Deme

Apologies, I’m not too well versed in the differences between imperial and US customary units. (I try my best to stay away from both)

*Imperial

Empiricism is a different thing entirely

I’m betting that we get a vast majority of the pictures after the splashdown. They aren’t even at the moon yet, so the most important pics of the trip are yet to be snapped.

That being said, I really really really like this one because it’s showing the moonlit nightside of the planet with auroras, airglow and zodiacal light in the background. A picture like that has never been taken before.

That would be airglow, a completely natural phenomenon, although a bit tricky to photograph from the ground.

Other than that, I fully agree with the rest of your comment

Oh damn, took me a moment to realize that first image is showing the night side of the planet. Much more interesting than what it seemed at first, with the moonlit planet, the aurora and the zodiacal light!

When an impact happens, the next one becomes much more likely with all that shrapnel flying around. If the biggest starlink layer becomes a minefield of shrapnel, passing it to reach the ISS becomes much more angerous. Same goes for any other launch, including GEO.

All these megaconstellation plans have big plans of scaling up exponentially, and that means the clock is constantly creepinc closer. At some point a strong enough solar flare could cause a long enough comms blackout.

But the main thing with the clock is that it also displays how often corrective maneuvers are needed. The more maneuvers are being made, the higher the chance of errors. I think that’s the real danger here. Starlink is scaling up massively and they have numerous competitors, including China. All it takes is a miscommunication and the snowball of kessler syndrome might start rolling.

Yes, space is big, but those objects are moving fast on intersecting paths. I’d recommend checking this out and also following @[email protected]

The global economical system with its built in assumption of infinite growth is on a collision course with the material realities of the world. So it will either change drastically, or collapse. The latter seems much more likely.

I think cracks will form and new, more local, decentralized and equitable frameworks will sprout from those cracks as people help each other, because the system can’t or wont help them.

English spelling sucks by being detached from pronounciation episode 978

It stopped being useful ever since they stopped using it just to visualize how quickly a nuke war could end things. Climate change is serious as shit, but it’s not going to lock in total devestation within the next two minutes. Same goes for many other slow-burn threats they try to cram in there. Many of them are already here, pretty much none have a discreet threshold to count towards.

True on both accounts

Musk isn’t even the founder of tesla though.

Good meme regardless.

Cycling to work. I happen to have a nice and scenic route largely within parks and nature, so starting to use it improved my life quite a lot. It’s a bit faster and more reliable than public transit, cheaper and a good exersice (30km there and back). And the scenery is way better than looking out of the window of a bus on an arterial highway.

Are long exposures bad as well? Almost every picture of the northern lights looks better in a camera than how they look to the naked eye, because cameras can perform better in low light with the right settings.

I used to be quite puritanical about not editing the pictures I take, but over time I realized that there’s no way to capture perfectly realistic photos, because there is no perfect baseline for that. Every sensation of sight is already subjective, because the brain is doing a lot of image processing and each brain and eyes are a bit different. Colours don’t exist outside the brain. Dark scenes aren’t actually desaturated, our retinas just suck at colour vision in low light.

Photography tries to emulate a very subjective impression of a scene. If the photographer makes tweaks to some settings of the RAW in order to make the final image closer to the impression they were trying to capture, then that’s quite fine in my opinion. Just the same as changing the settings of the camera beforehand. If they want to include multiple exposures with different settings, then that’s fine by me as well, because your eyes change aperture and focus each time they flick to a different part of the scene.

I already explained in my previous comment that there is no real paradox, only the appearance of one when tolerance is framed as a virtue rather than a contract.

Why don’t you tolerate fascists? What’s your reasoning for it?

Either you commit to a society that respects people as people regardless of their ethnicity, religion or sexual or gender identity (so long as they don’t limit the freedoms of others), or you don’t. I wouldn’t call that an arbitrary line. If your views cross that line, I will not tolerate them.

The local neonazis held a “book club” at a public library here once (a publicity stunt because they knew it would make a lot of people angry). One liberal writer decided to go there to participate and to talk to them. She announced this beforehand and an article was published in the biggest newspaper in the country. It must’ve come as quite a surprise to her and all the idiots cheering her on for her tolerance, when she changed no minds and only contributed to the publicity stunt while also lending some of her credibility to them. Tolerating their views only gives them more legitimacy as a part of the political discourse.

When I see neonazis marching on the street here, I go shout obscenities at them to make sure they as a group feel unwelcome. The last time that one of them came up to me asking if I had a problem, I tried to talk some sense into him and I think I succeeded at least to an extent. Because a one on one conversation detached from the wider context is the only possible avenue to do so, when the us vs. them tribalism is at least somewhat removed and people can actually see each other instead of just a member of the opposing tribe. No cameras or ulterior motives, no incentive to keep up appearances as the best little loyal member in our team. That’s how I think we should treat intolerance.

The so-called paradox dissolves away once you recognize tolerance as a social contract between parties, instead of some immutable principle.

They break the contract, so they’re no longer covered by it. Treat others as you would like to be treated. It’s not that complicated.

I’ll point out that the magnetic poles don’t correspond exactly to the geographical poles. The aurora comes much farther south in North America than it does over Eurasia, and in the south it’s skewed towards Australia and New Zeland. So “equatorial latitudes” may just mean equatorial latitudes in those areas.

But yeah, looks like quite strong activity

Reminded me of a quote from The Expanse:

My life has become a single, ongoing revelation that I haven’t been cynical enough.

• Chrisjen Avasarala, Babylons ashes by James S.A. Corey.