Confirmation that the #JWST sunshield has been successfully deployed & tensioned.
It’s almost impossible to say how big a deal this is – for most of us close to the project, it was easily the scariest part of the whole endeavour. And it’s done.
Take a bow, team ? https://t.co/nlBlevFFNZ
— Mark McCaughrean (@markmccaughrean) January 4, 2022
New frontiers in grifting?
This is fucking wild. Norton "Antivirus" now sneakily installs cryptomining software on your computer, and then SKIMS A COMMISSION. https://t.co/6s2otyCd78
— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) January 4, 2022
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:
I am excited to share a new study led by Shachar Givon & @MatanSamina w/ Ohad Ben Shahar: Goldfish can learn to navigate a small robotic vehicle on land. We trained goldfish to drive a wheeled platform that reacts to the fish’s movement (https://t.co/ZR59Hu9sib). pic.twitter.com/J5BkuGlZ34
— Ronen Segev (@ronen_segev) January 3, 2022
Barbara
If you can train a goldfish, I guess the implication is that you can train anything.
NotMax
“Cool, you got a new car! What color is it?”
“That all depends.”
;)
Baud
I read that the user has to affirmatively turn it on for it to work. Still, not a good thing for them to do.
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.
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.
Ken
XKCD has an interesting discussion of the purpose of the JWST sunshield.
Starboard Tack
@Barbara: Except MAGAts.
Baud
I look forward to goldfish-navigated space flight.
dmsilev
This morning, the Webb team finished the next step in the process, unfolding and locking into place the support for the secondary mirror. Next up, unfolding the primary mirror.
For updates: https://webb.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html
Starboard Tack
Nevermind.
mrmoshpotato
OT – sorry, but you gotta be fucking kidding?
OzarkHillbilly
@dmsilev: Was just gonna say that. Glad I’m not the only one here geeking out over this.
MattF
Now we know what those goldfish in the bowl are thinking as they swim around the bowl. “Vroom, vroom, vroom.”
dmsilev
@mrmoshpotato: I say we unite under the banner of “prosecute all those involved in the insurrection”.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud: Yeah. The tweet is misleading.
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.
Baud
@mrmoshpotato:
If you click through, you get to a website that says this:
I suspect they intend the meaning to lie in the eye of the beholder.
mrmoshpotato
@dmsilev: Agreed.
Cermet
All one can say is: Science rules (especially NASA.)
oatler
Headline reminds me of the scientist in the Thomas Dolby video.
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.
NotMax
@Baud
Anti-fascist and furious.
//
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.
Gin & Tonic
Welp, that was quick.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud:
Ah yes, the political differences we have with a bunch of Trump-humping, fascist shitstains…
Starboard Tack
@mrmoshpotato: Like the political differences you might have with face-eating leopards.
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.
Warren Senders
Sometimes you read a scientific paper and you can just hear people practicing their IgNobel acceptance speeches.
mrmoshpotato
@Starboard Tack: Haha, yes.
SiubhanDuinne
@mrmoshpotato:
Maybe I knew this once and had
repressedsimply 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.Baud
@SiubhanDuinne:
Hogan has a label though! He’s a Republican. (I don’t know what Lieberman is these days).
Ken
Quick poll: Who would watch a version of Robot Wars where the robots were directed by trained goldfish?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: a hundred and seventy-five pounds of spiteful pus in a skin-suit
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.
Chetan Murthy
Since it’s an OT, and I’m not the first to go off-topic, and hey, it’s SCIENCE! Ron DeathSantis at a presser, having some trouble breathing! Maybe he got covid!
https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1478834609236238338
OzarkHillbilly
@Cermet: Well, actually the laws of nature rule. But science seeks to define them in human terms. :-)
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?
Chief Oshkosh
So now that we can train goldfish to drive delivery trucks, is the supply chain problem fixed?
Starboard Tack
@Chief Oshkosh: Doesn’t Tesla use them for self-driving cars?
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?
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.
Brachiator
This is not wild. This is some bullshit.
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.)
Brachiator
@dmsilev:
Still bullshit.
Baud
@Cermet:
Science is cool.
Chetan Murthy
@Brachiator: Techdirt mentions that the 15% commission might tip the user’s ROI on mining to negative.
Brachiator
@Cermet:
There were cultures before this which used a proto- scientific method. Things just became more rigorous, I suppose.
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.
debbie
@SpaceUnit:
Guess your goldfish has this guy beat.
NotMax
FYI.
Brachiator
@NotMax:
The next movie in the Fast and Furious franchise?
debbie
@Baud:
No Labels will first need to prove the GQP is interested in unity.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Sourpuss
Lieberman’s label, in case it wasn’t clear.
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.
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.
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.
Sure Lurkalot
Great news on the Webb but I decry this obvious exploitation of goldfish.
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.
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
OzarkHillbilly
@Sure Lurkalot: Hey, they work for… Fishfood! Which is cheaper than peanuts.
kindness
I for one, welcome our new/future goldfish overlords. They have to be able to do better than we did.
RSA
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.
SpaceUnit
@debbie:
That’s too cool. Dude drives better than a lot of people!
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.
debbie
@SpaceUnit:
I loved the casual one-handed turns, just like a guy cruising and checking out the action!
Brachiator
@Robert Sneddon:
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.
Juju
@Chief Oshkosh: Only if you’re having a treasure chest with a lid that opens and closes repeatedly delivered.
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.
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.
Benw
@Matt McIrvin: same. I’ll let you know if and when it works for me
ReformedPantySniffer
@mrmoshpotato: That No Labels group can eat my whole ass. JFC. Asshats.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Australia kicks anti-vaxxer Novak Djokovic out of the country.
Aussie! Aussie! Aussie
Oy! Oy! Oy!
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Brachiator
@Robert Sneddon:
Funny to think about this as “turn of the 20th century.”
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.
Another Scott
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: Good.
Joker is an amazing athlete, but he got COVID early on (out partying), and the authorities need to demonstrate that everyone needs to follow the rules.
AlJazeera:
“Authorities say tennis champ ‘failed to provide appropriate evidence to meet entry requirements’ amid COVID pandemic.”
https://aje.io/bpfqf5
Cheers,
Scott.
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.
Kent
I would have gone with “wanker”
Actually for the whole lot of them that seems the appropriate label.
Kent
@Kropacetic: For a long time I thought it was named after this James Webb and I could never figure out what the fuck he had actually done to earn that honor except run against Hillary from the right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Webb
Kropacetic
@Kent: Wait, then which James Webb?
Oh, found an explainer from NASA.
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.
apocalipstick
But I have been assured that the only worthwhile endeavors regarding space are being performed by centibillionaires.
Matt McIrvin
@Benw: My town is having a vaccination clinic, I’ll probably just take her there.
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!
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.