divgradcurl.bsky.social
Physicist, teacher, friend to decent curious folks everywhere, enemy to fascism and bigotry, ally to their targets.
If I'm not on MAGA's enemy list, I guess I need to try harder.
Eppur si muove.
47 posts
374 followers
37 following
Active Commenter
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While we ARE that stupid, our whole biochemistry has the fingerprints of Earth life all over it. We evolved here.
(People do occasionally play with the idea that life in general on Earth was seeded from elsewhere, but not one specific species in an otherwise homegrown ecosystem.)
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Dear hr.opm@gov:
This week I did:
• Less ketamine than Elon.
• Less lying than Donald.
• Fewer couches than J.D.
• Actual science.
• Neglected to fellate even one dictator or to betray democracy, my country, our allies, or the rock-bottom standards of human decency.
There's always next week...
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Verteidigen Sie die Demokratie, und mögen die Faschisten Demütigung und Niederlage erfahren.
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In any space that cats and humans share, there will be a lot more cat ghosts per century than human ghosts...and of course, ghost cats will want to hang out with the witch who can see them and treat them as the all-important beings they are.
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I'm still impressed by Tim Walz. In a sane universe, he and Harris would be heading the executive branch now...but in this one, he didn't miss a beat going back to work to keep Minnesota afloat despite everything.
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Every scientist I know in real life understands that we're in desperate-last-ditch-effort-on-a-dying-planet mode now, and they still love science. And in the case of the movie characters, it COSTS them – every setback in the film is because they failed to ask obvious questions until it was too late.
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My gripe with Interstellar isn't the times it gets science wrong, or even the silly ending. It's that none of the scientist characters seem to actually LIKE science. They show zero curiosity or drive to understand; they don't bother to ask questions and it bites them in the ass over and over.
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Yeah Richard Dawkins is a legitimately brilliant evolutionary biologist. His descent into idiocy began with, "...therefore any random half-baked thought that flits through my brain about any field is first-rate thinking, and anyone who disagrees is as much an Enemy of Science as any creationist..."
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Wait, now I also want to know: was the problem about heat conduction? Static electricity?
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"I am, but you didn't have to call me out on it..."
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"It is absolutely possible to tell mr. trump to fuck off, as evidenced by the fact that I have just done so."
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Tolkien used to incinerate anyone he even LOOKED at, when he was in one of his Giant Flaming Eye moods...
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To their everlasting shame, most Germans in 1933 were happy with the decision to elect Hitler. Enjoy rotting with them on the dung heap of history.
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Justice for the Baroness! (And a zillion thanks to Riki Lindhome for reliably making us laugh no matter how shitty the world gets...)
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In the case of the Satanic Temple and similar groups, the whole POINT is to point out the absurdity of granting special treatment to religions.
"If your religion gets tax breaks and special access to government funding, even access to schools, then mine will too. But you're gonna HATE my religion."
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That's a strong "no" from me. I'll see it coming in time to steer for an offramp.
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The deer tick is wonderful. (I almost missed it, thinking you were talking about the ticks in the upper center who simply have too many legs. But the deer tick in the bottom center is a whole different level of awesome.)
Also, the microbes labelled "vertebrates" were a nice touch. Never change, AI.
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Thanks Jasmine. I did.
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If you figure it out, can you give us all a heads-up?
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It is absolutely true. It was the "remembering" part that struck me as especially dark, given that his last battle was against dementia.
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I'm honestly not sure whether that was dark as fuck.
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I assumed Mr. Cuban meant "penultimate", and that he anticipates one more power war after that one:
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Damn; American here, and I was thinking it must be a UK/Commonwealth thing.
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Thanks Jasmine, and happy New Year to everyone who's still working to open humanity's eyes to the wonders out there (despite the shitstorm down here...)
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In Unseen Academicals, Ponder tried to tell Ridcully that Prof. Macarrona preferred the company of men. Ridcully kept missing the point, to Ponder's great exasperation, only to turn out to have understood all along and not cared. "Anyway, there's not enough love in the world...Well done, that man!"
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Professor Bengo Macarrona D.Thau (Bug), D.Maus (Chubb), Magistaludorum (QIS), Octavium (Hons), PHGK (Blit), DMSK, Mack, D.Thau (Bra) would like to announce that I am an uncultured cur for leaving off 80%+ of his list of academic titles, which would never fit in this post. Oh, and also, he is gay.
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They won't just be finding humans; they'll be finding a whole ecosystem. If life is rare, it'll be among the most fascinating discoveries of their history. If life is common, I bet every new world is STILL really cool. As for their opinion of humans...evolving ain't easy, and I bet they know that.
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Any civilization capable of *choosing* whether to visit us or not would have little to fear from us. And in their place, would you really shun the opportunity to learn of a whole new biosphere and an emerging civilization, just because some of the locals are jerks and the jerks might be winning?
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As of today, Jimmy Carter joins the honor roll.
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Ah, thanks. I'd wandered away from the Net for a few days and lost track of his babbling.
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Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood hold places of honor on my list, but they might both belong to a later era than you have in mind.
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The mayor of New York is Eric Adams, who never met a police crackdown he didn't like. Do you consider Eric Adams even vaguely leftist? Have you ever MET a leftist?
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The "cat" thought experiment was never Schrödinger's idea in the first place. It was other physicists arguing that "If Schrödinger's interpretation of wave function collapse were right, then you could pull off obviously absurd results involving a macroscopic object like a cat."
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When he escaped Austria, he apologized to the resistance community in general, and specifically to Einstein, for his lapse in courage. Einstein forgave him; others said he never should have remained in Austria and had let himself become a useful idiot. But no one thought he was an actual Nazi.
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Then in 1936, when he was living in Austria, the ballooning Nazi movement there made Schrödinger an offer he couldn't refuse. He wrote a cringing letter praising Hitler, sounding exactly like something a hostage would be forced to sign, or like one of those mandatory Maoist "self-criticisms".
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Schrödinger? He was no Nazi, though you could argue he was a coward. In the early 1930s, when Einstein, Planck, Von Laue, and other German physicists were risking their lives and careers to denounce Hitler, Schrödinger just expressed quiet dislike of the Nazis and sort of crept out of the country.
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You are imagining that an NYPD chief is a "leftie"?
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Proud of you!
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They're all good boxes, Gus.
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Well, you've got ONE satellite commanding a whole lot of attention in the picture. Any others are gonna be way too small to see from a million miles out.
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"That's not a space station; it's a moon!"
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It's shaped like a cat.
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There is a lot of space between stars; direct collisions are REALLY unlikely. By "messing up the rotations", do you mean planets' orbits around their stars, or the galaxies themselves? In the former case, again, little danger. In the latter...the galaxies WERE disrupted, and we're seeing the result!
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Are you just kidding around, or saying NASA should have a plan for the galaxy merger? It's a little above their pay grade...