Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Bark louder, little dog.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Everybody saw this coming.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

This really is a full service blog.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

This fight is for everything.

In my day, never was longer.

You are here: Home / Science & Technology / Wednesday Evening Open Thread: SCIENCE!

Wednesday Evening Open Thread: SCIENCE!

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New frontiers in grifting?

And speaking of opening new vistas… someday the Media Village Idiots might be able to get out of their little glass bubble — or at least be able to ride the bubble out into the big world:

Reader Interactions

85Comments

  3. 3.

    Baud

    This is fucking wild. Norton “Antivirus” now sneakily installs cryptomining software on your computer, and then SKIMS A COMMISSION.

    I read that the user has to affirmatively turn it on for it to work.  Still, not a good thing for them to do.

  4. 4.

    SpaceUnit

    This is progress.  I get sooo tired of having to drop what I’m doing to drive my goldfish wherever they want to go.

    Let the little fuckers drive themselves.

  5. 5.

    Doc Sardonic

    @Barbara: No, sadly, it only proves that goldfish are smarter than a high percentage of Republicans and drive better than most residents of The Villages.

  13. 13.

    MattF

    Now we know what those goldfish in the bowl are thinking as they swim around the bowl. “Vroom, vroom, vroom.”

  16. 16.

    Cermet

    The fact that Webb’s secondary mirror is deployed and locked means that Webb is a real telescope now  – i.e. light from the main mirror can enter the instrument packaged. This achievement is a big deal – the payload is now an observatory.  So even if the other mirror sides did not deploy, Webb would work very well. Of course, the mirrors have to align properly and instruments work but those are side issues compared to this achievement.

    Combined with the solar shield, this demonstrates the critical procedure that any future larger scope will have to do in order to be carried into space. This proves that NASA can do this critical task – like their heavy probe landing on Mars that can then drive itself, for the most part.

  17. 17.

    Baud

    @mrmoshpotato:

    If you click through, you get to a website that says this:

    Sign on if January 6 should be a day of UNITY!

    We believe that January 6 should be a day of unity.

    The events of that day were horrific. Those involved should pay a price commensurate with the harm their actions caused our nation.

    At the same time, our elected officials, and all of us, have a choice on this week’s first anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol. We can politicize that solemn day and use it to further divisions in our Republic for short-term partisan gain. Or we can memorialize it by vowing to come together to restore respect between the parties, to honor our political differences, and to reaffirm that there is more that unites us than divides us.

    If you want to join with No Labels in calling for a day of unity on January 6, sign on below.

     

    I suspect they intend the meaning to lie in the eye of the beholder.

  21. 21.

    dmsilev

    @Baud: Yeah, if you go to the FAQ that Doctorow links to, it explicitly says that the user must turn it on and can turn it off at any point. I suppose one could get aggrieved at the “charge a commission” part (15% according to the FAQ), but honestly the worst part is that Norton is making it easier for more people to waste vast amounts of power growing e-tulips.

  23. 23.

    dmsilev

    @Cermet: The solar shield is particular to Webb. Telescopes that don’t specialize in infrared aren’t quite as twitchy about maintaining the instruments and (especially) the mirror at low temperatures. Unfolding a segmented mirror, yeah that will generalize to future space scopes.

  24. 24.

    Gin & Tonic

    Welp, that was quick.

    The CSTO peacekeeping forces will be sent to Kazakhstan “for a limited period of time in order to stabilize and normalize the situation in this country,” said Armenian Prime Minister Pashinyan (who came to power in result of protests). #Belarus is also the member of the CSTO. pic.twitter.com/xH0K6QyfZM
    — Hanna Liubakova (@HannaLiubakova) January 5, 2022

  25. 25.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Baud:

    Or we can memorialize it by vowing to come together to restore respect between the parties, to honor our political differences, and to reaffirm that there is more that unites us than divides us. 

    Ah yes, the political differences we have with a bunch of Trump-humping, fascist shitstains…

  27. 27.

    MattF

    @dmsilev: So… Norton implemented something that, undoubtedly, some of its customers want. And makes some (real) money off of it. Takes advantage of customer stupidity and wasteful, IMO, but not particularly evil.

  30. 30.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @mrmoshpotato:

    Maybe I knew this once and had repressed simply forgotten it, but I don’t think I realised until just now that the co-chairs of NoLabels are Larry Fucking Hogan and Joe Fucking Lieberman. Although really, those two are the least surprising choices possible.

  34. 34.

    Viva BrisVegas

    @Baud: No good. We would have ended up with a space race between the goldfish and the pigeons BF Skinner trained to fly gliders.

    In my day you only installed Nortons and MacAfee software on the basis that a professionally written virus was better than an amateurish one.

  37. 37.

    currawong

    Has anyone else had problems with tweets resolving properly in BJ? I reported it to @Watergirl a few weeks ago but the problem is definitely with my PC. I’ve tried it in different browsers and the problem occurs with different sites too (e.g. The Guardian). I have to read BJ on my phone now which isn’t ideal but passable. Even the Safari on phone has the same problem intermittantly.

     

    BTW, awesome news about the heat shield deployment. How complex was that?

  38. 38.

    Chief Oshkosh

    So now that we can train goldfish to drive delivery trucks, is the supply chain problem fixed?

  40. 40.

    dm

    Almost forty messages in and no one has mentioned AJ Carmichael, the head of The Commission in Umbrella Academy w.r.t the goldfish?

  41. 41.

    Benw

    As someone who works with electronics that have to survive in harsh and unreachable conditions, I can practically TOUCH the tension and relief underlying Mark’s tweet up top.

  42. 42.

    Brachiator

    This is fucking wild. Norton “Antivirus” now sneakily installs cryptomining software on your computer, and then SKIMS A COMMISSION..

    This is not wild. This is some bullshit.

  43. 43.

    Cermet

    @OzarkHillbilly: While certainly true, the point is that until the scientific method, all technological advances were prone to failure almost all the time, never able to generalize accurately from the little that was understood, and our advancement was incredibly slow – in the last four hundred years we went from little more advanced than the Romans to humans landing on the Moon and our deep understanding of both the cosmos and atomic level worlds – all because of the scientific method (yes, math codeveloped and was critical too.)

  44. 44.

    Brachiator

    @dmsilev:

    Yeah, if you go to the FAQ that Doctorow links to, it explicitly says that the user must turn it on and can turn it off at any point.

    Still bullshit.

  47. 47.

    Brachiator

    @Cermet:

    While certainly true, the point is that until the scientific method, all technological advances were prone to failure almost all the time, never able to generalize accurately from the little that was understood, and our advancement was incredibly slow – in the last four hundred years we went from little more advanced than the Romans to humans landing on the Moon

    There were cultures before this which used a proto- scientific method. Things just became more rigorous, I suppose.

  48. 48.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Cermet: I was being snarky.

    The laws of nature are inviolate, whether we understand them or not. Something evangelicals just can’t quite wrap their heads around.

  50. 50.

    NotMax

    FYI.

    Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards on Wednesday formally pardoned Homer Plessy, the long-dead civil rights pioneer whose stand against racial segregation led to an infamous U.S. Supreme Court case. Source

  54. 54.

    trollhattan

    @mrmoshpotato:

    Is the message, “We are unified in condemning insurrection directed at the Congress of the United States in an attempt to overturn the presidential election”? Then go forth and unify.

    Anything less, fuck off, loser.

  55. 55.

    Another Scott

    @Baud: “We” is used several ways there, and is intentionally hiding the meaning.

    I don’t think they’re fooling anyone.  I wish people would just forget about them.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  56. 56.

    Yarrow

    @Baud:  @mrmoshpotato:
    It should be a Day of Accountability. Followed by a lot more days of accountability. When those responsible have been held accountable then we can have the fucking Day of Unity.

  58. 58.

    Matt McIrvin

    CDC recommends boosters for kids aged 12-15.

    Tried CVS and they won’t schedule one for mine yet (they’re still saying eligibility is 16+). Will try later.

  59. 59.

    Leto

    @Barbara: as someone who spent 5 years training America’s youth to do simple tasks, I’d take a goldfish 7 days out of the week, and twice on days ending in -y. :P

  61. 61.

    kindness

    I for one, welcome our new/future goldfish overlords.  They have to be able to do better than we did.

  62. 62.

    RSA

    Goldfish can learn to navigate a small robotic vehicle on land.

    Interesting! I’ve done research in the area of navigation as well as in the area of animal cognition, and I have to say this is pretty creative.

    I think, in a cognition context, a couple of caveats would be appropriate. Navigation is typically taken to be a complex task that often involves recognition of landmarks, choosing between paths, memory of past experience, and the like. The experimenters have set up a basic task to be solved with a strategy of “Go to the visible target as quickly as possible.” Learning to operate the vehicle is very cool, but the result isn’t what would typically be called navigation in the literature. I think some variation on “locomotion” would be a better description, and even there it’s open to question; the task isn’t different in the abstract from many “manipulation” tasks.

  64. 64.

    Robert Sneddon

    @dmsilev: Oddly enough the James Webb Space Telescope isn’t the largest astronomical observatory ever flown in space — that honour belongs to James Bond’s nemesis, the Russian Spektr-R ten metre diameter radiotelescope satellite which was operational until 2019.

    The JWST isn’t even the second-largest, there was HALCA, a Japanese 8-metre diameter radiotelescope satellite flown back in 1997.

  66. 66.

    Brachiator

    @Robert Sneddon:

    Oddly enough the James Webb Space Telescope isn’t the largest astronomical observatory ever flown in space…

    I don’t know that size was ever an issue. I thought I read that what was special about this telescope is how it would be used to investigate the earliest periods in the life of the universe.

    Or something like that.

  68. 68.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Brachiator: There have been a number of smaller infra-red telescopes launched into space, such as the Herschel telescope flown by ESA. It ended up orbiting the L2 point the same as the JWST will for similar reasons, to get it away from the radiated heat of the Earth. The Herschel had a 3.5 metre dish, larger than the Hubble and at the time the largest non-radio dish in orbit. It used stored liquid helium to cool the instruments and when that ran out about four years after launch it was decommissioned.

    JWST has active cooling on board, not relying on stored liquid helium so its instruments will operate for ten years and more, hopefully. Its 6.8 metre diameter mirror has four times the light grasp of Herschel and much better instrumentation given technical advances since the turn of the century.

  69. 69.

    eachother

    Great article Annie Laurie.  Awesome telescope news.  Only 344 “single-points”.  25% more to accomplish. (86)

    I have had a range of goldfish from Ping-Pong (a carnival win) to Big.  Big grew old and big.  Outside in the summer and in a tank for winter.  A raccoon figured out in a 2 day effort, how to drain my fish pond by turning the fish sculpture to spout outside the basin.  I kept the pump up on bricks so if the water drained, it would leave enough water for the fish.  Story short.  The raccoon had sushi for dinner.

    Seeing the goldfish take its tank for a walk suggests to me I could have rigged a contact in the pond to have enabled Big to notify me a robber was in his house.

  72. 72.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

    Australia kicks anti-vaxxer Novak Djokovic out of the country.

    Aussie! Aussie! Aussie

    Oy! Oy! Oy!

  73. 73.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

    After hours in the isolated room under police guard the star’s visa was cancelled and he is due to be flown out of the country

  74. 74.

    Brachiator

    @Robert Sneddon:

    … and much better instrumentation given technical advances since the turn of the century.

    Funny to think about this as “turn of the 20th century.”

  75. 75.

    Jerzy Russian

    @dmsilev:    I like how the description says that the “secondary mirror plays an important role in reflecting the light from the primary mirror to where  the instruments sit”.   That is like saying your car’s brakes play an important role in stopping the car.

  77. 77.

    Kropacetic

    I had forgotten whom the telescope was named for, so before I found it further down the post I was thinking of it as the John Waters Space Telescope.

  81. 81.

    Kent

    @Kropacetic: Yeah, it was the guy who ran NASA in the 1960s from Project Mercury up through the Apollo program and moon landings.  A pretty eventful time for space exploration technological development in an astonishingly short amount of time.

  82. 82.

    apocalipstick

    But I have been assured that the only worthwhile endeavors regarding space are being performed by centibillionaires.

  84. 84.

    S. Cerevisiae

    Dead thread but just wanted to chime in as another one geeking out about the Webb! As someone said above it’s actually usable even without the primary mirror wings and I would bet they will deploy just fine. Thanks to all the scientists and engineers involved in this project, well done!

  85. 85.

    J R in WV

    @David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:

    I hope Novak has to ride in economy coach across the whole Pacific ocean leaving Australia! He can recall how the little people fly.

    I have decided that unvaccinated people should be forced into quarantine permanently until they are fully vaccinated. Beans and rice delivered to the house,  or carry out if they want to pay for it.

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