Give him a glass of water
…the miracle of magnets still appears to stump some people, including Donald Trump.
At a recent rally in Mason City, Iowa, the former president went on a rant about the [fragility] of magnets while complaining about the Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier.
Simply put: The ship has an electromagnetic aircraft launch system that relies on very large magnets.
“They had a $900 million cost over on these stupid electric catapults that didn’t work. They had almost a billion dollar cost over on the magnetic elevators,” he said. “Think of it, magnets. Now all I know about magnets is this: Give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets.”
That is, of course, not how magnets work. They work just fine underwater.
He didn’t say underwater. He said “a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets.” It has to be a glass of water, it has to be dropped, the person doing the dropping has to be Trump.
The former president has repeatedly brought up his fixation with the carrier, its electromagnetic catapult system, and the bizarre claim that magnets don’t function with water.
“They want to use magnets to lift up the elevators,” Trump said in a July 2021 interview with a Princeton professor. “I said magnets will not work. Give me a cup of water, throw it on the magnets, you totally short out the system. They said, ‘How did you know that?’ I said, ‘Because I know that.'”
There’s that thing he does again. “They said” – who said? They. Yes but who? They. Also, no they didn’t. Just like the people who, according to Trump, said “How did you do that???” when he said “woman man person camera tv” they didn’t say what Trump said they said. Nobody rushed up to say how brilliant he was, for the simple reason that no one thought he was brilliant and no one felt like saying he was. So when he talked about throwing a cup of water on the magnets no one hastened to congratulate him on his mind-bending genius. No one. And he doesn’t know that. He made it up, which is not the same as knowing it.
Like the Navy wouldn’t think about any such magnetic “fragility” before installing such systems. On ships. That travel. On water.
Mind you’ I’ve seen that degree of stupidity built into the plot of lots of movies, though the one that stands out the most for me is Shyamalan’s Signs, in which an alien invasion (or at least part of it) is thwarted by glasses of water(!) and a baseball bat.
Contact with water is lethal for the aliens, yet they’re invading a planet where more than two thirds of its surface is covered in the stuff. And most of those places that aren’t covered by water, still has it fall out of the sky on a fairly regular basis. And oh yes: the aliens are walking around without space suits. This permits their defeat through the deployment of the above-mentioned glasses of water (which is splashed on themI’m MELTING!) and baseball bat (which is used to whack them, and break glasses of water in their general direction). I kid you not.
So here we are presented with the spectacle of an alien species capable of interstellar flight, which uses fucking crop circles to communicate with its forces, and sends its unarmed invading soldiers to walk around naked on a lethally toxic planet, without the benefit of so much as Apollo-era space suit technology, which would have been proof against both splashing water and Louisville sluggers. That’s a twofer of Trump-level stupidity, both in the in-world alien species, and in the writing of the story itself.
Maybe he thinks the electromagnets will short out when they get wet? Which sure, under some circumstances, but a nuclear powered aircraft carrier is *gasp* electric… And there were plenty of marine batteries on every yacht he’s ever been on.
Read that more carefully, that’s 100% what he’s saying… My points still stand.
Someone might have said (suspiciously), “How do you know that?,” because, of course, neither he nor anyone else could possibly “know that,” inasmuch as it’s simply untrue.
Trump’s understanding of engineering, sciences and shipbuilding matches his knowledge of any military branch…
The USS Gerald R Ford does use a new type of catapult (EMALS) and internal lifts, which do use magnets. However the ship was used to test a lot of new equipment and crewing model, perhaps too much (powerplant, hull shape, and radars, just to list a few). The reason the media has become fixated on this ship is that it entered service very much later than planned, and only went on the first operational cruise at least seven years later than expected, long after the USS Enterprise, the ship it was meant to replace, had left service. There have been a lot of articles and programmes about this, including on Fox channels, where he no doubt first learned about it, and he is picking up on what far more knowledgable people have already said. Just with more ignorance.
New classes of ships have teething problems regardless. But in this case, the CVN78 has had a lot of problems and become THE most expensive warship in the US Navy. It is not just politicians who question the design: several experts in the field have pointed to the design issues, costs and construction problems. The design might be replaced after the fourth ship.
However, Trump’s fixation might be more to do with the fact there is no USS Donald J Trump (and not even planned). Worse, if he does get a carrier, it might be Ford class, and would he want to be associated with loser a president and a loser design? I would suggest a garbage scow, but they are useful and take rubbish away…
Ophelia quoted Trump:
Damn, he beat us to it. Maybe we will catch him next time.
YNnB?
Weren’t they ‘armed’ with a lethal breath-mist that they had to get mouth-to-mouth with their victims to deploy?
Anyway, for sheer scientific cluelessness it’s hard to beat Emmerich’s ‘classic’, 2012. And in a movie riddled with nonsense, the explanation for the sudden, catastrophic heating of the Earth’s core will stick with me until my dying day: “The neutrinos are evolving”! I would challenge even Trump to up that one.
I would propose 2023’s classic Moonfall about a hollow moon with a shrinking orbit that nearly grazes earth. Yes, I watched until the end, as I had with the first Sharknado.
Does that mean…there’s a second?
A second…third, fourth, fifth and sixth, no less.
My vote still goes to Impact for all the reasons set out by Phil Plait. To be scrupulously fair, the error of putting the Earth at the centre of the Moon’s orbit rather than at a focus did have a precedent in the Bank of England’s design of the Isaac Newton pound note putting the Sun at the centre of a planetary orbit.
Alan, to be fair, I think the majority of people believe the sun is at the center of a planetary orbit. I found I could blow my student’s minds two ways: One, the sun isn’t at the center. Two, the northern hemisphere is closer to the sun during the winter (in the northern hemisphere, of course. It isn’t winter for everybody at the same time…that also blew their minds).
Has the man never used a fridge magnet to display his kids’ artwork…
Nevermind.
It’s that Art of War comment again… (post? I can’t remember atm but am sure I saw it mentioned here) Talking to the completely ignorant, although in this case apparently wilfully so rather than mere accident of birth.
To be fair to budding astronomers, most of the planets’ orbits are pretty circular at this slice of galactic time (with Earth’s orbital eccentricity at 0.0167, where a minimum possible eccentricity is 0 and a maximum eccentricity is 1). Partially because of the circularity of these orbits, and mostly because of the enormous mismatch in mass between the Sun and all of the planets, the centre of nearly each Sun-planet pairwise orbit lies entirely within the Sun. The only exception to this is Jupiter, which is just massive and far-away enough that the barycentre of the Sun-Jupiter system lies somewhat outside the Sun’s corona.
The barycentre of the Earth-Moon system lies wholly outside the Earth, however; Impact’s director should certainly have thrown Neil Tyson a bit of pocket change to check on that.