Iran news agency says sorry for spoof article
Fars news agency issues apology for republishing -as fact - a satirical news story by the US online magazine Onion.

Iran's semi-official Fars news agency has apologised to its readers for republishing - as fact - a fake news article by the US satirical website the Onion.

Fars on Friday picked up the story about a supposed survey showing an overwhelming majority of rural white Americans would rather vote for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, than Barack Obama, the US president.

But the story was made up, like everything in the just-for-laughs newspaper, which is headquartered in Chicago.

The English-language service of Fars republished the story several days after it appeared in the Onion.

"Unfortunately an incorrect item was released on our website on Friday which included a fake opinion poll on popularity rate of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and US President Barack Obama," the news agency’s editor in chief was quoted as saying on the Fars website.

"The news item was extracted from the satirical magazine, The Onion, by mistake and it was taken down from our outlook in less than two hours.

"Although it does not justify our mistake, we do believe that if a free opinion poll is conducted in the US, a majority of Americans would prefer anyone outside the US political system to President Barack Obama and American statesmen," he added.

'Other blunders'

The Fars apology article then continues by citing a number of blunders by other news outlets.

The Iranian version of the Onion article copied the original word-for-word, even including a made-up quote from a fictional West Virginia resident who said he would rather go to a baseball game with Ahmadinejad because "he takes national defence seriously, and he'd never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does".

Homosexual acts are punishable by death in Iran, and Ahmadinejad famously said during a 2007 appearance at Columbia University that "in Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country".

The Iranian version of the article leaves out only the Onion's description of Ahmadinejad as "a man who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and has had numerous political prisoners executed".

The story appeared to have been taken down by about mid-day, Chicago time.

The Onion reveled in the fact that it had been taken seriously.

Will Tracy, the editor of the Onion, put out a tongue-in-cheek statement that referred to Fars as "a subsidiary of The Onion" that has acted as the paper's Middle Eastern bureau since it was founded in the mid-1980s by Onion publisher T Herman Zweibel.

"The Onion freely shares content with Fars and commends the journalists at Iran's Finest News Source on their superb reportage,'' Tracy said in jest.

It is not the first time a foreign news outlet has been duped by the Onion.

In 2002, the Beijing Evening News, one of the Chinese capital's biggest newspapers, picked up a story from the Onion that claimed members of Congress were threatening to leave Washington unless the building housing them underwent a makeover that included more bathrooms and a retractable dome.

tpaine posted:

the onion will only stop owning when the universe peters out of energy or collapses in on itself and only because there will be nothing left to behold it

well luckily the universe will neither run out of energy nor collapse on itself so we can count on the onion to keep delivering for an eternity.

getfiscal posted:

Transient_Grace posted:
current observations indicate that the universe doesn't contain nearly enough mass to collapse upon itself and would basically keep expanding forever, since we are currently not aware of any mechanisms that allow energy to actually be 'lost', the 'heat death' is a misnomer, it's just an heat equilibrium, all energy will be spread evenly across the universe which means that everything will only be a few centrigrade hotter than absolute zero, conceptually nothing will be energetic enough for chemical reactions to take place anymore and effectively the universe will be 'frozen' (though most of it will be considerably warmer than it is right now).
yeah but then god will intervene probably

Goal
Kyubey is a member of a highly advanced alien species known as the Incubators. Ostensibly, the girls he recruits to become Magical Girls are to defend the Earth from Witches. But the Incubators' true goal, which he keeps secret, is actually the creation of Witches, which are in fact Magical Girls who had their souls corrupted by grief and despair. In one of the spinoff comics, it was revealed that Incubators could prevent this transformation by purifying the corruption from the girls' Soul Gems. It is implied that Kyubey knew of this, but always kept it from the magical girls in the first series as revealing it would have been counterproductive.
Kyubey states that his reason for creating Witches is to collect the emotional energy of the girls. His race would then use this energy to stave off the destruction of the universe by entropy. As such, Kyubey can be seen as a "necessary evil" of sorts. His own race is incapable of feeling emotions, and as such sees humans as nothing more than convenient "energy producers". He himself does not see his own acts as "evil" in any way.

Kyubey's main goal throughout Puella Magi Madoka Magica is the conversion of Madoka Kaname into a Magical Girl. It is revealed that Homura Akemi has unwittingly boosted Madoka's magical potential to an astronomical level by going back in time repeatedly in an attempt to save her from death, creating many timelines all centered around Madoka. Kyubey states that Madoka could become the most powerful Magical Girl and then the most powerful Witch, and that her transformation could produce enough energy to singlehandedly save the universe from destruction (though her Witch would destroy Earth in the process, something Kyubey doesn't seem to care about).

To accomplish this, he cleverly schemes and plans to ensure that as many Magical Girls as possible die in Mitakihara Town, so that when Walpurgis Night arrived, the girl would be forced to either contract with him or allow her city to get completely destroyed.

deadken posted:

actually when all matter and energy becomes evenly distributed the difference between infinity and singularity becomes meaningless because of quantuum or whatever, and the whole thing just starts again, exactly the same as before; we have all lived these exact lives an infinity of times before and we will do so for an infinity of times again, there is nothing that can be done about it, and it's beautiful. world without end

dude... duuuuuuuude....

NoFreeWill posted:

there's a big crunch and then another big bang, imo

a little more on that, since the inception of the cyclical universes big-crunch theory thing it was noted that the amount of matter we can observe is not sufficient to generate sufficient gravity to negate the fact that pretty much all objects in the universe are all moving away from 'the center' and consequentially from one another. Basically it was theorized that the universe will have to be ten times as massive, the only way that was possible was if the universe contained 10 times as much in-observable matter (matter which doesn't emit light i.e 'dark matter') than it does visible matter. increased accuracy in our ability to measure gravity and mass suggests that the total mass of dark matter in the universe is just a fraction of the mass of visible matter (i.e, like how in our solar system the sun is about 100,000 times more massive than all other orbital bodies combines), so basically the universe will just keep expanding forever while the stars consume all their hydrogen fuel and eventually the universe will be even more empty dead and cold than it is now.

Not with a bang but with a whimper etc.

deadken posted:

actually when all matter and energy becomes evenly distributed the difference between infinity and singularity becomes meaningless because of quantuum or whatever, and the whole thing just starts again, exactly the same as before; we have all lived these exact lives an infinity of times before and we will do so for an infinity of times again, there is nothing that can be done about it, and it's beautiful. world without end

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late_Philip_J._Fry

same but the universe is shifted 4 feet to the side every cycle.

yeah it a cooler notion than the big crunch thing and more plausible but it's just meta-science either way, it's not so different from the speculation that the cores of black holes can serve as wormholes or pocket universes and the such, infinite multiverses yada yada.

maybe since temporal perception is relative to the speed of light as the universe becomes more energetic it will also become 'slower' and thus effectively it will never end, like that Achilles and the Tortoise paradox.