Prefacing this with "old or new, I have no nostalgia for Disney" and "I was never huge on cartoons/anime"... man, I can't believe how much I enjoyed Duck Tales. We got some visitors at the institute. Mostly positive, but one situation... OK. It's fucking terrifying to see a legit scientist peddling some of the dumbest tiktok conspiracy theories this side of, dunno, are people still laughing at Joe Rogan? One moment we're talking shop, discussing plasmon-plasmon interactions, using chalk to do math on the sidewalk like the meanest mofos this side of the chemistry building, and then BAM "Titanic was a conspiracy to kill some finance regulatory people Idon'tknowmybrainshutsoffattheword'finance'" and I'm standing there, confused about which one of us is having a stroke. This timeline is all sorts of ass. All the best. Happines for everybody, free of charge, and may no one be left behind.
I'll never forget the time a Very Senior Manager in charge of research commercialisation at our university told me, with absolute confidence, that the Apollo moon landings were a hoax.
It's horrible. You wait for them to hint it's a joke, laugh or crack a smile, but it never comes. Then it dawns on you, they're serious. Certainly not my first encounter, just never had an actual professor say this kind of bullshit. You can kinda get how they could be right wing or antisemitic or be otherwise mundane dumb. Having someone correct your reasoning on the fly with foreshadowing words like "do you have any idea how much energy it takes to move something so massive?" only to wipe their ass with it to talk about assassinating a ship with an iceberg requires mental disjunction I hope to never understand.