@bryan@mekkaokereke I have encountered a few people expressing nonsense like that since I moved back to Minnesota.
A group from the suburbs who wanted to pretend "Minneapolis burned to the ground" as a pretext for "support the cops" were particularly outrageous.
They would apparently rather deny the landscape in front of them than acknowledge ongoing racist violence by MPD (and by Saint Paul PD and other departments).
This is about an hour away from my farm, so this'll be a fun conversation, and yet another great opportunity to tell a lot of people about what a huge problem we have with unregulated commercialization of orbit. (Also I just redid my slides for my public talk next week, this is going in!)
Perhaps also @sarahtaber , for the potential North Carolina connection. If this was spacecraft debris, there's farmland nearby that should be checked for more.
@amyedge@sundogplanets@firefly@ai6yr@sarahtaber This was not a targeted re-entry: SpaceX just let the Crew Dragon trunk section fall out of the sky somewhere between Mississippi and Pennsylvania.
I note that the predicted ground track happened to pass very close to the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia - although the spacecraft did not get that far.
(The prediction was over the line in Tennessee, but Asheville is close enough to be within the cross-track uncertainty).
"spacewashing" is things like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and SpaceX promoting their roles in supplying NASA missions while they make huge amounts of money out of weapons contracts.
e.g. Lockheed Martin alone makes several times NASA's entire budget from its DoD contracts.
I want to read this book: A Darwinian Survival Guide. Sounds like a realistic view of what we need to do now. You can read an interview with one author, the biologist Daniel Brooks. A quote:
...
Daniel Brooks: What can we begin doing now that will increase the chances that those elements of technologically-dependent humanity will survive a general collapse, if that happens as a result of our unwillingness to begin to do anything effective with respect to climate change and human existence?
Peter Watts: So to be clear, you’re not talking about forestalling the collapse —
Daniel Brooks: No.
Peter Watts: — you’re talking about passing through that bottleneck and coming out the other side with some semblance of what we value intact.
Daniel Brooks: Yeah, that’s right. It is conceivable that if all of humanity suddenly decided to change its behavior, right now, we would emerge after 2050 with most everything intact, and we would be “OK.” We don’t think that’s realistic. It is a possibility, but we don’t think that’s a realistic possibility. We think that, in fact, most of humanity is committed to business as usual, and that’s what we’re really talking about: What can we begin doing now to try to shorten the period of time after the collapse, before we “recover”? In other words — and this is in analogy with Asimov’s Foundation trilogy — if we do nothing, there’s going to be a collapse and it’ll take 30,000 years for the galaxy to recover. But if we start doing things now, then it maybe only takes 1,000 years to recover. So using that analogy, what can some human beings start to do now that would shorten the period of time necessary to recover?
@evilotto@ai6yr I submit that going "no true Christian" or pointing out the contradictions between Samuel Alito's claimed beliefs and his actions is not that helpful.
Authoritarians do not care about hypocrisy.
Similarly; there is a contingent of American atheists who are willing to work with Christian nationalists because they value being able to engage in racist, sexist & otherwise bigoted forms of social control than they value having a secular government.
#PPOD: This stunning photo was taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) onboard the ESA's Mars Express spacecraft. Phobos is the larger and closer of Mars's two moons, the other being Deimos. One hypothesis of their origin involves the possible capture of primitive asteroids. Unfortunately, Phobos is being pulled apart and closer by Mars's tidal forces and gravity. Credit: ESA/DLR/FUBerlin/ @andrealuck CC BY (https://www.flickr.com/photos/192271236@N03/53635851891/)
#Random movie review: Star Wars Rogue One: how to film a movie and ensure you don't accidentally create a new star or any uppity actor/actress demands, by making sure to kill every single one of them them all off by the end of the movie. (Update: apparently they re-used the characters in a prequel TV series called Andor, LOL... haven't seen that many characters slaughtered in a movie ever)
Smelting #Steel Without Fossil Fuels: #Solar Power Shatters the 1,000°C Barrier for Industrial Heating
"Swiss researchers have developed a solar energy method using synthetic quartz to achieve temperatures above 1,000°C for industrial processes, potentially replacing fossil fuels in the production of materials like steel and cement."
@CelloMomOnCars@ai6yr It is not obvious to me that this solar thermal furnace is either useful or necessary for decarbonizing steel production.
A large fraction of steel smelting is already done in electric arc furnaces; which can be powered by any non-fossil-fuel generator, albeit at potentially lower efficiency?