The Day The Dinosaurs Died

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Mar 312019

A much longer and more detailed and generally just plain interesting story about the discovery in Hell Creek:

The Day the Dinosaurs Died

The following day, DePalma noticed a small disturbance preserved in the sediment. About three inches in diameter, it appeared to be a crater formed by an object that had fallen from the sky and plunked down in mud. Similar formations, caused by hailstones hitting a muddy surface, had been found before in the fossil record. As DePalma shaved back the layers to make a cross-section of the crater, he found the thing itself—not a hailstone but a small white sphere—at the bottom of the crater. It was a tektite, about three millimetres in diameter—the fallout from an ancient asteroid impact. As he continued excavating, he found another crater with a tektite at the bottom, and another, and another.

SHAZAM!

Finding not only the tektites but the *craters* they made in the mud? That. Is. AWESOME.

Can you imagine what one of those little fossilized mud craters would go for at auction? Every museum in the world and a *lot* of private collectors will want a piece of this place.

This looks painful

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Mar 312019

Somehow I suspect there’s not a “soyboy division” here.

Russia’s ‘Male Slapping Championships’ need to be seen to be believed

This is a silly thing. But there is, I think, value to be placed in a competition where your job is to just stand there and take it. I bet an argument could be made for competitive taser-holding.

The real question now that it is Current Year: are they going to open the competition up to women? I didn’t see any there facing off against the men. Clearly that’s due to the patriarchy preventing women from competing on an even level with the men.

Nuclear-electric spacecraft

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Mar 302019

A Pratt & Whitney magazine ad from 1964 illustrating a spacecraft using a nuclear powerplant. This seems to depict only the actual powerplant, rather than an integrated vehicle. Some details of note are the large thermal radiators and the nuclear shielding. The reactor itself is the structure on the near end of the boom. Flanking it are two someone oddly shaped boxes; these are radiation “shadow shields” seeming placed and shaped to keep radiation from the reactor from impinging upon the radiators. The conical structure just beyond the reactor is another radiation shield , designed to shadow the main structure.

This appears to not be a painting, but a physical model… one seemingly made from metal. Accuracy is perhaps not 100%.

Who do the woke hate today? Survey says: Spain

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Mar 302019

So a few days ago the new President of Mexico demanded that Spain apologize for conquering the Aztecs nearly 500 years ago (note: in reality, Cortez and his 200 guys didn’t so much conquer the Aztec empire and they showed up and led tens of thousands of *other* people to conquer the Aztecs, because the Aztec empire sucked and everybody around them hated them). And so now who is jumping on board the demand-Spain-apologize gravy train?

Via Google Translate:

The Ishbilia Mosque of Seville demands that King Philip VI ask for forgiveness for the Reconquest

A Spanish Mosque is demanding that Spain apologize for conquering… Spain.

So far, the Spanish government has told the Mexican government to get bent. I imagine they’ll do much the same with this more recent demand that Spain apologize for taking back its own land from foreign invaders.

“This is a system wide collapse”

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Mar 302019

Donald Trump ran and won on one goal more than any other: “build the wall” and control illegal immigration, because a nation that cannot control it’s borders and determine who it lets in is no nation at all. But he has not accomplished that goal. If he wants to win in 2020, he needs to do a bit better than simply relying on Democrats to run crazed idiots… and stories like this are not helping:

‘We’ve never seen anything like this’: As Trump threatens to close border, migrants overwhelm Texas cities

Hundreds of “migrants” are invading individual border cities each day, swamping the ability of local resources to deal with them. While it is of course entirely true that a perfectly impenetrable wall on the southern border would not stop the invasion of illegal immigrants – a great many of whom enter legally and simply overstay their visas – the ability to control the southern border is vital not only to the locals but also the the perception that the United States has no border controls. Just as with other forms of criminality, weakness invites attack.

Border Patrol officials were on pace in March for more than 100,000 apprehensions and encounters with migrants – the highest monthly tally in over a decade, he said. Around 90 percent of those – or 90,000 – crossed the border between legal ports of entry.

What do vegans eat?

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Mar 302019

Each other, it seems:

The Weird World of Vegan YouTube Stars Is Imploding

Short form: veganism is like any religion… they reserve a special hate for those who are like them but fall *slightly* short of the pure faith.

The article discusses not only vegans going ape over “vegan YouTube stars” caught eating some animal-based food product, it also mentions, rather casually, that rather a lot of the vegans suffer health issues from their diets. Now, honestly, I don’t care what diet you choose, so long as it’s legal; you eat humans or cats, you and I are gonna have some words. If you only want to eat rabbit food, hey, great, more real food for me. But what gets my goat are all the vegans boasting about how they’re morally superior while at the same time demonstrating that their diet *isn’t* what humans were meant for. Look at the latest developments in vegan food products: vegan hamburgers that taste, feel, even “bleed” like real hamburgers. Why go to all that trouble if eating meat is wrong? Shouldn’t you be satisfied eating vegan food that tastes like plants? The thing is, meat is tasty because humans are *supposed* to eat it, just as sugar is tasty because we are *supposed* to eat it. Cats are *not* supposed to eat sugar, and therefore they don’t seem to have an ability to appreciate the taste of sugar. Humans are omnivores, and while it’s certainly possible to survive on a diet wholly of plant products, it’s neither easy nor necessarily all that healthy in the long term. We have fangs for a reason, people.

I have no doubt that at some point humans will develop machines that will be able to take water, electrical power and basic chemicals – perhaps raw elements – and “replicate” perfectly cromulent foods of any type. Anything from tea, Earl Gray, hot, to a nice juicy steak covered in chocolate sauce and diced grasshoppers, stuffed with basil, bananas and crawdads, all without having to kill one single organism. And when that day comes… will vegans still avoid “meat” for ethical reasons? Will the subspace communications lanes be filled with replicator-vegans sniping at each other about what a “true” vegan diet is? Will HoloTube be filled with people trying to one-up each other? I bet it will be. There will doubtless be people who go that extra step and have the replicator surgically implanted in thier GI tract, with the end result that they neither eat nor poop, but simply reprocess their own waste and survive on water, sunshine and absorbed carbon dioxide. And won’t *those* people be fun at parties.

Ain’t exactly the King’s English

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Mar 302019

‘Ching, wap, ox’: slang interpreters decipher texts for court evidence

Seems the London police are having difficulty understanding the people they deal with. “A Clockwork Orange” was only wrong insofar as it underplayed the issue, and actually assumed that England of the future would be populated by English people speaking some form of English.

And here’s the other way how the universe might end

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Mar 292019

As recently discussed, the generally accepted understanding of the far future of the universe is that we are living in a relatively short (a few trillion years) flash of light at the beginning of the universe, after which will come an inconceivable period of cold dark nuthin’. But there is another possibility based on some baffling observations: The Big Rip.

In short, it seems that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Given what we know about how things work, the expansion should be slowing. The gravity from all the *stuff* in the universe should be slowing it down, at least a little bit… but it seems to be speeding up.

It is an observation without a good explanation right now. The mechanism behind it is not known; it is called “dark energy” simply because we don’t know what else to call it. But worse than simply accelerating, the possibility exists that the rate of acceleration is itself accelerating. One hypothesis is that there is a certain level of dark energy in the vacuum; this dark energy has an anti-gravitational effect. This hypothesis holds that the density of this energy per unit volume is constant over time, so as the universe expands, *more* of this energy is somehow added, increasing the total “pressure” shoving the universe apart. But worse still is the faint possibility that as the universe expands, the dark energy density actually increases. If this is the case, then as time goes by the force behind the expansion will grow asymptotically. *IF* this is the case, then at some point – somewhere in the vicinity of a few dozen billion years from now – the universe will essentially blow itself apart, down to and potentially including elementary particles.

If The Big Rip is our fate, the universe will reach its end *vastly* sooner than otherwise. The universe will end while the sky is still full of stars and galaxies, while terrestrial worlds still orbit nice warm stars.

YAAAAAY!!!

The exact moment of the end

awesomeness, critters, news, paleo, science No Responses »

Mar 292019

This is interesting:

Scientists Find Fossilized Fish That May Have Been Blasted by Debris From Asteroid That Ended the Dinosaur Age

When the asteroid hit the Yucatan 66 million years ago, it ~~sent a tsunami of seawater up into North Dakota (not quite *that* impressive… the Western Interior Seaway stretched from the gulf of Mexico into Canada at the time).~~ sent earthquakes up as far as North Dakota that caused seawater from the Western Interior Seaway to slosh well inland. With the seawater went sea creatures; the sea water and critters ended up in local fresh water, mixing with fresh water fish. And the fish ended up breathing the tiny little glass spherules blasted into the atmosphere in their bajillions by the impact; the glass lodged in their gills in their final moments of life.

Edited for accuracy

That’s some interesting history there, uncle Joe

AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., history, news, politics, THIS is why Trump won, ಠ_ಠ No Responses »

Mar 292019

Joe Biden, who doubtless wants to run for President yet again in 2020, manages to gaffe his way back into the news:

“In the 1900s so many women were dying at the hands of their husbands because they were chattel, just like the cattle, or the sheep, that the court of Common Law decided they had to do something about the extent of the deaths. You know what they said? No man has a right to chastise his woman with a rod thicker than the circumference of his thumb. This is English Jurisprudential culture, a white man’s culture. It’s got to change. It’s got to change,” Biden demanded.

Umm…. what?

Leaving aside for the moment the smearing of an entire race (fortunately for Biden, it’s the one race a politician can slander with virtual immunity), the history is laughably wrong and the message is confoundingly muddled. Assume that he wasn’t wrong and that in the 1900s the English legal system actually proscribed a thumb-thick whackin’ stick for beating the missus. Even if such a thing was the law of the land a hundred years ago (it wasn’t),

Correction: that’s what I get for not going directly to the source material. Biden didn’t say “1900s” but instead “late 1300’s.” He’s still wrong about the history, but 600 years is 600 years…

… it’s not the law *now.* So if he wants the law and the culture to change… wouldn’t it mean he wants it to change *back* to some fantastical era when women were chattel who could be legally beaten to death so long as the stick was below a certain size? Or is he so far gone that he thinks that this is actually the law *now?*

President Biden: Not Even Once.

If Trump wants to win re-election, then the thing to do isn’t to collude with Russians, but to collude with *Democrats.* Specifically the rather large contingent of crazy ones, the ones who go out of their way to insult white people and those who want to pass laws forcing Americans out of the sky and meat off of their plates. Make sure that *those* Dems are the face of the party, not the sane ones. Trump will win in a landslide.

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