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Neil deGrasse Tyson returns in Thursday’s Reddit Digest

Take a voyage of discovery along the ocean floor today on Reddit.

 

Kevin Morris

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Posted on Mar 1, 2012   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 8:41 pm CDT

Want to read Reddit but don’t have the time? Our daily Reddit Digest highlights the most interesting or important discussions from around the social news site—every morning.

  • Are there fossils on the ocean floor? “Fossils?” friendly evolutionary biologist ren5311 writes. “Sure. And plenty, plenty more. You are about to make a voyage of discovery if you’re up for it.” The ensuing, nerdy marine adventure is worth a read. (/r/askscience)

  • Reddit’s adult r/science readers say: “Give us recess or give us … Actually, we also want nap time.” (/r/science)

  • r/politics readers are enraged by a new U.S. law that allegedly “makes it illegal to protest at buildings or events where Secret Service are protecting someone.” Except, once again, they failed to read the actual document. Redditor HeyRememberThatTime points out that legislators are simply changing a few words here or there to existing legislation. That legislation might be bad, but as he notes: “It’s pointless frenzies like this that cause real problems to get ignored, and makes it harder to focus attention on actual problems.” (/r/politics)

  • At r/askreddit, statistics-savvy redditors debunk voting fraud allegations against Mitt Romney. (/r/AskReddit)

  • If you took a passing glance at Reddit’s front page today, you probably already know Neil deGrasse Tyson is doing the third in his AMA trilogy. If you don’t know why Tyson is so popular on Reddit, his comment here, (already submitted to r/bestof), should help clue you in: “The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.” (/r/bestof)

  • A guy who was struck by lightning is doing an AMA. But the story from another person in the comments makes for a better read: “The scariest part (which I remember clearly to this day) was the sound that started happening. The cloud started building up its charge against the mountain. For what seemed like an hour, but was probably only a few mins, a ‘buzzing noise’ started blaring. The sound started out in a low pitch but grew higher and higher in pitch over the few mins until it eventually became [inaudible] to our ears.” (/r/iama)

  • BritishEnglishPolice, who moderates quite a few big subreddits, has started a project to make the moderation process on Reddit as transparent as possible. (/r/IRRC )

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*First Published: Mar 1, 2012, 11:14 am CST