A “high altitude airborne object” shot down by an F-22. This seems like chump work for the F-22, when the F-15 seems perfectly capable of it. it also seems like a dandy way for China and/or Russia to soak up American air defense resources, dollars and time.
But hey, at least Pfizer/Biden/whatever might be off the news cycle hook for a bit.
Hard to argue that this is anything but clear evidence that Mars was once a wet planet.
It’s the sort of terrain where, on Earth, I’d not be surprised to see a fossil shell or footprint. That’s doubtless too much to ask *here,* but the evidence of water just sitting there like that is pretty spectacular.
Feel free to try to imagine “other ways of knowing” providing this.
I haven’t seen it, so don’t blame me. But this reviewer *really* didn’t like it:
Whoa.
The previews look better than the first two execrable seasons, but that’s a low bar indeed.
I am reminded of a reaction video I recently saw. Even in my advancing decrepitude that’s not that big of a mental achievement, considering I saw this video yesterday:
The young lady in question watched “Galaxy Quest” without the benefit of being a fan of Star Trek. Without, in fact, the benefit of actually knowing much about Star Trek. And yet, with minimal exposure to TOS or TNG… she got “Galaxy Quest.” Maybe a few of the jokes skipped past her, but the main themes? Fully understood, accepted and appreciated. A point she raised that caught my attention: near the end when the nerd-kid is contacted and learns that his favorite show is actually real, the young lady stated that she thought that this must have been the dream of many Star Trek fans. Little does she know: whole generations of Trekkies and Trekkers lived in the desperate hope of living in the world of Star Trek. For some this meant daydreaming about serving aboard the Enterprise. For some it meant doing what needed to to become authors or actors or film/TV show makers in the hopes of bringing their own dreams of trek to life (looking at you, Seth MacFarlane). For some of us it meant going into science and engineering in the hopes of starting mankind on the road to trekking the stars. And her realization got me thinking.
Over the last twenty-some years some “Galaxy Quest,” it has been almost universally hailed as one of the best Star Trek Movies. It is certainly one of the movies that shows most clearly a love and understanding of the original Star Trek. Within the movie, an alien race has picked up TV transmissions of the sci-fi series “Galaxy Quest,” and they decided to rebuild their entire society to conform to the vision of “Galaxy Quest,” and in doing so the saved themselves from oblivion and gave themselves hope and a new reason to go on. So… my thinking is this: the “Galaxy Quest Test.”
The test is simple: take a series or a movie that claims to be Star Trek, and imagine that it gets beamed out into space. It is picked up by an earnest alien race capable of understanding it. They have much the same ethics, hopes and fears as humanity, even if they don’t look anything like us and are really rather innocent, despite the fact they are being ground out of existence. What are the chances that these aliens will watch the show or movie and decide that the vision they’ve watched and understood is such a wonderful thing that they will choose to emulate it?
I can see this with TOS. I can see it with TNG. I can see it with Lower Decks and certainly Prodigy. I can see it with Voyager. I can kinda see it with Deep Space Nine. But the Kelvin movies? *Any* season of Discovery or Picard? Not a chance in hell.
So, when watching Star Trek Picard season three, keep this question int he back of your mind: “What would Mathesar think of this?”
Turns out the Chinese are zapping surface targets with lasers. This *seems* to be a benign scientific technique, checking atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and pollution and whatnot… but this is the Chinese Communist Party we’re talking about, so…
This sort of thing would be weird as hell to see out in the wild. I’m not sure if this is naked-eye visible, however, or if it took sensitive cameras to pick this up.
… photos taken by high-altitude U-2 planes confirmed the presence of the equipment, including “multiple antennas … likely capable of collecting and geo-locating communications” and “solar panels large enough to produce the requisite power to operate multiple active intelligence collection sensors.”
So, it was listening to us. Interesting to ponder just what it was listening *for.* Being a balloon, it would have had only minimal ability to target a specific site; it would have been able to scan a swathe of the country. Was it listening to cell phones? Was it listening for military-type transmissions and where they came from (looking for hidden bases/missiles/whatever)? Is the US going to start taking air defense seriously?
I seem to detect a few flaws in the story of how the US shot down the Chinese spy balloon…
Also to be seen here:
Chinese “version” of what happened with its balloon over US territory https://t.co/pS2GIbVCOy pic.twitter.com/PBckqy95YE
— Samuel Bendett (@SamBendett) February 7, 2023
I don’t know what the Russian military was expecting, but being on the receiving end of the first industrial-scale use of robots to hunt down their soldiers one at a time was probably not high on their list.
The video below is a bit yammery, but some important and interesting points are raised, discussed and… dunno. Apparently there’s drama going on among a number of twitch streamers; I’m a bit proud to say I don’t know who the hell these people are, but the crux of the matter is that someone set up a website that shows deepfakes of a number of these “e-girls” in X-rated situations. Some of these women kinda do that now; some of them don’t. What’s the law on this sort of thing? What’s the ethics? Is it wrong to look at such things? Part of the drama is that some e-guy was found to have, ah, utilized the website… and he and his wife are personal friends with some of these women. Awkward. Is he in legal trouble? Seems unlikely. Is he in trouble with the friends? With his wife? Seems pretty likely.
We are in early days of this sort of thing. With the rise of AI art generators and constantly improving deepfake-tech, this sort of thing will only get more prominent, and society is not even really trying to play catch-up yet. As always, people ignore science fiction at their peril.
Soon enough, it will be possible to spool up Naughty Imagery/Videos of *everyone*, made to order. Like do-it-yourself genetic tinkering, this sort of tech is inevitable and unstoppable, and lots of people will want to do it. How will society handle dirty imagery, fake vs real being indistinguishable, being readily available of *everyone?* Seems to me that, eventually as people grow up with it, people just won’t care anymore. You could walk past a giant billboard showing *you* going at it with a tapir and you’ll hardly notice. What effects will that have on society and on people? On one hand, it’ll be damned hard to blackmail people. The job of private investigators will become first really easy, and then really hard, as their photos and videos become unusable as evidence, much less proof. But a larger effect might be an acceleration of the baby bust. As such things become virtually universal, interest in going at it with the opposite sex might very well fall to prit near zero. And thus baby-making might become rather a niche interest, and the populations of developed nations will slip into the dark to be replaced with large numbers of imports.
That would doubtless be to *someones* liking.
Makes one think that the state government might not be filled with right-thinking honest folks who have the upholding of the Constitution as their primary goal.
The primary cause of the restraining order against this law is the equal protection clause, because while it bans the average citizen from buying a common firearm, it allows untrained security guards to have them, along with retired cops and a few other classes of people that you ain’t. The restraining order when originally issued only protected the eight-hundred-some plaintiffs in the case; it has now been made state-wide.
The fossilized brain of a 319-million year old fish has been found and studied via CT scanning of a fossil that had been on hand for a century.