Yeah, I’m not paying a whole lot of credence to the cosmology department these days, they’re too busy using Elmer’s Glue to keep their whole story from falling apart.

I’m not so sure about the whole ‘photon’ thing anymore either … an individual, no-mass, single-point thing that can survive travelling through that universe out there for -billions of years- ? The math works, but does the model, really?

Right on about the life thing too.

A more thoughtful way to do it would be if the user were able to delete any contributions they’d made to the discussion (while the title and links persist). This should be the default. NO contribution would ever be removed except by the creator (or by the mods, if warranted according to ze rools.)

People who live next to a freeway or major arterial often get relief because walls get built to deflect the continual noise away from housing.

These people need to organize and demand relief. That mine needs to be inside insulated walls… or moved WAY out of town. 300MW? I guess they can afford it.

No wonder. As you can see, there’s a lot less use of that ‘O-word’ over here.

I’m certain that she didn’t mean that -all- fields of science were scams … it’s always been physics that she’s PO’d at. And I understand that point 'cuz I’m very familiar with the history of physics, so I don’t need your recommendations. The position you’ve taken is clearly unassailable; I appreciate her news reports and chuckle at her sarcasm, so I guess we’re done.

Listened to the audiobook version of Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. I’d read it long ago and was surprised how differently I experienced listening to it. Recommended.

Currently finishing a read of the (British) Rough Guide to Cult Pop (2004) … a book about pop/rock music and its makers from the 50s forward to to 20 years ago. Broken up into many sections, put together by a crew of Brit-wits, many interesting facts and stories about a half-century of chart hits. Strong recommend IF you’re into that sort of thing, appreciate a bit-o-snark, and know most of the names already (or want to).

(big if true) => https://elt.eso.org/about/webcams/

Unless someone’s fey-king them, looks like the skeleton of the dome is about finished. About 3-2/3 years to go.

After reading that, I just checked my memory. After an hour and a half using FF and and a videoplayer (on a reasonably up-to-date Ubuntu 20.x-based XFCE system), I’m using 2.2GB (out of 16, fairly typical, with no swap). So I’m pretty sure that - depending as always on what software they’ve chosen - 2GB is far from ‘useless’. As always, depends on the use case. That’s plenty if you spend most days in a text editor coding.

True that about him. (Altho he has confidently misstated the facts a few times.) Sabine definitely has her on days and off days. Maybe I missed her saying exactly those two things you put quotes around. As for the productivity of Big Science, I think she’s right to suggest that it has not delivered the way that it once did, and right about how many of its top-rated people have lost its way (while there are still small, almost daily discoveries being made). (HYUGE topic for this little container.)

That’s only one and a half-assedtrophysicist.

But yeah, that was a great discussion.

she acts like an authoritative figure on everything. Worked for Kneel de Grass…

I doubt it … but that’s a really good question … to answer it you’d need to look at at least a century and a half of science fiction. I don’t think Jules Verne thought of it (haven’t read all his stuff), but it might have been Aristotle for all I know.

Sabine is a very bright and well-informed lady. I enjoy listening to her trash the well-paid real grifters. They’ve started attacking back? That figures. I guess hearing that you’ve been under-performing for decades makes it hard to stay focussed on the string theories and the ‘new particle!’ theories.

Nope. I chose to go to school and paid to get educated, not to get grades and piece of paper. No cheating, no cramming … I would only have been paying to cheat myself.

They can make the data disapppear, but they can’t make our own experiences (or the weather news) disappear.

Where I grew up, every year the winter temps got down to where F and C are the same temperature. That stopped happening 15 years ago, when temps in the Arctic had climbed fastest. There’s plenty more evidence out there, from all directions. They’re hoping that we’ll start to distrust our own senses? We can live underground, but that’s a hard place to grow food.

Maybe “2001 A Space Odyssey” had the right idea … spinning a whole big station to produce 1G. (Arthur C. Clarke was part of the writing team.)

Discussion here sez it takes a radius of 224m at 2rpm: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/281/what-would-the-size-and-rotation-of-a-station-need-to-be-to-produce-1g-gravity-f

At this site you can play with the parameters: https://www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/

If he’d given it a little push away, not just dropped it, (as he mentioned) it might have had enough energy left to bump him in the face. Probably not fatal though… exercise left for the student.

The professor and all the students are killed.

Seems to me you’d be better off with a circuit that up-converts 20 to 100 Hz sounds by a factor of 20, putting them into a range you can hear. That would not have to be a complicated circuit, and no doubt they’re already out there.

Or it could convert sounds in that range into something that amplifies those frequencies and vibrates against your skin instead (a ‘skin speaker’) … probably easier to make than a converter.