What made the Moon? New ideas try to rescue a troubled theory | Hacker News Reader

What made the Moon? New ideas try to rescue a troubled theory

quantamagazine.org

59 pointsfanf218 comments

I'm surprised they neglected a fifth theory- the moon impacted the Earth in an almost tangential, glancing blow.

Liquefied rock from the impact event spread over both planetoids, making the core of the moon completely different from its new skin, not unlike dipping chocolate in candy or vice versa.

The impact also allowed for the capture of the moon but at some large distance.

Just a theory, yet it explains a lot about Earth geology that the other theories leave unexplained.

Seems to me that it's only the minutiae of the hypothesis that are in question - unless I've misread the article, the overarching theory that an impact of some kind caused the moon's formation is still the working assumption, no?

I've never heard a theory that the moon itself impacted the Earth. There has been discussion of the idea of a fast glancing blow by Theia, which is omitted:

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-19011013

My eyes must be getting old, but black-background web sites are getting harder to read.

I haven't been able to read black background text for a long time. I wanted to read this article, but I couldd only read the first paragraph or so before I had to close the page.

When I was much younger than today, I was using black back terminals (the physical kind) all the time so at least at some point point I didn't have problems with it.

Part of what I prefer about Firefox over Chrome is the "Reader View" feature, it strips pages of JS and CSS styling and gives you the raw article so you can view the content as you so desire, including darker or lighter backgrounds, larger font or smaller font.

See:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...

Note: I use Chrome at work, mostly to test but my main browser is Firefox which seems to still feel natural to me. I was a day 1 early adopter to Chrome but couldn't get used to their browser.

I know about that, and I use it whenever possible. However, some sites (for example Mastodon) is a dynamic web application.

There is a plugin I used to use, called "care for my eyes" that allowed me to change the colours. However, its main purpose is to swap colours for people who prefer black background (a bit strange to me, but I accept their opinion) but it used to have an option to do the opposite. Unfortunately, that option is now gone so I am again unable to use sites with black background.

Try Stylish? It's pretty decent, and if you know any CSS worst case if a site you're on has no style, you can set one for that site, I think some of the styles are generic towards all sites too to try to do the best to darken them or lighten them up.

Data point, thank you. It's getting harder for me as well, but not so much that I noticed until you pointed it out. I have always preferred light-on-dark text on any kind of screen, and havde never quite understood why it wasn't the standard way to do things. But now I see.

I've always preferred light on dark and I'm nearing 40. I still prefer it by far, but one thing I've noticed is that the contrast ratios are so good in modern displays, that it can be harsh on the eyes. If you look back at the old days of green text CRTs, the black was never "black" it was more of a deep gray, almost black matte color.

I find that websites that use white or off-white on a dark shade of gray or light grey text on black look the best.

I don't think 255,255,255 on 0,0,0 is a good idea even though I prefer light on dark.

Example: http://i.imgur.com/CQ9WZAp.png

Well, I'm sort of nearing sixty, and believe me, it does make a difference. Driving at night, especially in heavily lighted and trafficked areas, just isn't as laid back as it used to be. Nor, as noted, is reading light on dark.

Your observations on 255/000 are obviously correct. In fact, I have always preferred light and dark greys to pure white and black in whatever design work I have done.

I noticed a bit of "fuzz" that seemed out of place as well.

Turns out that the body tag has:

  -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;

This greatly reduces the contrast on a dark background in my opinion.

Here's a screenshot to show off the difference with the top being the current site, and the bottom being what it looks like without that CSS:

https://i.imgur.com/3UOIOWL.png

Just out of curiosity, how do you feel with white on blue? Personally it's my favorite (I even have a small snippet to change any website I'm reading to white-on-blue)

Send your clicks/views to a different site with a good write-up: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/moon-ori...

https://outline.com/https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-made...

Frequently works, though not here.

It was an alien death star. Long abandoned, then captured by Earth's gravity.

Genesis 1:16, Psalm 8:3, youarehere.place

Perhaps the correct question is "Who made the Moon?".

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