Let there be light!
Bryn Celli Ddu, a neolithic burial site on Anglesey #Wales, is aligned to allow the sun to reach the back of the chamber at daybreak on the Summer Solstice.
Today, the sun will set on the longest day of the year at 9.26pm#SummerSolstice #midsummer #longestday pic.twitter.com/FpMcwnwzRi— Mark Rees (@reviewwales) June 21, 2021
Pick your pole…
Expeditioners in Antarctica celebrate winter solstice with a plunge into icy waters pic.twitter.com/B7sZCZcADR
— The Sun (@TheSun) June 21, 2021
And for a cosmic start to the week, from the president-elect of the National Society of Black Physicists: We are (probably) not alone, but we aren’t liable to be chatting any time soon…
Analysis: Intelligent life probably exists on distant planets — even if we can’t make contact, astrophysicist says https://t.co/peQmF1Hwqw
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 20, 2021
… Regardless of the odds, the existence of intelligent life in the universe matters deeply to me, and to most other humans on this planet. Why? I believe it’s because we humans are fundamentally social creatures who thrive on connection and wither in isolation. In the past year, many of us felt the hardship of isolation as deeply as the threat of a potentially fatal infectious disease. Enforced seclusion during the pandemic tested the limits of our tolerance for separation and made us acutely aware of our interdependence with all life on Earth. So, it’s no wonder that the idea of a trackless universe devoid of intelligent life fills us with the dread of cosmic solitary confinement.
For a hundred years, we’ve been emitting radio signals into space. For the past 60 years, we’ve been listening — and so far, in vain — for the beginning of a celestial conversation. The prospect of life on other planets remains a profound one, regardless of our ability to contact and interact with them. As we await evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, I draw comfort from the knowledge that there are many powerful forces in the universe more abstract than the idea of alien intelligence. Love, friendship and faith, for example, are impossible to measure or calculate, yet they remain central to our fulfillment and sense of purpose.
As I head into my mid-50s, I look forward with an infinity of hope to the moment when humans will finally make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence — in whatever far-flung star system they may live, and in whatever century or millennium moment that momentous meeting may occur. Until that day, I have no doubt that generations of young humans around the globe will continue to stand watch, looking skyward with the same sense of amazement and wonder that intoxicated me as a young boy.
Baud
I’ll settle for evidence of terrestrial intelligence.
debbie
Those distant planets aren’t dummies. ?
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone ???
rikyrah
We had tornado ?️ out our way last night. The rains and winds were ???
Followed the weather lady on Twitter.
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
Baud
@debbie:
They’ve designated Earth a no-go zone.
debbie
@rikyrah:
Well, that’s scary. Glad you’re okay.
debbie
@Baud:
Proof of their intelligence.
NotMax
Repeating for morning crew.
Reminder for any who might be interested that Prime Days began at midnight Pacific time and run for 48 hours thereafter.
Guide to the goings on; if the past is any measure, will be constantly updated in real time. And another, with a more, um, florid design.
Also, info on simultaneous savings deals offered by competing outlets.
mrmoshpotato
@rikyrah: T’was nice and pouring here in Chicago before it went over the lake and soaked Michigan.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Last night’s Chicagoland tornado went south of us, near Woodbridge and Napierville. Lots of damage there, apparently. I slept through it
Kristine
NE corner of Illinois, hello! The front slid south, so I missed the worst of the storm. But we did get some much-needed rain. I need to check my rain gauges. After coffee ☕️.
NotMax
Early FYI. Beginning 6 a.m. Eastern this coming Saturday, all the way through to 6 a.m. the following Monday, TCM will be airing a Hitchcockathon.
Sabotage
The 39 Steps
The Wrong Man
Saboteur
Torn Curtain
North by Northwest
Vertigo
The Birds
Strangers on a Train
Family Plot
The Lady Vanishes
Suspicion
Shadow of a Doubt
Rope
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
Dial M for Murder
The Trouble with Harry
Psycho
Marnie
The Lodger
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
Frenzy
.
rikyrah
@NotMax:
????
Amir Khalid
We used to think humans — and for the longest time, that meant only white male humans — were the only intelligent life on earth. I wonder how they define intelligence in extraterrestrial life forms.
Dorothy A. Winsor
It takes a lot of arrogance to think that in this whole vast universe, intelligent life only evolved on Earth
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
A cockathon! A cockathon!
A multi-film Hitchcockathon!
This sure makes me wish I had TCM access.
tom
@mrmoshpotato: And here in Michigan we definitely got soaked.
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: Wow. Very nice.
Dorothy A. Winsor
We had a very nice time yesterday having Father’s Day dinner at our son’s house. Yay for vaccination!
rikyrah
??
Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) tweeted at 9:58 PM on Sun, Jun 20, 2021:
Allyson Felix’s daughter and Quanera Hayes’ son share a moment after their moms qualified for the Olympics ❤️
(via @NBCOlympics)
https://t.co/Bx6lb6Z9dU
(https://twitter.com/BleacherReport/status/1406808675193294850?s=03)
rikyrah
BLACK ARCHIVES (@blackarchivesco) tweeted at 8:38 AM on Sat, Jun 19, 2021:
Footage of Juneteenth parades and events from 1979-1991 from the KXAS-TV station in Fort Worth, Texas.
This compiled footage features b-roll and news clips held at the UNT Library, Special Collections. https://t.co/4l91vSqBEU
(https://twitter.com/blackarchivesco/status/1406244963164250113?s=03)
japa21
@Kristine:
Checked mine. Shows 3 inches but always registers high so probably 2 to 2.5. Lots of lightning and thunder along with the rain. Tornado damage in those areas hit was extensive. No deaths reported and only a few injuries.
SiubhanDuinne
Apparently Netanyahu is really dragging his feet about moving out of the PM’s official residence. Last Monday he even threw a party for Nikki Haley and John Hagee (actually, I thought he had been dead for years) at the residence.
(Times of Israel link from Wonkette)
https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-family-to-leave-official-residence-only-in-a-number-of-weeks/
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne:
Damn. We even got Trump out of the White House by inauguration day.
Soprano2
It started pouring rain here right when it was time for me to leave the house for work! By the time I reached work it was raining lightly, thank goodness, but the streets had a lot of standing water in them. We actually need some rain after having almost 9 inches of it in May, because it was so hot last week – highs in the 90’s almost every day, which is unusual for us in June.
There go two miscreants
@SiubhanDuinne: A cockathon! A cockathon!
Phrasing!!
japa21
As I begin my 75th trip around the sun, I have always appreciated how the powers that be decided to celebrate my natal day with the longest day of the year.
WereBear
@rikyrah: Tornadoes are the worst! Glad you’re okay.
Baud
@japa21:
Happy birthday!
SiubhanDuinne
@There go two miscreants:
NotMax started it!
Dorothy A. Winsor
Mr DAW recorded that CNN report on the insurrection and is watching it now. Outside their own echo chamber, these people sound deranged. Of course so does TFG. I could barely stand to read his short Father’s Day message after it got to the part about “losers” and “RINOs” and “radical left.” I resented the seconds it took me to read that lunacy. I usually avoid him.
SiubhanDuinne
@japa21:
Happy solstice birthday! imagine all those ancient people building all those temples and observatories in your honour!
japa21
@SiubhanDuinne: They obviously were very prescient.
Jeffro
Let’s hear it for the (building? astronomical? sheer dumb luck in aligning burial chamber?) skills of my Welsh ancestors! I will ddo my bessqst to use a ffrffew extra consonnmnnants today in thhdhheir honor. ;)
Betty Cracker
@NotMax: Thanks for the links! Very tempted to purchase a 17-inch laptop that looks like a good deal. Will spend the rest of the day mulling that over…
germy
Whenever we think of life on other planets, we always envision advanced extraterrestrial life. Civilizations with technology, literature, the arts.
But our own planet is full of “non-advanced” life. Dolphins, birds, lizards. They’re advanced enough to survive their environments and often display remarkable intelligence, but they’re not building space ships.
Maybe any life we discover elsewhere might fall into that category.
Betty Cracker
Speaking of aliens, maybe they’ve been here all along.
Ken
It’s a little out of date, but XKCD compiled this handy list of what the aliens are hearing from us. So yeah, like Baud said, we’re a no-go zone.
waratah
My sister and her husband had their second shots in Australia and they issued them official Australian proof of their vaccinations. Why is it so hard to do here.
Kristine
@japa21: Checked my gauges. Maybe half an inch, which is surprising given how hard it came down in the beginning. But the worst of the weather slid south and took the rain with it.
Still, it’s close to 2” since Friday. A few more days like that, and my sump pump may finally kick on for the first time since the thaw.
NotMax
@japa21
Happy new solar orbit to you!
lowtechcyclist
@waratah:
Same deal as usual: it’s because of an entire political party of assholes.
BruceFromOhio
While I admire such enthusiasm, I do not share it. I’ll be satisfied with the belief that, yes, in the rich vastness of this universe, there is a really great party happening somewhere.
It would not surprise me in the least that at some distant point, should humans still exist, that others from afar admit, “we were avoiding you.”
?BillinGlendaleCA
@waratah:
FREEDUMB!
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Extra terrestrials haven’t contacted us, that shows their intelligence.
lowtechcyclist
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
The tricky part is that not only don’t we know how life began here, AFAIK we don’t seem to have a good understanding of how life can begin.
Once you’ve got life, it can evolve, and evolution is something we understand. But getting from non-life to life – well, if we don’t understand how, we have no way of understanding whether it happens once in every thousand solar systems, or once in every billion trillion solar systems, or just once, period.
Spanky
@schrodingers_cat: If it happens that we’re discovered by a much more advanced species, we may be looked on as the equivalent of a species of really cute cats. We could all be adopted off-planet as pets!
(Many authors have thought this through before, obvs.)
Ken
@Spanky: “Humanity, our evaluation shows your species has nothing to contribute to the Galactic Alliance.”
“Wait a minute! We forgot to include one thing in the application.”
“What is it?”
“This is one of our domesticated animals, a kitten.”
“Awwww…. Application granted.”
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@Dorothy A. Winsor: he’s playing the hits.
wasn’t his congratulations to even the haters & the losers back in 2013 one of his biggest tweets in the era before Politico Trump?
Soprano2
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I watched “60 Minutes” last night; they had a segment about the Oathkeepers and their participation in the insurrection. Overall it was pretty good, but it had flaws. They had the obligatory segment where they interviewed three Oathkeepers; they had the carefully selected 3 person group of one white man, one white woman, and one black man (instead of the actual more representative group of three white men). When she asked them what they thought about Oathkeepers participating the insurrection, they all immediately started saying “It could have been BLM, it could have been Antifa, we don’t do things like that” and of course there was no pushback or further questioning on that by the interviewer, although they did show that an Oathkeeper leader was provably there on January 6th. She also didn’t pursue it any further when, after getting a “yes” answer to her question about whether they thought we are in a civil war, she then asked why and was told “there are good people and evil people”, and “the evil people don’t want to follow the Constitution”. There was no question asking for examples of this, or any articulation of what their idea of not following the Constitution is. She didn’t ask them if they believe Joe Biden is the duly elected president of the U.S., either. They came off in that short segment as just citizens concerned that America is going too far in one direction, not as the deranged people they probably are. Why does the press continually fail us by not asking probing follow-up questions to things like that?
Geminid
A couple weeks ago, at the North Carolina State Republican convention, trump endorsed Congressman Budd for Senate. The Republican Senator who for now holds the seat weighed in this weekend. Senator Burr described former governor Pat McCrory as the “only” Senate candidate who could win the general election.
I thought of this when I saw trump’s Father’s Day message. I liked that he sneered at RINOs and losers. He will use these words a lot while advocating against Impeachers like Representatives Kinzinger and Cheney, and Senator Murkowski in next year’s primaries. And now that trump and his henchmen are asserting dominance over the party, trump in his typically churlish way will be tearing down McCrory and others competing with his chosen candidates.
Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell desperately want to regain control of the House and Senate next year. But all they can do is to try to mitigate the intra-party damage trump causes, and it won’t be easy. They have chosen to ride a mangy, flea-bitten and fickle tiger, and I think they will have a rough and itchy ride.
Steeplejack
@japa21:
Happy birthday! ???
germy
@Geminid:
They need to grab that tiger by the tail and face the situation.
Uncle Cosmo
Um, no, it doesn’t. All it takes is a scientific understanding of the great number of preposterously unlikely accidents that contributed to its evolution here, and the huge stretch of time since the Beeg Beng. I commend to you Brownlee and Ward’s Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe for astrophysical and biological perspectives, and David Waltham’s Lucky Planet: Why Earth is Exceptional – And What That Means For Life In The Universe for a geologist’s take.
Among other things, there is the crucial question of the value of the parameter L in the Drake Equation, which represents “the length of time for which … civilizations release detectable signals into space.” It may well be that at the present time there is only one advanced civilization that’s detectable by means at our disposal – our own. Other forms of intelligent life may have existed long before we came down from the trees, and either gone extinct (the Great Filter argument), eliminated their emanations (by implementing fiber optics or other narrowcast communications), and/or turned inward (when computing power permits any individual to simulate an existence in which s/he is God, who needs the rest of the cosmos?). It is not at all unlikely that a complex life form capable of developing spaceflight and interstellar communication would also develop thermonuclear weapons and species-lethal plagues and weaponize planet-scouring asteroids, and proceed to self-extinction when such capabilities percolate down to the level of solipsists and nihilists. If that routinely occurs within a few hundred years of the advent of such technolgies’ appearance, it would be highly unlikely that another species is at a technological level equivalent to ours at this eyeblink of time.
In fact I can make exactly the opposite claim to yours:
BruceFromOhio
@Uncle Cosmo:
Uh, I think you kinda proved
@Dorothy A. Winsor‘s point there, buddy.
ant
I wonder if we’ve already been visited by an alien species. Namely that Jesus was an alien, as were angels in the Bible.
Everyone I mention this too views it as a radical idea, but for me at least, it makes more sense than the conventional story that Jesus is some white guy with a long beard who lives in the clouds, and keeps track of every ones masturbation habits.
Geminid
@germy: I compare McCarthy’s and McConnell’s situation to that of the party in Virginia. There, the “populist” tea party types and their bible-thumping allies have driven the Republican party so far to the right that the party cannot win with them. But the Republicans can’t win without them either, because they have alienated so many moderate and independent voters.
The Republican dynamic is different nationally, I don’t know by how much. But I don’t think McCarthy and friends believe they can win without the trump loyalists. It’s no wonder congressional Republican leaders are silent about the many voter suppression and election theft measures being enacted by Republican state legislatures. That may be the only way they can win now, even with the advantage of gerrymandering.
BruceFromOhio
@ant: When you put it that way, yeah, not as radical.
NotMax
@Geminid
Subject to change in the many months to come but at the moment gut feeling is optimistic about the ’22 elections.
Not a single “r” in that sentence, by design.
;)
Brachiator
@ant:
Not very radical. There have been a number of books about this, and it has long been a standard topic on late night “alien abduction/UFO/Conspiracy” talk radio.
Pyramids, Stonehenge, etc., all built by space aliens.
J R in WV
@ant:
Also, giant wheel in the sky in Ezekiel, what else could that be but a flying saucer? Gleaming like beryl or sapphire… I’m sold.
R-Jud
Bryn Celli Ddu is a magical place that happens to be smack in the middle of a rather un-magical working farm. Should you ever happen to wind up on Anglesey, you should go there. It’s accessible by the public during daylight hours.
Chacal Charles Caltrop
@Brachiator: I think the idea that angels specifically were aliens is a plot point in Babylon 5
JaneE
We can’t even communicate with other intelligent species on our own planet. Maybe apes and whales and dolphins aren’t quite as “smart” as we are, but it wasn’t that long ago that our methods of determining “intelligence” always showed Blacks to be inferior, and we know now that was a crock.
Humans didn’t come to grips with mathematical zero until just hundreds or maybe a thousand years ago, but apparently crows can also grasp the concept of “none”. And make tools to use, even without opposable thumbs.
The tales of the Mediterranean area include dolphins saving human lives – how does empathy or altruism across species count in the measure of intelligent life?
Considering how big the universe is, it would be really strange if we were the only “intelligent” species, but depending on how you measure intelligence there may be a few dozens of intelligent life forms on this planet out of how many? If that ratio applies across the universe, we may well never find the few we could communicate with as equals. Getting a radio signal from a planet a few hundred or thousand light years away, much less hundreds of thousands or million light years away doesn’t mean we can communicate with them in any real dialog. Assuming we understand what we are getting in the first place.
Sister Golden Bear
@debbie: They’ve read the Hitchhikers Guide:
Brachiator
@Chacal Charles Caltrop:
Yep. Vorlons.
And in some ways this was a variation of a theme in Arthur Clarke’s “Childhood’s End.”
Geminid
@JaneE: My Atlanta friend speculates that intelligent dolphins may eventually take us over. First, human chess players would start playing chess with dolphins using waterproof devices. After a while, the dolphins would finagle more powerful chess playing stations, and then the ransomware attacks would begin. Humans would understand who was striking when the demands are so many thousand kilos of mackerel dropped at a particular place in the ocean. By then it would be too late, though, and the dolphins would impose conditions on any and all human maritime endeavors, to the benefit of them and their fellow cetaceans. Unable to withstand the dolphins’ superior intelligence, the U.N. would sign a treaty on behalf of the humans, ceding control of the oceans and agreeing to curb land activities that degraded them.
My Atlanta friend likes to play chess, and smokes a lot of weed.