[burkaman]

Only had a couple minutes to try this but I'm already confused by a couple things.

- "UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS IS A FEDERAL OFFENSE" I guess this is a joke but I don't really get it, just seems like a weird thing to have there.

- In the first popup, the "audio transmission" is significantly different than the printed text.

- "The Earth is a sphere." - this is not true, I think it should be classified as a hypothesis

- "The universe is expanding." Isn't this a theory? I don't think it can be called "a basic statement", it is a well-tested theory based on a lot of observational evidence.

- "Humans and gorillas evolved from a common ancestor species." This is obviously a theory, it's like THE theory when you need an example of what a theory is. You cannot establish this by experiment or observation.

- "Light is an electromagnetic phenomenon described by Maxwell's Laws" Why is this classified as a theory?

etc.

The categorization of this first lesson seems very arbitrary, and often contradictory with the "knowledge database" on the left.

Edit: Did you AI-generate these questions and then not proofread them?

[notahacker]

Looks like NASA is to blame for these https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/weekly/2page23.pdf

I do agree much of the categorisation is baffling (I could nitpick several others). In that respect it's a shame to start off with that lesson when some of the others are so much more relevant to the mission concept, interesting and less debatable

[burkaman]

Thanks, I tried to find that original source but wasn't able to.

[notahacker]

I'm trying to overthink the space power systems exercise now ;-)

Actually very nicely designed, but the pedant in me is screaming "you can't just expect the other 3 solar panels to have the same number of dead zones" and I can't find the source either...

[tzs]

There are photos of the Earth taken from the neighborhood of the Moon. They show something that is indistinguishable from a sphere to the naked eye.

Sure, with instruments you can measure it and find that it deviates from a perfect sphere. But every object that is made of atoms multiple atoms is not a perfect sphere.

[burkaman]

I don't think it's a pedantic point, this is supposed to be a site about learning math that NASA scientists use, and the exact shape of the Earth is very relevant to them.

I just think it shouldn't be used as a canonical example of a fact when you'll probably learn at some point that it technically isn't true.

[TeMPOraL]

Some point being any half-decent middle-school textbook, or any popular science space book for teens. There's usually a footnote or an info box explaining that Earth isn't a perfect sphere.

It's not some arcane nerd knowledge. It's just a detail people don't remember from school because it's irrelevant to their lives.