No cavalry … and no calvary either … is going to ride over the hilltop and save us. We can only keep healthy, keep learning and keep doing the best we can for each other. Yeah, it matters today. And it’s always today.

THANKS for alerting me to another source of XKCD madness!

All pets were at one time wildlife. Killing one to save it… wow.

It’s gross, fraudulent as three-card monte, and … as with many corporate tricksters … there needs to be a law with prison terms.

For Krogh, the source of the number, it was a quite reasonable estimate, which was about all that was possible at the time. And it was ‘wrong’ by less than an order of magnitude … compared to the newest estimate. AND an estimate of a truly unimportant number is as good as you can get (or need) in many cases. What’s the total length of all the ice cores drilled since Camp Century? And their total volume is?

I specially liked the part where he collected $50k by clueing the affected companies.

Sabine is a very competent physicist. That’s why her viewpoint - right or wrong - is well worth hearing. The fact that the Nobel went to a computer scientist instead says a lot about the state-of-the-art.

Sabine knows her shit. May she coax some physicists into getting back into experimenting… and away from Big Science funding.

I ran into a very old saying yesterday: A fish rots from the head down.

Quite the contrary! The idea is that today’s curricula and methods of instruction have changed a lot over two centuries. Here in the US, it is not uncommon for secondary arts teachers and programs to be dropped whenever schools are feeling a budget crunch. Now we see similar things going on in major universities.

In the high school I attended, and later in one that I taught in, the separate building for the sports program was as large as the rest of the school. I thought those were fairly clear statements of what the district’s priorities were. ‘Education’ is a very broad word that can mean many things in many places.

A musician friend of mine, when asked “Why are there no Mozarts or Beethovens any more?” replies “We went through your schools.”

As they always teach over at Electoral College.

Me too! (I can only wish I could hear the Carlin version.)

Here’s a picture of it while it’s still in the shop. https://inspenet.com/en/noticias/nasa-tests-solar-sail-in-solar-in-orbit/

Haven’t heard about the NASA design yet, but JAXA’s 2010 IKAROS used "Eighty blocks of LCD panels are embedded in the sail, whose reflectance can be adjusted for attitude contro ".

Thanks for reminding me of a great film I saw in theatres long ago… I was at a con once and heard Barry (spouse and I both liked ‘Enemy’) and bought his Workshop book … good to see he’s still kicking …

and thanks too for hooking me up with Feral Historian’s stuff (like his style) which I might never have found otherwise…

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Wow. I can’t believe it took me so long to learn about that. And no tour needed. Interesting, thanks!

For very long-time, high-probability safety, the surface of the Earth is constantly being re-shaped. Whole mountains can disappear in a few million years. Floods, earthquakes, ice, weather alone.

Svalbard’s a ‘seed vault’ only, there must be something for extinct animal species. Another question I thought of: if stored on the moon, who among the finders will know enough to even know that they’re looking at? let alone to make purposeful use of it?