From the “Other Ways Of Knowing” and “Teach The Controversy” files…
It seems aliens are interbreeding with humans to create a hybrid species are they’re annoyed that we’re trashing the environment.
Go on and guess whether the good Prof is in the STEM fields or the “humanities.” Go on, guess.
Recently discovered and described, the exoplanet LTT 1445Ab: about a third larger in diameter than Earth, perhaps 8 times as massive, orbits a red dwarf some 6.9 parsecs (22.5 light years) away. That’s not so unusual, but the red dwarf is part of a trinary system. So a hypothetical observer could see *three* stars in the sky.
It orbits close enough to the primary so that the surface is baking hot and the “year” is only 5.36 days long. Doubtless this means that the planet is tidally locked, so the*other* side of the world should be pretty cold and dark except for when the other stars are in the sky.
If I did my math right, the mass & radius give an approximate surface gravity of about 3.9 G’s. Not a place to party. In fact very likely a wholly unpleasant place.
Add to the list of racists: Baltimore’s former mayor.
Read The Baltimore Sun's report here: Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh: 'You can smell the rats' https://t.co/CPbAQD7LAC
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) July 28, 2019
As it turns out, Mayor Pugh was removed from office for corruption. Even so, unlike a whole lot of other people on her side, she doesn’t seem to have been nose blind to the earthy scent of rats and dead animals.
And here’s a whole news story full of racists, complaining about the totally-not-real rat problem:
And a news story featuring a couple fighting both rats *and* city hall:
More people who are apparently racist against Baltimore: Baltimores subwayworkers.
The point being: Baltimore is rat infested. Is it anyones fault? Maybe, maybe not. Is it racist to point out that Baltimore is rat infested? Nope. No more than it’s racist to claim that southern Mississippi in August is hot and humid, or that southern California is quakey, or that Seattle has a homeless problem, or that Kansas gets tornadoes or that Thatcher, Utah, tends to get infested with skeeters. Anyone who claims otherwise is a liar.
The crocodile tears over someone telling the truth were just simply hilarious to watch, but The Amazing Lucas makes it even funnier.
“Infested” just might end up being the word of the year.
This interesting bit of news & video was on the local news tonight:
I’m thinking drugs just might maybe be involved. That, or he thought Trump was behind him.
From wikipedia. Murder rate per 100,000:
Guatemala: 26.10
El Salvador: 61.80
Honduras: 41.70
And in the US, also via Wiki:
Baltimore: 55.77
St. Louis: 66.07
Hmmm. If people from Guatemala and Honduras and El Salvador can claim refugee status in the US due to their fear of violence, it raises a few thoughts:
1) Where can people from Baltimore and St. Louis claim refugee status? I understand there are a lot of apartments standing empty in London, purchased by wealthy non-Brits as investments and money laundering projects. The Brits could simply nationalize the apartments and fill them with a million central American refugees.
2) People from central America are less violent that people in St. Louis. Maybe we should do an exchange?
3) Maybe we should simply settle central American refugees into Baltimore and St. Louis. Sucks for the refugees, but on the aggregate it would make those cities statistically safer. And since it wouldn’t be actual “gentrification,” since the people moving in do not have the sin of being white or even rich, I’m sure the locals won’t mind having their local cultures over-written.
So Trump put out another tweet calculated to drive Certain People buggo. And just like clockwork, Certain People went buggo.
What did Trump tweet?
….As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2019
Baltimore? Filthy, dangerous and rat infested? Clearly trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “Charm City” is a clean, safe utopia by all accounts. Such as:
And…
“Baltimore is the big city with the highest per capita murder rate in the nation, with nearly 56 murders per 100,000 people.”
And…
I mean, *everyone* loves Baltimore. It’s a universal.
Facts, it seems, continue to be racist.
So I watched the first episode of the new Netflix series “Another Life.” On a certain level, the show has promise:
1) The premise is interesting… an alien Macguffin lands on Earth and TMA-1’s a message to another star system. So since the humans can’t make any sense out of the Macguffin, they send a starship to this distant star (clearly the show isn’t set in the present, but if they said what year it was I missed it)
2) The production values are quite good. The sets and the exteriors of the starship all seem quite quality.
That said… after one episode I want every member of the ships crew to get fed through a woodchipper.
A) They’re on some sort of government starship…yet they do not wear uniforms.
B) They’re mostly twenty-somethings, for reasons which are unclear.
C) They act like teenagers. Not “19 years old and well-disciplined by a year in the Service” teenagers, but “14 year old petulant children unfamiliar with discipline, decorum, basic manners and a work ethic” teenagers.
D) There’s a violent mutiny within minutes of the first hint of difficulty.
E) They’re all Pretty People, with two exceptions:
E1) The Fat Guy with the beard and long hair: this Hurley lookalike, clearly a darling of the Space Service’s physical training program, will doubtless be set up to be the show comic relief or general doofus
E2) The What The Hell Is That character, apparently the ships doctor. Is is an android designed to be confusing and offputting, using its unnatural appearance to dissuade crew from wasting time and resources in the medbay? Who knows.
It’s the usual “most important mission in history,” and this is the best Starfleet has to offer?
And then there’s the production design. Sure, a great deal of effort went into making it all look good, but less went into making it look *right.*
α) The bridge. You know how we’ve all laughed about how Starfleet keeps forgetting to install seat belts? Whoever designed this ship forgot to install *seats.* While the ship is being buffeted and banged up by Stock Standard Sci Fi Space Storms, our bridge crew of mental defectives are standing around getting thrown into the bulkheads. Which, of course, are not padded in any way. But even assuming a smooth ride, you don’t want your crew just *standing* all day, when they could sit down easily enough.
β) Ah, but there *are* seats. After banging the crap out of everyone through several attempts to fly multiple close orbits around a star (a concept that made no sense whatsoever… seemed like they were going for “slingshot maneuver,” but you don’t go into a circular orbit even once around a target star, never mind three times), suddenly not only does a cockpit with “manual controls” open up, but jump seats magically appear for some of the other bridge crew to strap themselves in… *away* from their duty stations.
γ) And then there are several open, exposed, *large* lightning-based electroenzapulation panels littering the ship. Basically a chunk of wall, a meter or two wide and at least that tall, just sitting out there in front of Odin and everybody with constant forked electrical arcs zapping around ’em. Nobody paid them much mind, so I figured they must be some sort of weird decorative thing, or a strange way to display power consumption… something. Until one character gets knocked into one and gets burned to a dead crisp.
W.
T.
F.
Netflix. Dude. There are people out there who you can bounce your ideas off of to make sure stupid crap like this gets caught early enough so that dorks like me can’t pounce on them, point and laugh. Some of us even work cheap. They could point out that some of your ideas don’t make a lick of sense: while the notion that a star isn’t actually where it seems to be because of gravitational lensing could be an interesting one, it falls apart when you make it plain that humans have been zipping out between the stars for *decades*. Because in all that time stellar cartographers would have noticed the problem. the target star here is pi Canis Majoris, which is about 100 light years away… a journey of only 3 months. Things go wrong when they end up at Sirius (kinda along the way to pi Canis Majoris), which is 8.6 light years away. If 100 light years is a trip of only 3 months, then most assuredly humans will have traveled much further that Sirius in *every* direction by this point, and thus the news that pi Canis Majoris is being lensed will have been in all the papers. Cripes, if it’s only 8 days to Sirius (based on taking 3 months to go to pi Canis Majoris), there’s probably a Vegas-style resort in orbit around the place by that point.
That pile of stupid was scraped up from just the first episode. Guh.
Netflix did great work on “Lost In Space.” So how the frak they screwed this up… dunno.
Simply put, the “tragedy of the commons” is the realization that people don’t care about stuff they don’t own. This can be seen in any public space: after a political protest, the grounds are covered in trash; public housing complexes quickly turn into rubbish-strewn, grafitti-covered warzones; roadside ravines fill up with abandoned washing machines and old tires. It’s a reality that is no respecter of political/economic reality… while it is a particular issue in collectivist systems (witness the dour, depressing, run-down nature of communist AnythingAnywhereAnytime, from the factories to the Trabants to the apartment buildings to the nuclear reactors), it also rears its head in free markets.
You might not expect the tragedy of the commons to pop up so much in a system that respects free markets and private property. But it all very much depends on who owns the property vs who is actually in possession of it. It is an old joke about how people abuse rental cars because, hey, it’s not *mine.* And there is of course the issue of factories, powerplants and universities spewing toxic horribleness out into the environment, because, hey, I don’t own the river or the atmosphere.
But now there’s a new tragedy of the commons, one that didn’t exist but a few years ago: scooters. These Lime/bird/Whatever scooters are starting to pop up all over the place. I’m seeing them rapidly increasing in Ogden, Utah, to the point where I witnessed a car/scooter accident a month or two back. The problem – well, *one* of the problems – with them is that the user picks one up wherever they happen to find one, ride it where they want to go… and then abandon it there. After all, the rider doesn’t *own* the scooter; what happens to it after they’re done with it… ehhh, who cares? Well… the people who own the property that the scooters are abandoned on, THEY care. The people whose driveways and handicapped entry ramps are blocked by the scooters, THEY care.
Fortunately, there is a capitalist solution to this capitalism-generated problem: repo men.
The thing is, the people who are behaving badly are not, strictly speaking, the scooter companies, but the customers. It’s the jackholes who just dump the scooters wherever who are the problem. But since they don’t own the scooters, what do they care?
I can see a couple solutions:
1) When you rent the scooter, you don’t just pay your dollar or whatever the fee is, but you *also* pay, in advance, the repo fee that the scooter company will have to cough up if you’re a jackhole. However, if the scooter is rented *again* or is docked at an official station, your repo fee is automatically refunded.
2) Self-driving scooters. Thy get abandoned then, thirty seconds later, right themselves and toddle off to the nearest collection point.
3) Make abandoning the scooters anywhere inappropriate a crime. When you rent one, you have to face into the small camera that each scooter has; before it’ll move you have to be recognized. If you abandon the scooter like an ass, an APB is put out for you.
I can see #1 being a whole lot easier than #2. But #2 is, I suspect, coming soon enough. Not, perhaps, for scooters, but for self-driving rideshare cabs. These, too, will doubtless become exemplars of the tragedy of the commons; if you call one up, expect it to smell of fresh urine, spraypaint, vomit, smallpox. Unlike a New York City subway, you wont be able to move twenty feet away to get away from the smell. Just make sure to check the seat for any surprises before you it down.
The only thing really “shocking” here is that the Feds are finally doing their jobs.
The illegal alien in question had committed crimes and had been ordered out of the US in 2011, went to Mexico but returned illegally and had an outstanding arrest warrant. Time to go.
Hmm. I wonder if there might be a market for buttons. But I imagine someone else has already sewn this one up…
