The vast majority of conservatives bitching about cancel culture are simply upset that there is now a social stigma and actual repercussions for saying the hateful shit they used to get away with.

My favorite part of Adams' rant is when he was like "I'm gonna back off from being helpful to Black America". LOL, I cannot fathom what Adams thinks he was previously doing that was "helpful". Maybe barely restraining himself from yelling the you-know-what-word whenever he had the courage to venture into an urban area and saw one single Black person? Is he... helping Black America through a newspaper comic strip about a white guy working a white collar job? Did he... not call the police when a wealthy Black couple showed up to a dinner party? I wanna know!

What's scary is that instead of admitting an objectively bigoted rant is over the line, conservatives have largely rallied around Adams. Including Elon Dumbfuck Musk. (p.s. I love that Hubski could smell Elon's shit from a mile away 5+ years ago)

edit: update, hahahhah, new favorite part of the rant, where he says "I'm so sick of seeing videos of Black Americans assaulting White people on social media". Dude, lol, he really doesn't realize that he's getting served that shit because he engages with it and subscribes to people putting out that type of content?!? This guy's such a fucking idiot, holy hellllllllll

edit 2:

Guys, it's not a big deal.

Sorry I left in a tizzy.

I'll try to finally make it to shitting all over the recent optimistic fusion news within another week or so.

Glad to be back though, but I'm still on twitter 😬

pointing a kaleidoscope at a turd

Had to try it.

Real hero: Wife.

I'm familiar with the statement, but there might be other benefits to not having a moronic narcissist psychopath in the white house which should convince you to vote against Trump. We'll solve the stated problem later. Vote.

Because America is the only country that matters in the world (HUGE fan of American Exceptionalism, myself), you've probably heard we just hit 1,000 infections. We're undoubtedly way behind in assessing and tracking the true number, despite a growth rate matching the rest of the non-China world closely (b ~ 1.2). Alotta this comment is for posterity, not Devac.

If we have identified 1k+ cases, and we have reportedly used perhaps, optimistically 8k testing kits to this day. Let's say there's a two-day test delay for specimen handling, testing, and reporting (again, pretty optimistic, I think). We might infer that somewhere around 1 in 5 people that get tested are testing positive, but this invests an unwise amount of faith into our testing and reporting system. Because, OHhh, that's right, we don't even fucking know for sure that the other 4 out of 5 aren't positive yet (per theAtlantic.com article above), or if the tests even always work. We can't infer a damn thing because of the botched response, which obviously needed to include accurate statistical reporting.

You want good statistics? The feds and states should've talked about how they would coordinate testing and coordination in like January. We knew this was more contagious than SARS or Ebola because of China's (relatively) swift and massive response, and then their transparency. We talk shit about China, and maybe for good reason sometimes (sorry), but they deferred to scientists, and now, the source country of the outbreak is on track to have less cases than the U.S. within a month or two. Thank goodness covid-19 didn't originate here in the U.S. under Trump, the rest of the entire world would be 10x more clueless about it. Not-America saved our asses by generating the statistics we need. This time, it's not just another instance of U.S. disregard of science on the world's stage, our naive response negatively impacts health at a global scale. An international organization may investigate Trump and his genius squad for criminal conduct in their response to covid-19. Or, at least, one may try.

K, back to strict math. Let's play nice for almost a few contiguous paragraphs, and assume that U.S. measurements are going OK. Here they are:

I'mma fit an exponential function, f(x, A) = A*(b)^x, to data between Feb. 23 to now. I'm just using A=50, and x={0, 17}, and I get a b value somewhere between 1.19 and 1.2 that satisfies f(x=17) = 1,000. That actually agrees with what is currently being observed in the larger dataset of all the non-China's right now (source: the YouTube video in my post far above, by 3Blue1Brown).

Fitting an exponential to this larger dataset (which has muuuuuuch better statistics) over roughly the same time interval as before also gives me b ~ 1.2. Pretty cool, but not necessarily indicative of accurate measurements in the 'States. Using the covid-19 tracking map and basic knowledge of population sizes, a comparison of population percentage diagnosed with covid shows that the United States is shockingly low compared to e.g. Europe (don't use the circles to do this, use the raw numbers in the sidebar). Perhaps it came to the U.S. last, or some initial quarantine efforts were not in vain, but we cannot make any statements with a high confidence when only a very small subset of folks presenting with symptoms are being tested. For whatever reason. The cloud of uncertainty regarding wtf is going on inside the Trump administration doesn't help, and casts further doubt on the veracity of the numbers they offer (or don't).

Ok, angry me, again, sorry not sorry. This absolute shit job of almost zero covid-19 testing preparation means we will, FOR A LONG TIME, continue to have much worse statistics compared to almost every other developed country. We have missed an opportunity to respond intelligently to this. It frankly doesn't much matter how many little hotspots you quarantine if you're not tracking the spread of the virus through the population. That's like simply ignoring a flaming bag o' poo on your doorstep, but your porch is wooden, and your house burns down. Shoulda sprung for a fire extinguisher.

I have yet to see any documentation or explanation regarding why the Trump admin. refused testing kits offered to the U.S. from the WHO (probably not the band, in this instance):

But neither the CDC nor the coronavirus task force chaired by Vice President Mike Pence would say who made the decision to forgo the W[orld] H[ealth] O[rganization] test and instead begin a protracted process of producing an American test, one that got delayed by manufacturing problems, possible lab contamination and logistical delays.

Again, the theme: You need good science, president dipshit. Good science needs data. You've ensured that we won't get it in time to help choke this thing early, and compared to the rest of the developed world, we're fucked. You've endangered the entire world. Great job.

Prediction: The U.S. will lead the developed world in covid-19 cases within a month or two, surpassing China. Italy's condition is unfortunate, and a reminder that luck is always on the playing field during an epidemic.

I'll meet you halfway:

... not only is it going to be a lot less work to take our atmosphere from 400ppm to 250, we're already here.

Yepperz. Realistically, it will "cost" governments tens of trillions of dollars to solve the climate problem. Over the next ten to twenty years, it will become glaringly obvious that we have no choice.

When people are like, "HEY, send me to start terraforming Mars RIGHT NOW!", I wanna tell them, "OK, have fun! I'll be here. Maybe you'll get the bandwidth to email me before you die, but maybe not". I think NASA is probably realizing that any serious attempt to colonize Mars needs to be an international endeavor if it will ever have a chance of succeeding (/affording it). With a staunchly anti-globalist president, there's no good reason for NASA to broadcast that, because they also probably realize that they're gonna have to pull a Vatican and think on timescales of human generations from the get-go, so what's four or eight years? I've been trash talking a Mars shot since I got here. The public simply doesn't understand how many challenges there are to colonizing Mars, and unlike asteroid mining, there are essentially zero business incentives for sending people to Mars. That I can think of, at least.

SETI & Drake Equation paragraph

It's not hydrogen emission, it's emission generated when hydrogen bonds to hydroxide and makes water. Had to look it up, I was so confused, I thought "Why would SETI be looking at... Lyman-Alpha..?". I don't think targeting water is a terribly bad idea. Water has so many unique properties (yuge heat index, less dense in the solid phase than the liquid, relatively small temperature difference required for phase changes, should occur everywhere in the universe near a previous supernova that produced the Oxygen, etc.), and although it certainly might drastically narrow the types of "life", it seems like a decent start.

I think I've said this before, but I wonder if there isn't something encoded into quasar outbursts, like if advanced civilizations ever systematically arrange matter to fall into the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies. I doubt it's really possible to encode much on very short timescales, because the processes in the accretion disk and jets that create emissions are super turbulent and non-linear. Actually, we think the most common non-linear process energizing things there is probably magnetic reconnection (muh jerb), but anyway. The dots and dits could be days, weeks, months, or years-long, though, I guess. That'd be the best way to have an omni-directional signal, because you'd be modulating gamma-ray and relativistic particle fluxes, which are rare enough that your signal-to-noise ratio is muuuuuuch better than other wavelengths or lower energy particles, especially if it were coming from the center of your own galaxy. There are many many other considerations, though.

Didn't know that about Drake and the Navy. I still maintain that the galaxy might be teeming with life, and there's not really a reason for them to bother us. Apparently there are plenty of solar systems with rocky, watery planets. There might be only a relatively small span in a civilization's development when they broadcast radio waves up into space before switching to neutrino beams or whatever. Think of it like a spherical shell of radio waves, and however many years they broadcast for, that's how many light years thick it is, and the radius of the shell is obviously growing one light year per year. The strength of the signal inside the shell decays as a function of 1/r^2; quite quickly, as the radius expands outwards.

Give me the energy requirements for a tightbeam visual signal from, say, Alpha Centauri B. I wanna be able to read morse code at night.

Ho boy, here we go. Pinging Devac for peer review.

Like, with the naked eye? OK, you'll need an apparent magnitude of at least +6. Let's make it +4, because I don't want to voyage into the central Pacific Ocean to see this, I don't even wanna squint. We'll assume that the Alpha Centaurians (probably centaurs) have tuned their laser's beam divergence such that when it reaches us, the beam diameter is the size of Earth's diameter. And btw, they'll have to aim 4.3 years in advance, so (being nowhere near precise enough) 0.3 orbits ahead of wherever Earth is when they flip the switch. From the apparent magnitude wiki article, we'll just convert the m=0 flux for the "V"(= visible) band to m=+4 using Pogson's ratio, 2.512, raised to the (+4 - 0 =) 4th power: 2.512^4 = ~40. OK, so to have enough visible photon flux per unit area (we start with cm^2) for it to appear as an m+4 for everyone on Earth, we need 40 x 3.64E-20 (= ~1.5E-18) ergs/(s*cm^2*Hz). We need to get rid of the Hz. If we assume they're using a monochromatic beam smack dab in the middle of the visible light spectrum, say 550 nanometers (yellow) = lambda, and c = lambda*f (where c is the speed of light), so f = 3E8 (m/s)/5.5E-7 (m) = ~5E14 Hz. So 1.5E-18*5E14 = ~1E-3 ergs/(s*cm^2). 1 erg = 1E-7 Joule, so now we're at 1E-10 J/(s*cm^2) = 1E-10 W/cm^2. Sanity check before the final step: I guess this sounds kinda right. If cat toy laser pointers are around 1 mW (1E-3 W) and we're instructed to never shine them in peoples eyes (which are roughly a square centimeter), it makes sense that barely-discernible blinking lights in the sky should be around 10 million times less powerful. OK, best for last. Finally, we multiply by the cross-sectional area of the Earth... in square centimeters. Earth's radius is ~6000 km, = 6E8 cm, and pi*r^2 = ~1E18 cm^2. So those guys are rollin' with a 1E8 Watt laser. 100 million watts. Let's make it a "jiggawatt" (1E9 Watts) for funsies. According to gubbmint, you'd need about 400 windmills to power your laser. Only(?) 40 windmills for the 1E8 Watt laser. Problem is, you might want a lotta lasers. And the results for red and blue will be more or less similar, certainly well within an order of magnitude.

If they built a truly dispersionless laser (not quite possible, but play along), and knew exactly where your eyeball would be at all times 4.3 years in the future, they could just use something as powerful as the toy laser, and it'd still damage your eye. Hey, what're you up to just after January 28th of 2024? Asking for a friend.

31/m/tx, u?

I'm James. Working on finishing up my physics PhD. lil helped me with my grad school application letter! Apparently she did a great job, because it worked :).

Just got engaged about a week ago after an 8 year trial period with the best girl in the world. Looks like a courthouse, nuclear-family-only shindig, and then a backyards kegger for the 1 year anniversary or something. Pomp and circumstance ain't my thang.

Used some of my tax return to buy a Switch. flac, I'll be PM'ing you in a few days or weeks, depending on how long it takes me to get sick of BotW (could be months, I guess).

As for everyone else, if I'm in your neck of the woods sometime, I'll let you know, and maybe we can meet up. I just got back from Yosemite, and yeesh, it's gonna be tough to top that backdrop. Most beautiful place I've ever been. And before you ask, I managed to miss firefall, mostly because I was either snowboarding or watching PowerPoint presentations.

This week, I cheated. I asked my friend (let's call him Natthew, or "Natty", for short) to send me a pic, and he delivered:

(plz zoom)

Thanks, Natty!

I took ref's route and googled my way to success, just printed out a .pdf for two adult tickets. The Texas Theatre webpage is nothing short of terrible - there is still no mention of Welcome to Happiness.

I'll report back. Shoot, I might even try to rope my parents into this if someone who's seen it already can verify that it won't irritate a couple of Southern Baptists.

He's not attacking you, it's all good.

I actually appreciate you teasing out specifics from him, he can be vague sometimes. And yeah, it's really dense stuff. Evolutionary anthropologists will do that to you.

Cheer up, you're one of us! :)

167th in the country, here.

injects more heroin

This is somewhat of a regrettable confession, but I wore the same pair of jeans to work every day for TWO YEARS without ever washing them. It gradually became a social experiment.

No one ever said anything. The jeans never reeked of ass or piss, and indeed I also heard talk of lil's quoted text that claims bacterial saturation occurs within two weeks of continual wear. I don't know about you, but if I washed my jeans every two weeks, the style/wash of them would have been long gone many months ago.

I feel pretty unhygienic at times, but I look like I just bought a pair of new jeans.

P.S. If you try to sniff my ass at a Hubski meetup, I'll morph into a dog and do the same to you.

There's a John Oliver bit for that

It doesn't incapacitate anyone farther than maybe nausea and permanent hearing damage.

When you are permanently taking away something like a sensory ability, that is especially criminal. There is absolutely no reason that these devices should ever be used... anywhere. Other non-permanently damaging methods of riot and crowd control are just as effective. Utilizing LRAD is the result of someone's (really, multiple persons') hard-on(s) for harming other people.

It's about fucking time that we started having a national dialog about the out-of-control militarization of the U.S. police force. That it took such a series of unfortunate events to get peoples' wheels turning is pathetic.

ref, u boi crazy.