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Cracked magazine on our side

Yeah, but, see, when the group with the highest profile agreeing with you is a humor site, it's not exactly what you'd call a ringing endoursement.
 
The Kiai Master one is still making me laugh every time I think about it. Seriously, why did he make a bet in the first place?
 
Yeah, but, see, when the group with the highest profile agreeing with you is a humor site, it's not exactly what you'd call a ringing endoursement.

I dunno. Humor can be pretty subversive. And influential. And a decent source of information. Look at all the studies suggesting that people who regularly watch The Daily Show often know more about current about current affairs than those who watch some actual news channels.

Anyway, I think the most appropriate reaction to those who claim psychic powers is to laugh at them, and where better to do that than a humor site? :)
 
Yeah, but, see, when the group with the highest profile agreeing with you is a humor site, it's not exactly what you'd call a ringing endoursement.

Cracked is actually fairly well researched for a mere "humor site." If you notice they hotlink references in pretty much all of their articles. Most of there stuff is pretty much just well documented things presented in a humorous manner.

But broader yeah I can't see how having a humor site agreeing with you lessens one's stance.
 
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Yeah, but, see, when the group with the highest profile agreeing with you is a humor site, it's not exactly what you'd call a ringing endoursement.

Surely the truth is wherever you find it? The Bible is the Revealed Word of God and yet I'll take Cracked any day.

As I have been known to say, "More truth in a page of Mad than a whole issue of Time."

:cool:
 
Yeah, but, see, when the group with the highest profile agreeing with you is a humor site, it's not exactly what you'd call a ringing endoursement.
Yes, because it's a fact that when reading facts, laughing can actually tweak the space time continuum just enough to make them untrue. I mean, the nerve of those people, writing about actual things so humorously and un-Karl-Fargman-like! Maybe you can get a mob of interweb-dweebs-do-well together and boycott one of the ******* funniest websites on the internet? No? :boggled:
 
HarryHenderson said:
Yes, because it's a fact that when reading facts, laughing can actually tweak the space time continuum just enough to make them untrue.
:rolleyes:

You know perfectly well that I wasn't saying anything like that (if you don't, you've failed at the English language). I was saying that if one of the higher-profile groups on your side is a site that has turned penis jokes into a fine art, people are far more likely to dismiss it. Facts are facts; rhetoric is rather important, however.

Having a humor site on your side doesn't lessen one's stance--if more serious groups are on your side as well. If you don't have those, you run the very real risk of having people think that your side is a joke.
 
:rolleyes:

You know perfectly well that I wasn't saying anything like that (if you don't, you've failed at the English language). I was saying that if one of the higher-profile groups on your side is a site that has turned penis jokes into a fine art, people are far more likely to dismiss it. Facts are facts; rhetoric is rather important, however.

Having a humor site on your side doesn't lessen one's stance--if more serious groups are on your side as well. If you don't have those, you run the very real risk of having people think that your side is a joke.

I've found the one's that don't have humor on their side are often more of a joke.
 
:rolleyes:

You know perfectly well that I wasn't saying anything like that (if you don't, you've failed at the English language). I was saying that if one of the higher-profile groups on your side is a site that has turned penis jokes into a fine art, people are far more likely to dismiss it. Facts are facts; rhetoric is rather important, however.

Having a humor site on your side doesn't lessen one's stance--if more serious groups are on your side as well. If you don't have those, you run the very real risk of having people think that your side is a joke.

Sometimes ridicule is the only rational response.
 
Actually, I find Cracked to be a mixed bag, as information sources go. Sometimes whoever was doing the article actually found some good source while googling, while sometimes it's at the level of 'I know some guy who hammers swords, so let's pretend I'm an expert on metallurgy.'

I mention the latter as an example because I did a facepalm marathon at that recent article about swords, and then again at the hordes of uneducated lemmings throwing their endorsement of all that utter idiotic nonsense in the thread.

E.g., they claimed a katana is made of pig iron, but actually tamahagane steel used in swords is 1 to 1.5 percent carbon, while pig iron is 3.5 percent or over. That's just as wrong as the fanboys' belief that it's magical steel, just in the other direction.

E.g., they claimed that folding and hammering is done to push the carbon out, but it's utterly idiotic to think that any amount of hammering can push individual atoms out of the lattice. It's actually done to push slag out, while carbon does tend to gradually burn off at the surface just for being in contact with oxygen. Also, it misses the point that hammering and folding was done with bars of different grades of steel, i.e., pattern welding, which isn't even the same as the hammering to get a bar out of bloom that they describe.

Meanwhile it has almost empty of any factual stuff which would have made the point, like the much bigger issue of differential quenching vs tempering.

And that's just one example out of many where they got stuff horribly wrong.

Which I guess makes the point of why one shouldn't take their facts from a humour site. It's ok as a humour site, but I wouldn't take my facts from them, and probably neither would a lot of other people. So, yeah, I wouldn't start a victory celebration because they made fun of psychics either.
 
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Interesting! I reposted that one, is there a good response article I can put with it?
 
You mean for the swords one?

I suppose I could write a response article, but I don't think that my credentials boiling down to 'amateur wannabe historian who only researched katanas to make a Skyrim mod' are all that much better than 'guy who knows an amateur swordsmith'. At the end of the day, I'd rather anyone serious about it didn't just take their facts from me either, but do their own research.

Plus, it seems kinda pointless, since their basic conclusion that katanas are structurally weaker than a European longsword is correct. It's just that every single argument they used to that end is wrong. So it's kinda being right for the wrong reasons.

That said, though, a lot of katana reproductions people buy or which are used in comparisons (like the awful one on Lock And Load) ARE tempered steel, rather than traditionally built. Basically they're more of a shingunto reproduction. (Ironically, the super-katanas people claim the allies encountered in the pacific, the ones that supposedly cut through machinegun barrels, would also be shingunto, which was the standard army sword at that point, not traditional family swords.) You can tell those by their having no hamon (that white wavy part near the edge), or a fake hamon done by chemical etching or just rougher polishing there. So far I only seen one TV station which actually had an expensive katana traditionally forged just so they can destroy it in their test, the rest go with the cheaper reproductions.

Ironically, though, those crap reproductions are FAR harder to damage than the real thing, and can be used to show stuff like poking through a steel breastplate with a katana or whacking cluelessly at a metal breastplate with it, without risking shattering the crystalline martensitic structure at the edge.

So the fanboys who think that katanas were awesomely strong and flexible and whatnot... might actually own one that is, if they bought a cheap replica :p
 

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