I was out for a walk, and what did I see? Flocks of birds running away (OK, flying away, to be precise) from our little winter.
OK, I’m being a little unfair, #notallbirds. There are these little black-capped chickadees that hang around my house, and they’ll be here all winter. Those are #bravebirds. But geese? Big bullying cowards that hang around the parks pooping all over the place, and fleeing south at the first little cold snap.
The reason my photos suck is entirely because I don’t have access to exotic geography. Yeah, that’s it.
Those catastrophic hijinks atop the telescope, and the explosions, couldn’t have been good for the structure.
Seriously, and sadly, the Arecibo radio telescope has collapsed. It’s done.
A huge radio telescope in Puerto Rico that has played a key role in astronomical discoveries for more than half a century collapsed on Tuesday, officials said.
The telescope’s 900-ton receiver platform fell onto the reflector dish more than 400 feet below.
The US National Science Foundation had earlier announced that the Arecibo Observatory would be closed. An auxiliary cable snapped in August, causing a 100ft gash on the 1,000ft-wide (305m) reflector dish and damaged the receiver platform that hung above it. Then a main cable broke in early November.
Rather than blaming Sean Bean, though, I should note that this is another example of the decay of our scientific infrastructure on Donald Trump’s watch. You don’t he really cares about a radio telescope, or Puerto Rico, do you?
Tantalizing. I keep seeing news about the discovery of a massive cliff face in a remote part of central Colombia that is covered with ancient rock art. This would be really cool, except that I’m feeling suspicious and skeptical. But look at this image! I want it to be true.
There are a few reasons I’m dubious right now. I don’t doubt that the rock art is there, but I’m seeing claims that it’s between 20,000 (as reported in 2015) and 12,500 years old. What I’m not seeing is citations to the scientific literature. The recent surge in interest seems to be fueled by the upcoming release of a television program on UK Channel 4. For all I know, that could be equivalent to an announcement that it’s going to be on the History channel, which would tell me it’s garbage and hype. Does anyone know if there is a paper in an archaeology journal about it?
I just like the idea of seeing more art by witnesses to Giant Ground Sloths.
Lately, on my YouTube channel, I’ve been plagued with Peterson fanatics suddenly popping up on old videos and leaving weird, unfocused comments like “Strawman!” and “Fallacies!”, without bothering to tell me what I’ve strawmanned or what my fallacy was. But then, if you’re a Peterson cultist, you’ve probably already got serious logical deficits. So anyway, for this week’s Bad Science Sunday (it’s early, but calendars are merely a social construct anyway), I decided to infuriate them even more. It was fun.
As usual, I end with a plea to subscribe to my channel, or to sign up for my Patreon, but also with a request that everyone pray to Skaði, Goddess of Winter, because it’s almost the end of November and we have no snow on the ground, and it’s freaking me out.
It really makes you want to read the whole thing, doesn’t it?
Except, when you actually read the story, it’s not that interesting. The “rise from graves” is just masses of shallowly buried mink corpses bloating and bulging up to the surface. Unpleasant, yes, but these are not zombie mustelids stalking Denmark. The “mutated form” bit is also not a big deal — viruses are constantly mutating. The real concern isn’t even mentioned in that story. The mutation is just a useful marker, as near as I can tell, that allows them to trace patterns of infection, and 12 people have been found to be infected with COVID carrying the same marker. That suggests that we could have zoonotic transmission from mink to humans (or vice versa). Also, about a fifth of the Danish mink farms have the disease among their animals, which says it’s spreading fast among the captive mink, and now we’re seeing infections and death in mink farms in Utah and Wisconsin. It also seems the virus is deadly to mink.
The Utah Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory (UVDL) completed necropsies on several dead animals from the two mink farms after the mink operations reported unusually high mortality rates in their mink populations. The samples were tested at the Washington Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory at Washington State University. From there, the samples were sent to the National Veterinary Services Laboratories for final conformational testing. The affected mink farms have been completely quarantined to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2.
Denmark is going to kill 15 million mink to contain the virus. It sounds like a catastrophe for the ethical treatment of animals, but I would remind you that all 15 million were already doomed — they were raised to be slaughtered for their fur, so this is only accelerating their death…and depriving mink farmers of their profit. On the bright side, it may lead to the demise of a particularly brutal kind of animal abuse.
This new Netflix show is coming up in early December, and I’ll have to watch it.
They certainly splurged on the CGI budget for the trailer, so why did they have to go and ruin it with shots from that failure of the imagination, the old ‘alien autopsy’ hoax?
I did not enjoy making this video at all, not because of the content, because of all the copyright bullshit YouTube put me through. I use a few very short clips from the History Channel show, Ancient Aliens, specifically to criticize the stupidity therein, and I guess the History Channel is very protective of their idiocy, and the thing kept getting flagged. I finally said screw it, demonetize it, I’m not going to let that channel of lies and foolishness push me around.
So here it is, for what it’s worth. I hate the History Channel, alien pseudoscience, and Giorgio Tsoukalos even more now.
Do I include a sorta partial script of what I said, below the fold? Yes, I do.
Either that, or this deep space tracking station has been invaded by arachnoid aliens.
I choose to believe that the giant spiders taking over our space program are benevolent.
Well, good for Clallam County (if you have no idea where that is, it’s on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state. Port Angeles? Nirvana? Does that help?). They voted for Biden, and now have a 40 year winning streak in ‘predicting’ the outcome of presidential elections.
Clallam County is on quite the winning streak — one that no other county in the United States can claim.
According to the latest count on Monday from the Clallam County Auditor’s office, 50.43% of voters cast their ballot for former Vice President Joe Biden and 46.72% voted for President Donald Trump.
That means the county has picked the correct presidential winner in every race since 1980.
Going into this election cycle, Clallam County was just one of 19 counties nationwide to hold that voting record.
With just over 50% of the county’s votes going to Biden, it is now the only county in the country to have kept up such a winning streak.
The county residents don’t know how they are so good at this. I have an explanation, though: it’s chance.
40 years is just ten presidential elections. Because of the way our system works, it’s a binary choice, basically — so like a coin flip. The likelihood of calling 10 coin flips in a row is 1 in 1024. There are more than 1000 counties in the country, so I’d guess that the chance of one of them having a ten election streak is pretty good. Also the fact that it’s not really a 50:50 chance — one outcome proves to be slightly more likely after the fact — and that Clallam has a nice demographic mix, with the slightly urban Port Angeles plus all the conservative loggers and fishers, and it’s not surprising at all.
Then, of course, look what xkcd posted:
None of that will prevent Washington state journalists from descending on Clallam county in 2024.
