Speaking of, the Hubble Space Telescope sent its first image back to Earth #OTD in 1990.
Folks knew right away that something was wrong with the optics, but the problem was eventually corrected.
Ground Image: E. Persson (Las Campanas Observatory, Chile)/Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington
Hubble Image: NASA, ESA, and STScI https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/110378772317401238
@mcnees I knew one of the engineers at Kodak whose group built the backup mirror. He's still smug that their mirror didn't have this problem (I still don't understand how it was missed in the prep work, as it's not like they couldn't swap it out).
@mcnees Benjamin Snavely (now deceased) was the one who told me about it. You used to be able to see the spare mirror at the Air & Space museum. The Kodak group were a tad annoyed it wasn't their's going up.
This is pointless: Scotland is already self-sufficient on renewables. What we need is a new grid interconnect between Scotland and England so we can export our surplus energy to the south!
It's all about the lobbyists, of course:
"Its ambitions for up to a quarter of all electricity to come from nuclear power by 2050 are being led by government-backed body Great British Nuclear." (Who?)
@cstross although Scottish & Southern Electricity, which I bought shares in 20+ years ago because nearly all their power was generated by renewables, built a lot of natural gas power stations in recent years (a huge mistake but on brand for the market unfortunately).
Would you like to install our new feature 'help me write' in your browser? It's a text-generating spell made from the ground-up bones and wrung-out hearts of underpaid writers, sprinkled with algorithms torn from the livers of overpaid AI engineers whose ethics team colleagues were all fired for revealing how the spell was cast. DO YOU WANT TO INSTALL
@annaleen I was in a meeting of society leadership earlier today and one of them had surveyed their staff (anonymously as they wanted the truth) and found the majority were already using AI, mostly ChatGPT. Without checking with the IT dept.
Harvard's president will be ousted for all the below reasons:
• an organized right-wing bad-faith effort to find any thing that sticks
• mainstream media can't identify bad-faith
• she’s a Black woman in a key role and vulnerable because of pressure by wealthy white male alumni already angry about her reaching the highest position at Harvard
• a lack of citation rigor in a tiny percentage of her work that nevertheless violates policies, not having been found and corrected contemporaneously
@glennf I'm expecting it to be listed on the NYTimes, "look what we achieved in 2024" lists to show the value of your subscription at the end of the year, without any irony.
The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin just said (on Threads) that last night's results show that 90% of political reporting is garbage.
That's because 90% of "coverage" is speculation and opinion. An email from the NYT "The Tilt" assured me that it was a good night for Democrats but that doesn't mean anything for 2024.
Rubbish.
Elections tell us how voters feel. Polls do not and pundits do not.
@Teri_Kanefield Someone yesterday said if there was good news for the democrats, somehow the NYTimes would play it as a bad night for Biden. They don't disappoint.
@taylorlorenz you’ve got to hand it to the CEO though, destroyed Discovery’s philosophy, switch to cheap crap (and closed their Silver Spring HQ which was an incubator for documentaries in the region because he didn’t want to leave NY), which damaged the brand, and now he’s successfully doing it to Warner & HBO now he’s the top dog. I canceled our subscription when they merged HBO Max with discovery and filled it with reality shows. Couldn’t see the point of keeping it.
I can’t believe I have to say this, but MAGA Mike Johnson should listen to Mitch McConnell. McConnell believes, correctly, that aid to our allies is intertwined, and that we must provide Ukraine aid at the same time as Israel. We cannot allow Russia to win, or it will bring ruination and war far beyond Ukraine. Support Ukraine now. Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦
@georgetakei I wonder how quickly McConnell will cave to Johnson though? I mean his reputation is that of wanting to hold onto power at all costs, no matter the damage done to the country (see last 20 years but particularly the impeachment votes in 2021)
@odr_k4tana Scihub's goal (or claim) is to make information free. So is Open Access's. Except someone always have to pay the bills. I think it's too early to say whether OA is viable in the long term, as a lot of it depends on whether scientists will pay to publish.
@odr_k4tana society publishers already plough their profits back into the community. And there’s a lot of cost that is assumed free that isn’t free. Editors, software to run these systems, portico etc. A publisher is running a system designed to keep articles available for a century or more. Take a look at the UK. Mandated to GoldOA yet most use Green. Who is paying the cost? Note. I’m not saying you couldn’t make it work, just that it’s not as simple as commonly portrayed.
Two-thirds of Americans fear that political unrest could lead to violence in their country in the next year, the highest share among all Western countries surveyed, according to a global poll commissioned by Open Society Foundations. https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/focus/open-society-barometer
One of the things I found very frustrating about professional physics magazines 15-20 years ago (all my degrees are in physics) was that they were so po-faced about “proper” physics (only quantum mechanics and cosmology counted) and really looked down on anything messy in the real world. I made a physics career out of studying the mess. And then look at this, seaweed on the cover of Physics Today, because they’ve finally discovered how interesting messy things are. #ocean#science#physics
Physicist Rudolph Peierls was born #OTD in 1907. He contributed across the breadth of 20th century physics, from quantum field theory to nuclear physics to statistical mechanics.