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Bad Astronomy
« Falcon 1, take 3: today at 4:00 Pacific time!
1) Brian May 2) No live chat today »

User Friendly for today

I was trying to think of some snarky comment or pithy statement to make about today’s User Friendly cartoon, but it’s a single panel and pretty much straight to the point. So just go read it, chuckle, and remember that in many cases, this is the level of sarcasm a lot of conspiracy theories deserve.

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August 3rd, 2008 8:58 AM by Phil Plait in Humor, NASA | 33 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

33 Responses to “User Friendly for today”

  1. 1.   The Science Pundit Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 9:01 am

    Aha! So that’s where they’ve been hiding it. How low will the government stoop? ;-P

  2. 2.   Richard Drumm The Astronomy Bum Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 9:03 am

    Tricksy hobbits!
    R

  3. 3.   defectiverobot Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 9:04 am

    That one actually made me laugh. It’s rare when a political cartoon does that.

  4. 4.   cardoso Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 9:23 am

    He did good. He did very good. Now I can’t stop laughing. Userfriendly is a great comic, I put it next do xkcd as my favourite geek comic.

  5. 5.   Svip Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 9:35 am

    @defectiverobot: User Friendly is not a political cartoon, it’s a more computer related cartoon, as its name sort of implies. But that doesn’t stop him from referring to scientific topics, not often associated with computers.

    The mission with landing the sound stage on the moon was done in a sound stage. How is that for logic?

  6. 6.   Umair Rahat Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 9:39 am

    I told ya’ll the Moon landing was faked. Since they didn’t had the technology to fake the landing on Earth, they had to send astronauts to the Moon to fake the landing.

  7. 7.   Pieter Kok Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 9:47 am

    Yes, that’s very funny. Thanks for the link!

  8. 8.   Umair Rahat Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 9:49 am

    Svip, they faked the landing in a sound stage which landed in a sound stage on the Moon. “How is that for logic?”

  9. 9.   MattGS Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 10:01 am

    I usually don’t use these things, but that one deserves a LOL :)

  10. 10.   amphiox Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 10:02 am

    This is great. They faked the moon landing by landing on the moon. It’s the perfect conspiracy. Total plausible deniability.

  11. 11.   Sili Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 10:07 am

    Bah! Everyone know the soundstage was on Mars.

  12. 12.   Yoo Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 10:13 am

    It would be funny if the Moon hoax was staged in order to hide the fact that we have a full-fledged colony on the Moon instead of trying to hide our inability to go to the Moon. :P

  13. 13.   Brian Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 10:25 am

    Ah, that was just a perfect little cartoon.

  14. 14.   CafeenMan Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 10:26 am

    Everyone is so, “The moon landings were faked!”

    “Nuh uh!”

    “Yeah so!”

    “No they weren’t!”

    But the whole thing is just a front to keep going at each other and avoiding the real conspiracy – one that not only includes the U.S. government, but most governments around the world.

    The moon is fake. It doesn’t exist. In fact, the whole notion of “outer space” is just contrived nonsense.

    I wish they would just admit they were wrong about Earth being a sphere so they could stop with the “scientific” nonsense about there being a universe. There is no universe beyond Earth (which is actually just an elaborate sound stage).

  15. 15.   Mena Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 10:36 am

    Oh, that reminds me. Did anyone watch “The Colbert Report” on Thursday? It’s a good thing that he recanted his feelings about the moon landing being a hoax! :^)

  16. 16.   Jewel Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 10:42 am

    *chuckle* That’s funny.

  17. 17.   zer0 Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 10:43 am

    Few things make me literally laugh-out-loud while I’m home alone perusing blogs… this one got me good!

  18. 18.   Phil Plait Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 10:47 am

    Now I’m a bit confused… the website name is User Friendly, but the RSS feed says the cartoon is Daily Static. The title on the cartoon itself says User Friendly. So I’m guessing that the cartoon name is UF, and DS is just what he calls each individual comic on a daily basis.

  19. 19.   Umair Rahat Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 10:56 am

    CafeenMan, the conspiracy you are talking about “the Moon and the outer space doesn’t exit” was formed by UN to keep public from knowing that the Earth doesn’t exist.

  20. 20.   BR Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 11:24 am

    Phil, I believe the Daily Static is the name Illiad gives to what shows up on the home page, which includes that day’s comic as well as various news items and the link of the day. The comic strip is User Friendly.

  21. 21.   baley Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 11:51 am

    lol, excelent strip

  22. 22.   MarkH Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 11:59 am

    I love UF… been reading it for 8 years now, plus went through the archaives to get the “whole story”.. the strip is awsome.

  23. 23.   BearsAssaultedByBasil Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 12:12 pm

    Reading all the moon hoax posts recently lead my to wonder: How large of a telescope would you need to see something that was left on the moon during a moon landing?

  24. 24.   Phil Plait Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 1:20 pm

    BearsAssaultedByBasil: stay tuned! I have a post I’m working on on that topic. :-)

  25. 25.   MaDeR Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 3:46 pm

    Bears: very damn big.

  26. 26.   Dave Hall Says:
    August 3rd, 2008 at 11:31 pm

    Sili Says:
    Bah! Everyone know the soundstage was on Mars.

    Are you trying to tell me that NASA _outsourced_ the moon landing hoax?

  27. 27.   earthandbeyond Says:
    August 4th, 2008 at 12:06 am

    Hmm, is something wrong with the website? I can’t view the cartoon.

  28. 28.   Eddie Janssen Says:
    August 4th, 2008 at 12:17 am

    The same here (The Netherlands)

  29. 29.   CR Says:
    August 4th, 2008 at 12:48 am

    Likewise; I can’t view it, either. Based upon the comments here, though, I get the gist of it, and it sounds funny.

  30. 30.   Larian LeQuella Says:
    August 4th, 2008 at 8:57 am

    Yet another comic to add to my list I suppose. I’ll bookmark it next to xkcd!

  31. 31.   Don Snow Says:
    August 4th, 2008 at 11:59 am

    @ BABB

    I picked up a steady reflection just west of Maskelyne G crater (Apollo 11) with my 60mm refractor. I forget the eyepiece I used, but it was around 60x magnification. The text in “First on the Moon” named the landing site as beside Maskelyne W.
    You can’t use a very big telescope, to view the moon. I tried with my 8″ reflector, and durn near blinded my right eye. Moon’s just too bright.

  32. 32.   Don Snow Says:
    August 4th, 2008 at 12:05 pm

    I clicked every link on Phil’s line. All I got was a web page with a mechanical dog. Well, that’s life on the ‘net.

  33. 33.   Arthur Maruyama Says:
    August 4th, 2008 at 1:44 pm

    BearsAssaultedByBasil:

    I’ve worked out that the Hubble Space Telescope–despite orbiting above the Earth’s atmosphere–can resolve objects on the surface of the Moon that are at least 40 feet across, which means that at best a base of one of the Lunar Module _might_ show up as a discolored pixel in a picture–certainly without enough detail to remove doubt. Since the largest ground-based telescopes using adaptive optics can now match Hubble, it would have to be a really huge scope to pull in enough detail to remove all doubt.

    I think at least some hoaxer cite as part of their “proof” that NASA does not allow Hubble to point at the Moon because it might show that the Moon landings never happened.

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