<story><title>A mother and son who unraveled a geographic hoax</title><url>https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/moose-boulder-debunked</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rogerdickey</author><text>&amp;quot;Son&amp;quot; here. AMA! Fun to see this on HN.&lt;p&gt;A few replies to some good questions:&lt;p&gt;1. Per @JdeBD, that was the Wikipedia edit that started everything. After 30+ hrs of online research, all roads lead back to this edit. I read 3 books on the island and found no mention of the boulder.&lt;p&gt;2. I took a bunch of photos that didn&amp;#x27;t make the article. Happy to share them offline with interested parties, but given that I could not find MB, they don&amp;#x27;t prove much.&lt;p&gt;3. The article does focus on us getting lost but that happened well after we left Ryan Island. This confused the NPR reporter too. Ryan Island is pretty easy to get to from Malone bay which is just a water taxi away from Rock Harbor. We had a working GPS with us the whole time which made certain legs of the trip a lot easier. How did we get lost with a GPS? The island is a mix of clearly marked dirt trails and large rock fields with no trail markings. You need to have a great sense of direction and some luck to pick up the trail again after traversing each rock field. We got lost after what must have been a quarter-mile rock field at 1am and the GPS didn&amp;#x27;t have the hiking trail marked in that area.&lt;p&gt;4. We made 2 landings at different points on Ryan Island, one southern and the other west &amp;#x2F; north-western. I did a lot of bushwacking from both points but there was no evidence of any water on the island or even mud where there could have been a &amp;quot;seasonal&amp;quot; pool. I was looking for a clearing or any kind of large flat-ish area but couldn&amp;#x27;t find anything like that larger than a few feet in diameter. The (small) island is extremely rocky and densely wooded.&lt;p&gt;5. Re the route, as many have noted it was very convoluted. We originally planned to go 18 miles in a day - the first half mostly paddles and portages, the second half is an 11-mile coastal trail back to Rock Harbor. The plan was to abandon the canoe at the halfway point and come back and get it via water taxi the next morning. After getting lost we gave up at the halfway point around 4am and camped for the night there.</text></comment>
<story><title>A mother and son who unraveled a geographic hoax</title><url>https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/moose-boulder-debunked</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DoreenMichele</author><text>It has crossed my mind that there&amp;#x27;s an awful lot of information available online and we often, as individuals, can&amp;#x27;t really know what&amp;#x27;s true and what&amp;#x27;s not. So we tend to rely to some degree on &amp;quot;consensus&amp;quot; -- on the idea that if &amp;quot;a billion people&amp;quot; say it&amp;#x27;s true, it must be true.&lt;p&gt;While not a completely useless metric, it&amp;#x27;s also not a completely reliable metric either.&lt;p&gt;With having this thought, I have doubled down on trying to stay out of things I&amp;#x27;m not personally knowledgeable about. For me, this means trying even harder to stay out of most kinds of political discussions, which frequently boil down to gossip and name calling and deciding which &amp;quot;people&amp;quot; you want to be seen as and who you want to be for and who you want to be against.&lt;p&gt;Political discussion tends to not be about good policy and what kinds of policies we want to have and why. And I have concluded I honestly don&amp;#x27;t know enough in most cases to have any idea which candidate I should be talking trash about or whatever. And it all too often ends up a case of me parroting sentiments of acquaintances just to try to connect socially.&lt;p&gt;I wonder how much that&amp;#x27;s true for other people&amp;#x2F;&amp;quot;in general.&amp;quot; And I wonder if we need to revisit how politics gets done and revise our de facto use of popularity contests now that you are so unlikely to meet people you are voting for or know someone who actually met them and we are reliant on Facebook and what not, which has proven to be very much game-able.&lt;p&gt;The degree to which modern politics so often looks to me like the plot from &amp;quot;Wag the dog&amp;quot; is pretty disturbing.&lt;p&gt;Which isn&amp;#x27;t actually intended to take this into the direction of politics. It&amp;#x27;s just to say that rubrics of social proof that were probably more reliable when the world was a smaller place have gone weird places in the internet age and we maybe need to think about that more than we do and try to find solutions.</text></comment>