As if it wasn’t weird enough that astrology is a thing again, now this:
I find I’m starting to pine for the days when the cultural loopiness was a belief in rampant alien abductions.
On November 9, a helicopter was flying over the Woolsey fire in California when it received notification of some folks who needed rescue. After a careful landing in a rough area *real* close to the fire, they picked up a few civilians… and their dogs. And from what I saw, there was zero hesitation on the part of the chopper crew about picking up those pets, even though one was a large mastiff who was clearly dubious of the whole “get on the helicopter” idea.
Bravo, sirs. I can’t imagine ditching my critters in an evacuation. During Hurricane Katrina there were tales of people who were forced to abandoned cats and dogs because the people driving the boats wouldn’t carrying them. Now… for something like a horse… yeah, there are weight limits. But if I was being rescued from a flood or a fire, I’d happily let some strangers smelly panicky dog sit on my lap.
Parking an expensive house on top of a hill sounds great until you realize you live in fire country, the hillside is loaded with very flammable brush, it’s been a drought for years and fires go *uphill*. I wonder how many of these folks, when they rebuild, will build out of concrete and adobe with large elevated water tanks to hose down the house at the last minute.
This seems to be an incredibly short-sighted point of view for someone who buries himself in the mantle of Science. I wonder if his recent delvings into social justice have NPC-ified him?
“This whole idea of terraforming Mars, as respectful as I can be, are you guys high? … We can’t even take care of this planet where we live, and we’re perfectly suited for it, let alone another planet. … Nobody’s gonna go settle on Mars to raise a family and have generations of Martians … It’s not reasonable because it’s so cold. And there is hardly any water. There’s absolutely no food, and the big thing, I just remind these guys, there’s nothing to breathe.”
Meh. Translation: “It’s hard so nobody will want to do it.”
Welcome to cultural enrichment, now endorsed by the judiciary!
A Detroit judge has dropped nearly all the charges against a Michigan doctor accused of performing female genital mutilation on at least nine underage girls, according to court documents.
Fan. Bloody. Tastic.
The article doesn’t give the whole decision, but the bits it quotes seem… lame.
On the one hand, SpaceX has announced the date for their first planned unmanned launch of their manned Dragon spacecraft to the ISS: January 7, less than two months from now. If that works… then SpaceX will be on track to restore Americas ability to launch our own astronauts back into space. Yay! On the other hand…
In short, NASA has apparently flipped out after seeing Elon Musk,away from work, away from SpaceX property, and on his own time, smoke some weed and drink some booze. So they’re conducting safety reviews of both SpaceX and Boeing, focusing on their “workplace safety cultures.”
In that same spirit, I hope they run a similar review of themselves. I’ve heard tell that astronauts sometimes like to get tore up on their free time.
I suspect that a *lot* of this is n effort by the entrenched Old School to get into spaceX to get them to change their culture to be more Old School.
This is a fun and entertaining read:
In short: in the early 2000’s the government sought to combat global warming and carbon emissions. Not, say, by doing something as monumentally sensible as building a crop of new breeder reactors, but instead by focusing on biodeisel and ethanol: the turning of food into fuel. In the midwest the corn farmers loved this, as now there was a whole new market for their crops since corn could be turned into ethanol; at the same time, poor people who kinda relied on cheap corn for, you know, eating, were just SOL because the price of corn went up. But corn was not the best source of bio-fuel. That would be oil-palm trees, whose fruit produce an oil that’s just great for that sort of thing. Problem: oil palms don’t exactly grow like champs in the US. Solution: find a place where they do, like Borneo, then chop down, clear cut and burn off the existing forest to plant crops of oil palms. Result:
The tropical rain forests of Indonesia, and in particular the peatland regions of Borneo, have large amounts of carbon trapped within their trees and soil. Slashing and burning the existing forests to make way for oil-palm cultivation had a perverse effect: It released more carbon. A lot more carbon. NASA researchers say the accelerated destruction of Borneo’s forests contributed to the largest single-year global increase in carbon emissions in two millenniums, an explosion that transformed Indonesia into the world’s fourth-largest source of such emissions. Instead of creating a clever technocratic fix to reduce American’s carbon footprint, lawmakers had lit the fuse on a powerful carbon bomb that, as the forests were cleared and burned, produced more carbon than the entire continent of Europe.
BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
So not only did this dump boatloads of CO2 into the atmosphere, it trashed the local ecosystem and has led to the usual dystopias of corruption and crackdowns. The palm-oil based fuels are now mandated by law within Indonesia.
Tell me again why we’re better off not building latest-gen nuclear power plants?
Last I heard, nobody seems to know where on Earth this occurred.
Clearly the shelving in the warehouse was either not well built or was hilariously overloaded. If someone wasn;t killed or seriously injured I’d be shocked.
And so long as I’m posting stuff that has already been blasted all around the interwebs for a couple days, there’s this video of the cat “Wilfred” (who really does look like that) that has been hilariously (and NSFWedly) overdubbed by Michael Rapaport.
Blink, mother…
A while back a 1987 press image was posted on ebay showing a McDonnell-Douglas full scale mockup of a Neutral Particle Beam weapon system. This would have been an experimental system, not an operational weapon; details on full-scale NPB weapons are *very* hard to come by, but the smallest NPB weapon system that I’ve seen anything remotely resembling hard data on would have required a non-trivial number of Shuttle-derived heavy lift launch vehicles to put into orbit a piece at a time. Some references – extremely vague ones – have even made mention of dimensions for the full-scale weapons being measured in kilometers.
The purpose of this system would likely have been to simply show that a neutral particle beam could be reliably generated and directed at an orbiting target some decent distance away. While it would likely be very unhealthy to be int he way of such a beam, it’s weapons potential would doubtless have been low… thus the need for vastly scaled-up operational versions.
The design of the BFR has apparently undergone yet another radical change, as-yet undefined. Additionally, the first stage is now called the “Super Heavy” and the upper stage is the “Starship” because Musk claims future versions will indeed go beyond the solar system. Ummm.
On one hand, it’s great that SpaceX is fast on its feet, changing the design as much as needed, as needed. It is of course perfectly normal while devleoping major new designs for there to be a long protracted period of constant design changes, sometimes including radical changes in direction. Take, for example, the long and winding paths Boeing took to the develop the B-52 and B-59 bombers.
On the other hand, it often seems as though these changes of course are driven by personal whim, and every time there’s a redirection there are major delays. This will make even *pretending* to keep to the schedule SpaceX has laid out problematic at best. The upper stage – now “Starship” – is supposed to make test hops in 2019. Hard to do if they’re still designing the thing.
But… SpaceX isn’t NASA. They just might be able to perform.
This article. This one. Right here.
The article proceeds from a very clear bias: “what is wrong with straight men such that they overwhelmingly reject astrology,” instead of “what is wrong with people who actually buy into this obvious BS.”
If you’re a straight man with a lot of female friends, you probably tolerate astrology (“It’s gotten to the point where I’m sharing Virgo memes in the group chat like ‘lol, me’, but I still don’t like it,” says Adam from Manchester). And if you don’t, you likely think it’s a load of shit (“If you try to bring up that shit with me, I’ll think you’re a mindless bimbo,” Tom, 25, London). There are obviously women and LGBTQ people who feel similarly, but why is this attitude so prevalent among straight men in particular? Is it because astrology is generally seen as a “women’s” interest?
What?
WHAT?
No. The reason why men reject astrology isn’t because it’s a “womans interest,” but because it’s BULLCRAP. It is long-debunked fact-free nonsense, based on essentially nothing but wishful thinking. I don’t care if astrology is girlie, or if homeopathy is for black folks, or faith healing for religious fundamentalists or ghost hunting is for transsexuals. The fact that these things are for “people other than me” isn’t what makes them not for me, but the fact that they are NONSENSE.
There are some good lines in the story from guys who were interviewed about their astrology-crazy exes. But there is also a line in there that, if I were a woman, I would find *terribly* insulting:
“Astrology is a natural, intuitive way of telling time, and women are more in tune with nature,” Randon continues. “Men, however, are builders who work with the material world. Unless you give a straight man evidence of astrology being real, they’re less likely to find it remotely interesting.”
Translation: women are friggen’ morons incapable of rational thought, doomed to glom onto any passing rubbish that claims to be”natural.”
And I’d love to see how someone uses astrology to tell time. Me, I look at a clock. They’re cheap, reliable and everywhere. But apparently this person thinks that astrological charts and chicken bones and burning incense and gazing into crystals will help you determine when it’s time to clock out and go home.
Entirely unsurprisingly, the author of the piece comes to the conclusion that since this is a patriarchy and how obviously cis-het men live live of ease and comfort they do not need to take solace in the easy answers of superstition. Ask any cis-het guy who has had to make decisions about which bills to pay that month and which to put off and hope don’t go into collections just how “patriachal” society is and just how nice it would be to have easy answers, how great it would be to be able to lay the blame for your problems on the stars, the planets, society, the patriarchy… anybody but yourself. But there are a whole lot of people – not just men, not just straight – who are more interested in reality than comforting but ultimately destructive delusions.
So… why *do* straight men hate astrology so much? Because *somebody* in this society has to face reality.
