Amazing Breakthrough Day: April 1st

What newspapers do you read? Where I come from, a weekly supplimentary on Science/Tech covers a lot of gruond. I'm sure you hail from a slightly better off locality.

Ecouter. S’il vous plaît. I can accept exaggeration, to make a point. But not this. Reddit/Digg? Jesus! You must bonkers and nuts mixed with a whole lot of pre-concieved misconceptions.

nice idea. Personally, I think it'll be very difficult indeed to get the press to do this kind of thing, because the press put profits before their social duty - in this case a NEW science story will sell more newspapers, and therefore make them more money, even though it is fairly clear that it's a bad thing to do.

How about this: convince the US National Academy of Sciences to put out a weekly or monthly report, written by prominent scientists, on some settled science. That way the scientific community would do the hard part, and the press would have something slightly more newsworthy. Just an idea...

Or, you could write an article to some newspaper to whom this is relevant. Perhaps New Scientist or Scientific American would publish an article on why settled science is a good thing to report, and why it's unethical for the press to constantly report breakthrough science.

If I have some time, I might like to write in to new scientist myself about this. Would this be Ok? - obviously I'll attribute the idea to you.

A mainstream publication probably wouldn't do this, but I can imagine Slashdot, Google, and various tech/sciece/health blogs doing this as an April Fool's joke. If you don't have a blog, do it to a friend: "Omg! Did you hear that scientists have figured out how to plot what the night sky would look like from any point on earth at any point at time and with any light pollution level???? This will change EVERYTHING!"

Preferably, the web sites would make the "new"s about something of practical use, so that it looks like a new breakthrough. Some ideas:

-Scientists have discovered that simple "Turing" machines can do all the computations of modern computers! -Mathematicians have discovered that prime numbers can be used to provide military-grade encryption of messages! -Engineers have discovered a way to make heavy objects support their own weight merely from the pressure of the air flowining around them!

Not quite the same, but you may enjoy the following from The Onion, where April Fools Day is a year-round event: "Buoyant Force On Area Object Equal To Weight Of Water Displaced"

I love this proposal!

As long as the newspapers are at it, they should use 'Amazing Breakthrough Day' as an excuse to change the Atrology section to the 'Astronomy' section.

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes!!!

Be totally serious about this! Spread it around the internet! This is such an amazing idea! Next April Fool's day is going to be the best one ever!

Gosh, I'm so ridiculously excited no one's even going to take me seriously.

I'm not in USA but people here in my country really don't read newspapers a lot anymore. 90% of newspapers are quite low-quality, so called "yellow press". So really internet is a media of a greater quality. Most of newspapers are covering stuff like politics, economics, other stuff which seems more "clear" for the people reading them. But in fact, e.g. a seller of apples trying to argue with a postman about situation in Syria is quite much the same if they would discuss collision of black holes.