Keysh

That's not even remotely correct.

Just today I heard a talk about people looking at stellar motions in ultra faint dwarf galaxies, because standard dark-model theories predict they should have centrally cusped dark-matter density profiles -- and fuzzy dark-matter models predict different profiles, which they could potentially discriminate between.

Probably closer to 300 billion stars. (It's roughly the same size as the Milky Way, which is estimated to have ~ 100 to 400 billion stars.)

Nemo was indeed originally written as a former Polish rebel against Russian rule, but Verne's publisher objected on the grounds that this might offend Russians[1], and so the published version of Twenty Thousand Leagues had no mention of national origin or ethnicity for Nemo.

[1] Both because the Russian market was important for sales of French books -- and government censorship in Russia was a strong possibility -- and because the publisher supported France's ongoing negotiations with Russia for a potential alliance, and worried a book promoting anti-Russian themes might make the negotiations more difficult.

The main beaches for tourists in the Canary Islands (on Tenerife and Gran Canaria, at least) were built with sand imported from the Sahara. (There are black volcanic sand beaches there naturally, but those were thought to be unappealing to tourists — at least back in the 1960s, when the tourism industry was starting up.)

Yes, I did mean "chartjunk", but I agree with you ;-).

The "Global internet users" graphic near the bottom of the article is an impressively bad example of what Edward Tufte called "chatjunk". Not only is it visually pretty awful, it's really hard to tell where the data points are supposed to be. (The surface of the "piles o' desktop computers"? The top of the hominid heads? The neck of each hominid?) And I like how the vertical axis apparently starts at minus one billion users, suggesting that shortly prior to 2005, there was a point where there were negative one billion users.

Well, that happened with some European cities as a result of WW2.

I remember a celebration in the late 1980s for a retiring British architect/art historian, who reminisced about being an architecture student during the Blitz in London. While he and his pals sheltered underground during the bombing, they shared a (slightly shameful) excitement about the prospect of rebuilding London with "something new" after the war was over.

In contrast to some European cities, where the goal was to recreate as much of the pre-war architecture as possible, postwar London was, as I understand it, rebuilt with lots of new architecture. My impression is that most people think a lot of it was pretty terrible.

Are a few brown bears more dangerous to marmots than the many black bears that already live there?

Or you can call plt.clf() to clear the frame.

Harris et al. 2023, “Diverse African genomes reveal selection on ancient modern human introgressions in Neanderthals” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09609...

“… most Neanderthal homologous regions in sub-Saharan African populations originate from migration of AMH [anatomically modern human] populations from Africa to Eurasia ∼250 kya, and subsequent admixture with Neanderthals, resulting in ∼6% AMH ancestry in Neanderthals. These results indicate that there have been multiple migration events of AMHs out of Africa and that Neanderthal and AMH gene flow has been bi-directional.”

This is, admittedly, research published after Slimak’s book came out, and referring to an earlier time period.

> The syntax of python is also a bit verbose. Like, why do we need plt.show(), when I plot a figure obviously I want to plot it!

That is kind of annoying. Fortunately, it's easy to turn that off by activating "interactive mode", in which figures automatically appear when you use a plotting command. You can do this via "plt.ion()", or have it set automatically with

   interactive : True

in your .matplotlibrc file.

The preprint version of the main paper being discussed: https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2408.07745

The point is not "the fleetingness of life" per se, it's the question of what comes before and what comes after. Bede's implication is that the pagan religion of King Edwin had no explanation, whereas Christianity provided one ("... what came before or what follows after, we do not know. Therefore, if this new lore brings anything more certain and more wise, it is worthy of that that we follow it").

Kandahar is a city; Gandhara was a kingdom. (But, yes, there is a theory that the name ["Kandahar"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kandahar) derives from Gandhara, as opposed to deriving from "Alexander" -- though it seems generally agreed that there was a city -- [Alexandria of Arachosia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Arachosia) named after him built on that spot.)

The site is back up again...

A significant amount of carbon-14 was added to the atmosphere from nuclear weapons testing. Since it has a half-life of about 5,000 years, most of it is still around. (The rest of it comes from cosmic rays smashing into atmospheric nitrogen.)

Granted, that's an isotope of a well-known element, not one of the "extra elements tacked to the end of the periodic table". I can point out that [tiny traces of plutonium-244 have been found in the ocean seafloor](https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996499035/freshly-made-pluton...). That has a half-life of about 80 million years; it's probably the result of ejecta from a supernova washing over the Earth several million years ago.

Gandhara (not "Ghandara") is mentioned in the Behistun inscription of the Persian emperor Darius, from about two hundred years before Alexander, so it's clearly not "a corruption of Alexandria".

Nitpick: “This event happens” is not in the passive voice. “This event is triggered” is in the passive voice — and so is “this event is triggered by subsystem A”. (What you probably mean is “writing something vague or lacking agency”.)

I remember thinking, after watching Margin Call first and then The Big Short, that you could pretty much identify exactly where within The Big Short the (single-night) events of Margin Call would have taken place...

The (Nautilus) article is confusing in the way it conflates "megaherbivores" (herbivores weighing more than 1 [metric] ton) and "megafauna" (any animal, regardless of what it eats, weighing more than 45 kg[1]).

Also: "Giant ground sloths, musk oxen, and short-faced kangaroos: All have gone the way of the dodo" -- A) Of those three animals, only the giant ground sloth was big enough to qualify as a megaherbivore; and B) musk oxen are very much not extinct!

[1] Which I assume is a translation of an older definition using 100 lb as the lower limit.

Pull quotes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull_quote) have been used in magazines for decades; they’re not exactly new.

Blue giants live only a few million years to a few tens of millions of years.

If they weren’t gravitationally bound, they would have left the Milky Way billions of years ago.

Also, “in the halo” doesn’t necessarily mean “far from the center of the galaxy”; it means “not orbiting in the disk”.[1] Some of these stars are closer to the galactic center than the Sun.

[1] And further away from the center of the galaxy than the bulge — but the bulge is much smaller than the orbit of the Sun.

Yes, but that’s not what they’re trying to do.

Non-paywalled article about the concept, including renderings of the hexacopter design:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-next-mars-helicopter

This is a serious study of actual "raw data" that directly contradicts Graeber:

"Despite generating clear testable hypotheses, this [Graeber's] theory is not based on robust empirical research. We, therefore, use representative data from the EU to test five of its core hypotheses. Although we find that the perception of doing useless work is strongly associated with poor wellbeing, our findings contradict the main propositions of Graeber’s theory. The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low and declining and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions."

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...

This was a presentation at a conference; there’s probably no paper to read (yet, anyway).

Individual atoms or ions can be excited to "meta-stable" states, from which they can decay via emission of forbidden light, by other photons (usually X-ray or UV) or by energetic collisions with other particles.

It has nothing to do with black holes, except that accretion disks around black holes can, due to their high temperature, produce the necessary energetic photons. (But so can massive stars, for example.) The rotational energy of the black hole is not involved.

It actually says it was written by the European Space Agency, for what that’s worth.

Speaking as an astronomer: what an oddly pointless (even misleading) press release.

Non-expert readers could be forgiven for reading that and thinking this is some sort of "discovery" ("Hubble observes something new and unusual!"), that the forbidden emission lines only appear in Type 2 Seyfert galaxies ("The spectral lines that Type-2 Seyfert galaxies emit are associated with specific 'forbidden' emission lines."), and that they only come from the active nucleus ("in the midst of an incredibly energetic galactic core"). But none of that is true.

Forbidden emission lines are ubiquitous in astronomy. Any time you see an object with emission lines, some of the emission will be forbidden. So we see forbidden emission lines from Seyfert 2 nuclei, from Seyfert 1 nuclei, from quasars, from non-Seyfert nuclei, from the nebula of star-forming regions, from planetary nebulae, from supernova remnants...

You could pick literally any spiral galaxy that Hubble has observed and title the image "Hubble sights a galaxy with 'forbidden light'", and the title would be just as correct. Or swap "nebula" for "galaxy" and use any Hubble image of a nebula in our own galaxy. (There's even forbidden emission coming from the solar corona.)