Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

Come on, man.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.

How stupid are these people?

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Mars Landing Tomorrow: The Oatmeal Explains All

Mars Landing Tomorrow: The Oatmeal Explains All

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I love The Oatmeal. I love that NASA and JPL are having Matthew Inman live tweet the 7-minutes of terror.

And if we can keep landing on Mars, I believe we can solve Climate Change. Yes, it might (ok, probably) just come down to 7-minutes of terror there, too, but I believe.

Open thread

Reader Interactions

54Comments

  1. 1.

    opiejeanne

    Inspired by John Cole’s trek to the apple farms we headed east on I-90 out of Seattle yesterday and went as far as Thorp, just past Cle Elum; there’s a produce stand there in a huge barn, but not a lot of produce yesterday. We bought some apples: Pacific Rose, Lady Alice to try, and Honey Crisp. The Pacific Rose may have been mislabelled because they look nothing like the photos online, and the Honey Crisp may have been a mistake but at $1.49/lb we were dazzled.
    We didn’t go farther because there was a lot of snow in the passes and it was past 3pm by the time we got there, and coming back through Snoqualmie Pass after dark might have been nasty last night. There were some ominous clouds hanging around over the Cascades.
    It was a nice ramble, but we need to do it earlier in the fall when the farms have their stands open.

  6. 6.

    Corner Stone

    Re: Mars landing. Someone wake me when Elon Musk starts calling the JPL engineers pedophiles. #BeBess

  7. 7.

    opiejeanne

    @Corner Stone: The local farmstand in Bothell is called Yakima, and that’s their regular price. They closed down right after Hallowe’en and now they’re selling Christmas trees. I should have bought loads of Honey Crisp and stuck them in the fridge. These look a little bruised and may not last long enough to be eaten.

  8. 8.

    Corner Stone

    And if we can keep landing on Mars

    I could be wrong, but it’s my understanding that the “landing” part isn’t the issue. Kind of like my son informing me that people don’t have a fear of flying, they have a fear of abruptly no longer flying.

  10. 10.

    Corner Stone

    @germy: Turns out I’m not so different from the Martians after all. Except for the whole “repopulate” part. I also usually get the same reaction at 37 seconds or so into the clip.

  11. 11.

    West of the Rockies

    Back to the apples… Blah. (I know, I don’t have to participate.)

    But thank you, TaMara, for a hopeful post. That NASA project is amazing.

  12. 12.

    germy

    "…six months before people were sickened by the contaminated romaine, President Donald Trump’s FDA – responding to pressure from the farm industry and Trump’s order to eliminate regulations – shelved the water-testing rules for at least four years." https://t.co/laPLdLP0mW

    — Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) November 25, 2018

  15. 15.

    frosty fred

    For assorted reasons I’d missed the farmer’s market the last two or three weeks so I was glad to get back yesterday and find Winesaps from Apple Hill. I try to have some every year in memory of my grandmother, who used to tell a childhood story about them. (Ultimately that story led to my interest in genealogy/family history.)

  16. 16.

    NotMax

    How does NASA get an unlimited budget?

    Announce they struck oil when Insight digs down into Mars.

    :)

  18. 18.

    dnfree

    I am psyched and nervous for the Mars landing. The time delay between when it actually happens and when they find out about it must be agonizing!

    I worked at Argonne National Laboratory at the time of the first moon landing, and it was a great place to be. (We didn’t have anything to do with it, but it was a critical mass of scientists.) People brought in very small portable TVs and we all gathered around. Every time there is one of these landings, manned or otherwise, I experience some of the same emotions.

  19. 19.

    dnfree

    @Corner Stone: You remind me of one of my former co-workers (or your son does). We used to have to file “near-miss” reports on accidents that came close but didn’t happen. My co-worker used to say, “Shouldn’t they be called near-hit reports?”

  21. 21.

    TaMara (HFG)

    @opiejeanne: I stuck a bunch of diced apples in my intant-pot with a little bit of brown sugar and some lemon juice and cooked for all of about 3 minutes (so they still retained their shape) and then froze them. Great for apple crisp or pies, also I have great recipe for apple filled cookies.

    You know, if they’re going to go to waste. ?

  22. 22.

    NotMax

    @dnfree

    Yup. Slowing from 12,000 mph on approach to 5 mph on touchdown is quite the feat all on its own.

    Plus after successful (fingers crossed) landing, Insight will quickly be on the far side of Mars, so even more hours of anticipation before planetary rotation brings it back into signal range to check on initial deployment procedures (including planned snapping of some photos with the lens caps on).

  24. 24.

    FlipYrWhig

    @dnfree: There’s a commercial now for I think headlights that talks about how you can avoid “near-misses like these.” Isn’t avoiding a near-miss a hit? (Yes, I am annoying.)

  25. 25.

    dmsilev

    Mars kills spacecraft. Lots of them, over the years. One might be tempted to suspect active defenses on the part of the Martians, but that couldn’t explain things like a confusion over whether Imperial or Metric units were being used on one particular craft.

    NASA/JPL has gotten pretty good at it though, so fingers crossed.

    After InSight, the next one up is Mars 2020, a rover similar to Curiosity with a different set of instruments plus some mechanical upgrades. I’m sure it will get a name at some point as well.

  26. 26.

    Spinoza Is My Co-Pilot

    High tech, NASA-style solution (or, rather, set of solutions, I suppose) to climate change? Yeah, it would be pretty to think so…

  27. 27.

    Mnemosyne

    @FlipYrWhig:

    I dunno, “near-miss” seems to be a pretty obvious euphemism so people don’t freak out like they would if the pilot said, “Well, folks, we just had a near hit with that other airliner you saw, but it’s okay now.”

  29. 29.

    West of the Rockies

    @Corner Stone:

    I think death would come by contagion or suffocation from the decomposing apple ooze rather than blunt force.

    Nonetheless, I know my disinterest in apples is my issue. You guys nerd out on apples all you want! ?

  31. 31.

    sukabi

    @opiejeanne: come down a bit further to Chehalis. There’s a little shop called Veggies, their prices on fruit is a lot better than regular grocery stores.

    1849 N National Ave, Chehalis, WA 98532

    They have a pretty good apple selection for a small shop.

  32. 32.

    Gravenstone

    @dnfree:

    I worked at Argonne National Laboratory

    Think I’ve told this story before, but in the early 80s I and several college classmates toured Argonne. They showed us a “hot box” and as we were talking about it, one of my classmates walks over and starts playing with the remote manipulators! Needless to say, our guide was not exactly pleased with this development. Fortunately, they allowed us to finish the tour.

  34. 34.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Mnemosyne: It seems like there’s a slightly different taboo too — like maybe they were told that suggesting that other people’s headlights make accidents more likely was over the line. So then they had to say that the other guys’ headlights play a role in close calls / “near misses” but with their headlights there’s never a close call in the first place. But I think I’d say “close calls” instead of “near misses” to avoid the ambiguity. But, like I said, I am annoying.

  36. 36.

    MobiusKlein

    @Mnemosyne: ‘near miss’ makes more sense when you think about the categories and sub-categoires:
    Hit
    Direct Hit
    Glancing Hit
    Miss
    Near Miss
    Total Miss

    Regardless on what your intent was, “Near Miss” is an interesting grouping.

    If you want to hit the target, it’s good to know you were very close.
    If you want to avoid the target, near misses are a sign you were lucky – this time.

  39. 39.

    Arclite

    Landing on Mars requires intelligent and educated people to come together in common purpose to achieve a goal.

    Overcoming climate change requires dumb and uneducated people to overcome greed and self-interest for future generations.

    Not sure these are really comparable.

  41. 41.

    J R in WV

    Am eating a Michigan Honeycrisp right now, so juicy and delicious!!!

    Been in the fridge for at least a couple of weeks, still great. They keep well, don’t they~!

    Did you all see the “apple forest” story the other day? Origin of all our apples, a small forest of nothing but apple trees, wild ones, in Khazakistan. however you spel that name…

  42. 42.

    NobodySpecial

    Mars is such a goddamned honeytrap that people can’t help but want to go to it, even though it won’t do much to help us study climate science. The big problem is the damn thing doesn’t have a magnetic field. That’s less than useless to us. Venus is actually a better target, but blah.

  43. 43.

    Brachiator

    @dnfree:

    You remind me of one of my former co-workers (or your son does). We used to have to file “near-miss” reports on accidents that came close but didn’t happen. My co-worker used to say, “Shouldn’t they be called near-hit reports?”

    The crash of the European Mars lander was described by some of the scientists behind it as a “near success.”

    Despite the long list of recommendations, the report concluded that the mission had come very close to success.

    This was, perhaps being kind.

    The ExoMars test lander Schiaparelli crashed onto the Red Planet because of a combination of poor modelling, problems managing subcontractors and inadequate navigation software….

    The detailed report has confirmed the preliminary findings that a glitch in the computer caused the module to believe it was further along in the descent than it actually was. At one point, the lander’s computer was even telling it that it was below the surface of Mars, when it was still up in the air. The result was that the engines cut out far too soon, leaving the module to drop like a stone out of the sky and smash into the ground at a velocity of around 150m/s.

    The component that started the critical error was the inertial measurement unit (IMU), which malfunctioned when it detected rotational accelerations that were larger than expected. When this bad data fed into the navigational computer, it put Schiaparelli at an erroneous altitude.

    I got nothing but respect for all the people who have to try to get this right.

  44. 44.

    Arclite

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is fierce, intelligent, and says all the right things. She’s the public face of the Dems right now, and IMO you couldn’t have gotten anyone better.

  45. 45.

    Aleta

    For the past 27 days, a small Protestant church in The Hague has been conducting round-the-clock religious services to protect an Armenian refugee family from deportation.

    By law, police officers in The Netherlands are not allowed to enter places of worship during religious services. So, reverends from around the country have taken turns holding services at Bethel Church to prevent officials from arresting the Tamrazyan family, who have been in The Netherlands for nine years. “By giving hospitality to this family, we could give them time and place to [demonstrate] to the secretary of state the … urgency of their situation,” Theo Hettema, chairman of the General Council of Protestant Ministers says.

    Sasun and Anousche Tamrazyan and their three children, Hayarpi, Warduhi, and Seyran, fled their native Armenia and sought asylum in The Netherlands after Sasun’s political activism earned them death threats. After several years of court procedures, the family was granted asylum by a judge, but the government launched legal proceedings and succeeded in overturning that ruling. (While Hettema does not know why the government sought to reverse the Tamrazyans’ asylum status, he believes appealing asylum approvals may be part of the government’s strategy to limit immigration.)

    https://qz.com/1470153/a-dutch-church-is-holding-non-stop-services-for-a-refugee-family/

  46. 46.

    MagdaInBlack

    @Arclite:
    I liked her fire and intelligence from the beginning. It was my hope she would choose a mentor who could refine that.
    It appears she may have done so, in Pelosi.
    Let us hope. ☺️

  47. 47.

    West of the Rockies

    @NotMax:

    Indeed. However, I worked on an apple orchard as a kid–that is probably the seed issue. (Insert eye-roll emoji here.)

  48. 48.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Major Major Major Major: Was your mission to find a cafe to work in successful? Close to home?

    You know that TriBeCa is the home of Robert DeNiro’s film festival, right? That’s about all I know about your neighborhood.

  49. 49.

    From Both Sides of the Pond

    OT: Anyone following what is going on in the Sea of Azov between the Russians and Ukrainians? Blocking the straits, ramming, shots fired, and blocking of Ukrainian points of entry to the west by ‘cars with foreign registrations’, etc?

    ETA: Cheryl’s all over it with a new thread.

  50. 50.

    Aleta

    MORRISVILLE, N.C. — More than two dozen people were arrested Friday while protesting the detention of an undocumented man who had been living in a Durham church for 11 months.
    Samuel Oliver-Bruno sought to defer his deportation to Mexico after living in the United States for more than 22 years.

    Oliver-Bruno arrived at a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Morrisville on Friday morning for an appointment, joined by his 19-year-old son, Daniel Oliver-Perez; a pastor at CityWell United Methodist Church, Cleve May; and other members of the clergy. May said once Oliver-Bruno completed paperwork, he and Oliver-Perez went to a line to be processed while May and clergy members stayed in a waiting room.

    That’s when ICE agents tackled Oliver-Bruno, May said. … “This was a bait-and-switch,” May said. “A legal process was put into place that was used as the bait to pull Samuel out of sanctuary.”

    Outside the USCIS building, he and other protesters formed a human wall around the van Oliver-Bruno was placed in, keeping him and officials from leaving for about two hours. “I hope the world sees this,” May said. “They’re choosing to show exactly how dehumanizing their agency is. They’re choosing to engage in tactics that are devious, to say it lightly.”

    May and 25 other protesters were arrested and charged with failing to disperse on command. Many of the protesters were members of CityWell.

    North Carolina Congressmen G.K. Butterfield and David Price, both Democrats: … “It’s clear that while Mr. Oliver-Bruno was attempting to follow the law in pursuit of his legal petition, ICE coordinated with USCIS to target him upon his leaving the CityWell United Methodist Church. “Samuel, his wife Julia, and his 19-year-old son Daniel have been productive and upstanding members of the community for many years, with no serious criminal records and deep ties in the faith community.” “As Members of Congress representing the Durham community, we will continue to do everything in our power to keep the Oliver-Bruno family together.”

    https://www.wral.com/dozens-arrested-after-undocumented-man-living-in-durham-church-for-11-months-detained/18015326/

  51. 51.

    Mnemosyne

    @MobiusKlein:

    Hm, interesting point. I think you may be right and that’s the origin of the term, which is why it doesn’t entirely make sense in everyday English.

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