Farther away than anyone has gone before.
The Orion spacecraft is now in the lunar sphere of influence, meaning the moon’s gravity has more pull on the vehicle than the Earth. At 1:57 p.m. ET, the crew surpassed the record for the farthest distance traveled from Earth by humans, which was set by the Apollo 13 mission at 248,655 statute miles from Earth. At 2:45 p.m., the crew will begin making observations of the surface of the moon during the flyby.
Pretty good. Fly on!
Holly Dunsworth is doing a page-by-page reading of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. She has more stamina than I do.
When that book came out, it got a lot of praise, so I picked a copy off the shelf at the bookstore and started browsing through it. I did not buy it, because I could see, just from skimming the first chapter that it was shallow trash written by someone with only a superficial knowledge of the subject. How did people fall for this? It was just another example of the enshittification of everything, in this case of evolutionary science.
She doesn’t hate the book, though. She’s just correcting all the petty and annoying mistakes in a book that, so far, is sort of generally true. That’s a useful service.
Personally, I couldn’t bear reading the book, but it’s worth reading the Dunsworth commentaries.
This past weekend, I was trained in the movie business. Our local theater is run as a co-op, I’m a member of the board, and I bravely volunteered to assist in occasionally assisting in running the theater. This meant going in to operate the projector and help with the concessions. Easy, right? Push a few buttons, relieve some of our helpful volunteers, no sweat.
Except it turns out to be a non-trivial exercise. The theater is an old building that has been clumsily revamped to handle a modern movie projection system. The first step is running around to various closets and hidey-holes to flip circuit breakers on, power up various computers and devices, gather up a pair of cash boxes and count money and deliver them to the ticket booth and concessions, and turn on the two projectors, and wait. These are run by old computers that take ages to start up and feature antique Windows software to run everything.
The projector software really does everything for you. It shows all the ads and movies on a tight schedule, and once it’s running you can just ignore the projection until the movie is done. That sounds great, but it’s more like the autopilot on a private plane. It does the job it’s designed to do, but before you can push the button to switch on the autopilot, you still have to do all the pre-flight checks and turn on the engine and get the plane down the runway and into the air. It’s much more complicated than I imagined.
So I’ve gone through the procedure once — it wasn’t enough. I’m going to have to do more run throughs under supervision before I can fly solo.
I didn’t have a chance to watch the movies. I was able to catch the end of The Bride, which was confusing and loud. The star of the weekend was Super Mario Galaxy, which was packing the house — we had a record attendance. I did learn the most of the money made is from concessions, which I’ll have to learn how to do next. This is the first time in my entire life that I’ve worked in retail, and I’m mystified by it.
But the glamor!
I thought Xians were supposed to celebrate with colored eggs and church services and a nice family dinner. I was wrong. They celebrate it with threats of bombings and cursing and mocking religions. Good to know.
Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J.
TRUMP
I think I’ll pass on the whole fuckin’ holiday.
I put together a rambling video about the final project in my genetics class, and about the responsibility of modern geneticists to deal with the terrible bad ideas of the past — eugenics. I give you a few examples of bad genetics, one relatively benign, and another actively evil (as you might guess, the evil example is Donald Trump.)
The gentler example is Fairfax Cryobank, which provides a good, useful, and even necessary service, sperm storage. I’ve visited their St Cloud branch, not as a client, but leading a field trip for a class on modern reproductive technologies, and they seem like good people with a lot of dewars. You can browse their catalog of sperm donors, and it’s a real trip. It’s more like reading the submissions to a dating site…a dating site where you’ll never meet the person whose profile you’re reading, but if you’re lucky and spend a few thousand dollars, you might get a frozen vial of sperm in the mail.
Here, for example, is one profile among many.
Donor 7587 is an easy going individual that takes pride in his fitness and his heritage. He can be a reserved man but once he feels comfortable with someone, you can see how funny, charming, and talkative he is. He has maintained an active lifestyle since he was a child by pursuing sports like soccer, tennis, and snowboarding. He loves to travel and has especially fond memories of a trip to Spain when he was little. Donor 7587 carries himself with quiet confidence. His dark, thick hair is always impeccably styled, each strand seemingly in place with effortless precision, giving him a polished, put-together look at all times. His fair skin provides a striking contrast to his bold features, especially his full, well-shaped lips that add a subtle softness to his overall appearance.
They’ve all got cute little baby pictures, since you won’t meet the adult. This is all for the benefit of clients, who will pick a vial of sperm based on vibes, but almost everything in that description is not heritable. You won’t get a vial filled with “funny, charming, and talkative,” because those are things that family, friends, and experience will generate. My objection is that it perpetuates the myth of simple inheritance of traits for everything, and misleads the client. But all of reproduction is a misleading game, as far as the traits of your child are concerned.
I would recommend adding a more appropriate button to the website: a “RANDOM CHOICE” button. Click it, they’ll send your doctor a completely random arbitrary vial from their vast collection. You’ll be surprised! But no more surprised than if you carefully choose the father of your child based entirely on a profile on a website.
Trump has proposed a 2027 budget. Here’s the bottom line.
The budget would increase funding for presidential priorities – such as the military, which would receive US $1.5 trillion, a 44% increase – while reining in spending on many domestic programmes.
A few details:
If you thought last year’s science budget was bad, this year’s is the annihilation of American science. If you’re celebrating the accomplishment of the Artemis 2
NASA faces a 23% cut to its total budget and a 47% drop in funding for its science division. More than 40 projects would be terminated. “It’s an extinction-level event for science,” says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a non-profit organization in Pasadena, California, that advocates for space exploration. “It would undermine and prevent NASA from being the world leader in space exploration.” NASA declined to comment on Dreier’s statement.
It’s not just NASA!
The proposal would eliminate funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. It would also shutter three of the NIH’s 27 institutes and centres – those focusing on minority health and disparities, international research and alternative medicine.
The worst, to me, is cutting the NSF budget to less than half. That’s what funds most of the basic science in biology (biomedicine is a little different, that’s NIH, which has also been cut.)
And what, pray tell, are the president’s priorities? He’s going to tell us, while also addressing Russell Vought, the Project 2025 guy.
Not daycare, not Medicare, not Medicaid, none of the “little things”, which includes science — we can’t afford anything but war. We’re too busy paying for wars.
We have one little glimmer of hope. The president does not have the power to set the budget — everything he has said is a “recommendation”. Congress sets the budget. This will be negotiated next fall, starting in October, at a time when many congresspeople are thinking about the 2027 elections, and we have to put the fear of the electorate in their minds, starting now. Trump wants to tax people more and cut essential services to fund more war, and I don’t think that’s a winning election message. Throw them out!
Instead…
It’s April. Come on.
I was enthused about the Artemis 2 lunar flyby mission. I was. My interest is cooling fast, though, and I fear the worst for NASA’s weekend.
I was turned off by this article about Victor Glover, one of the Artemis 2 astronauts. It was published in the Daily Citizen, which in case you didn’t know, is a rag produced by Focus on the Family…right away you know, it’s going to be all about evangelical Christianity (I don’t recommend that you read further in that publication, a lot of it is about trans-hatred.)
It starts off OK.
After spending six months aboard the ISS, he returned to Earth and praised NASA for allowing him to take communion each week.
“I was able to worship in space,” he said, adding, “[NASA] supported me and my family’s desire to continue to worship and to continue our faith walk even while I was off the planet. That was really important to me.”
You don’t need to praise NASA for “allowing” him to practice his religion. That’s the default. Christians like to believe they are prosecuted for their faith, which sometimes means they pretend to be surprised that they get to pray, when no one, not even atheists like me, are saying that they shouldn’t be allowed to do the innocuous practices of their religion. Go ahead, pray! Take communion! Sing hymns! We aren’t going to complain unless you force your superstitions on us.
If an astronaut wants to wear their lucky socks or carry a rabbit’s foot on board, I can’t imagine NASA complaining. Matters of personal belief are not issues that should be disallowed, although we should also be free to regard rabbit’s feet and communion wafers as silly.
Glover goes on to brag about another silly practice, prayer.
My career is fed by my faith, and you know, anytime I do something that’s pretty risky, I pray — before I fly, every time I fly. Definitely when you go sit on top of a rocket ship.
I have to shrug — yeah, go ahead and pray, just leave me out of it. I’m not impressed with sitting on top of a rocket ship, either. I think you owe more to the engineers who designed and built the machine, than to an imaginary being who played no role in its construction, and isn’t going to help you if something goes wrong.
But he just can’t shut up and has to blurt out a stupid saying.
“In the military, there’s a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. There aren’t any on top of rockets, either.”
Well, fuck you too, Victor Glover. There are and have been atheists in foxholes, and on top of rockets, too — but in our Christian country, their existence is ignored, if not belittled. Courage is not an exclusive property of soldiers and astronauts, and many of us feel no need for the crutch of superstition.
Every human being is mortal, and is guaranteed to experience events in their life that carry the threat of their imminent demise, without having to be on top of a rocket. I’d be more scared of riding in an automobile, since more people are going to have traumatic, terrifying events in one of those. Some may pray, some may call out to God, Allah, or their mother, but others will feel helpless acceptance or struggle to escape their situation without the magic mumbo-jumbo. I’ve had a few near-death experiences (I anticipate more in the distant (I hope) future as I get older, and there will ultimately be one that will require dropping the “near-“) but never have I given any thought to a divine being. It’s just not part of the way my mind works.
I’m not going to deny Victor Glover’s mind the ability to flit to thoughts of supernatural salvation when he’s frightened, and he shouldn’t be telling us how other people’s minds will work. Let us instead consider a counter-example, the astronaut John Young, who had an exceptionally accomplished career that makes Victor Glover look like a rookie.
John W. Young, now retired, had the longest career as an astronaut. He’s the only person to have been commander of four classes of spacecraft. He was part of the first two-man space mission. He’s the first person to have orbited the Moon alone. One of three people to have flown to the Moon twice. The list goes on and on. Oh, he’s also one of the 12 people in human history to ever walk on the Moon.
Young was asked about God, and he gave the kind of answer I would give, too.
Interviewer: Did you discovered God up there?
Young: No. I don’t think so.
Interviewer: No sense of awe? Wonder?
Young: No.
Interviewer: Why not?
Young: Because I think that the way things are in space are the way they are and I think that’s a good thing. I think that if people have to go into space to discover God, they have some other kind of problem.
According to Victor Glover, John Young shouldn’t have gone to the Moon. I repeat, fuck you, Victor Glover.
The writer for the Daily Citizen went further and opined even more idiotically.
Indeed, modern science increasingly supports Christian theism. Scientists have discovered that our universe is fine-tuned to support life – and many creatures within it appear intelligently designed. There is also increasing evidence that our universe began at a finite point in the past – raising the question of what – or Who – caused the universe to come into being.
No. Science does not support theism, Christian or otherwise. The fine tuning argument is bullshit — why presuppose “tuning” at all, the universe is what it is, and what life exists within it is by necessity compatible with its physical nature. We do not appear “intelligently designed,” we are constructs of chance and a few billion years of natural selection. Our universe is the product of the expansion of a singularity and we don’t know enough about the properties of that event to say anything about causation, or whether the universe is finite, so don’t bother pretending that science is propping up your creation myth.
Focus on the Family has no control over NASA, but I am concerned about the propaganda NASA will put out this weekend. It’s Easter weekend. They’re sending a ship on a flyby of the Moon. I remember in 1968, NASA sent another manned mission on a flyby of the Moon over Christmas, and they broadcast a reading of the book of Genesis. Having to watch that was one of the nails in the coffin of my religious upbringing, a gross disappointment that radicalized me and made Christianity look even more ridiculous.
Right now, the USA is an embarrassment to the world for a variety of reasons. NASA won’t be helping if they make a goofy-ass evangelical Christian the centerpiece of a major scientific mission, even if only for a day. I’m cringing at the thought that an astronaut is going to preach at us about a resurrection and an empty tomb on Sunday.
I won’t be listening. Victor Glover is reinforcing the spam-in-a-can stereotype, and will further diminish American prestige, what little of it is left. But at least when he lands he can announce that he’s going to Answers in Genesis! They love dumb-ass astronauts there.
Pam Bondi has been fired. No one in that cabinet can rest easy!
Whoever replaces her will be just as bad, or worse, unfortunately.
