Keysh

In the second Bourne film (the first one directed by Greenglass), he starts off in Goa, then shows up in an airport in Italy, and later appears (with no indication of how he travels) in Munich, Berlin, Moscow, and New York City.

And, honestly, there wasn't a whole lot of visible "travel" in the "old" Bond, either. Bond is an agent of MI6, often with a cover as some kind of rich businessman or playboy. So of course he travels everywhere by passenger plane. (Unless he's doing some covert infiltration by parachute or surfboard or whatever.) The difference between Bond and (later) Bourne in terms of travel is that Bond has the resources of a wealthy government, while Bourne has... some kind of ninja superpower, I guess. In both cases, they mostly just translate invisibly from place to place.

An AGN in a satellite galaxy of a nearby massive galaxy would be a bit interesting; but unfortunately this wasn't such a thing.

I downloaded a Hubble Legacy Atlas mosaic image of the Sombrero Galaxy, and found his galaxy ("Iris"), right where he said it was. From the appearance (and the color figures in his paper), it's a nice strongly barred spiral (something I study a lot). Given the very small angular size (roughly 4 arc seconds in diameter), it's probably hundreds of megaparsecs (well over a billion light years) or more away, and so not associated with the Sombrero Galaxy (which is at a distance of only 9 or 10 megaparsecs).

The object is not in the NASA Extragalactic Database (not surprising for something so mall and distant). If you search near its position in Simbad, you do indeed get "PSO J190.0301-11.6124" (listed as "globular cluster candidate"), just as he found -- but it's crucial to note that the latter object's position differs by about nine arc seconds from the position of the "Iris" galaxy. If you look at the Hubble image, you can see a compact, slightly elliptical object at the position of PSO J190.0301-11.6124; its appearance is consistent with being a "globular cluster candidate" associated with the halo of the Sombrero Galaxy. But all the deductions about possible distances, spectral energy distributions, etc., are vitiated by the misidentification.

So while this is a galaxy, it's way, way beyond the Sombrero Galaxy, and I doubt the claimed X-ray source association, so it's probably not an active galaxy. (Well, it could be, but we probably don't have any evidence for that.)

If you could travel to Mars in an open-air vehicle, and then land and survive on the surface wearing nothing more than ordinary clothing, and get your water from local streams and rivers, and grow crops on the surface with no special effort -- _and_ if Mars was already inhabited by human societies adapted to the land, whose food you could eat, with technology roughly equivalent or somewhat below yours, and political divisions you could exploit, and wealth and products you could extract -- well, then your European-colonialism analogies might have some relevance.

The reality is "the narrow model" (of European colonialism) doesn't remotely fit "the conditions we are presented with"... But we seem to be in the mode of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail": when all you know is European history, European history is the only possible model.

(Really, something like the Maori colonization of New Zealand -- which had no pre-existing population, and required the settlers to bring their own crops and scout for resources for making tools -- is _marginally_ more relevant. Even more relevant are things like research stations in Antarctica, where -- again -- there's no pre-existing population, and where you simply _can't_ grow food locally or easily survive outdoors.)

The modern (21st C) vogue for zombie apocalypse movies pretty clearly stems from two sources: Japanese video games in the 1990s; and a pair of British films in the early 2000s: Resident Evil (based on one of the aforementioned Japanese video games) and 28 Days Later. (It's a bit hard to argue that both the Japanese and the British were acting out some deep-seated fear of a black slave uprising.)

No, it doesn't, because you're ignoring all the physics required to get the mass into a small enough region so that it will collapse to form a black hole. The only way to make that happen that we know works is to form massive stars, where a fraction of the star's mass, in the center of the star, will eventually form a black hole. But the largest stars we know of have masses of ~ 200 times the Sun, and so can't form black holes more than a fraction of that.

If you imagine a more massive gas cloud collapsing under its own gravity, it will fragment into subclumps before getting very dense; these subclumps will themselves fragment or go on to form stars directly, but with an upper limit of, say, ~ 200 solar masses.

(It's possible that if you start with a cloud of pristine gas in the early universe -- nothing but hydrogen and helium -- that it might collapse to form a single supermassive star, or even a black hole directly. That might give you something like a 1000-solar-mass black hole. But that's still fairly speculative, and requires unusual conditions that don't exist generally.)

The main way supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies grow is by accreting gas, not by mergers with other black holes. (But you can still have potential problems with not being able to accrete enough gas in a short enough time to explain early SMBHs, unless the initial "seed" BHs are larger than those formed by conventional supernovae.)

"He found that the beetles had similarly high success rates with four other frog species....

"When swallowed, other similar water beetles were killed and digested by the frog...."

"As the relationships between scientific practice and social, archaeological and historical interpretations continue to be debated in the discipline at large (McGovern 1995; Jones 2001; Knapp 2002), it should perhaps not come as a surprise that we insist that it is critical that all types or ‘genres’ of evidence be taken into account in relation to the tophets as both a historical phenomenon and a series of archaeological contexts. We all have to work within the limits of our own expertise, whether as scientists, archaeologists, philologists or epigraphers, but we should also strive in the humanities as much as in the sciences to apply the highest standards of academic rigour, without preconceptions, in order to formulate falsifiable hypotheses and interpretations that take into account the full range of available sources—however strange we may find the results..."

I don't know, that sounds like a pretty good "understanding of the scientific process". (Admittedly, I'm just an astrophysicist, so maybe I don't understand "the scientific process".)

Belief in a luminiferous ether (that fills all of space) is consistent with the idea that EM waves can travel through space (after all, we can see light coming from the Sun, etc.) and that radio waves could be used.

But Tesla seems to have argued that working "radio" technology was really electrical currents traveling through the ground (or through the ocean in the case of radio on ships), which then somehow induced "reception" in the radio equipment located above the currents.

https://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/pogge.1/Ast162/Unit5/gp...

(It might be useful in space, where you'd be creating something like a comet's halo, which separates from the body on a much longer timescale.)

Unfortunately, I'm only about halfway through it, so I haven't gotten to the part where he tries to explain why this happened. But so far, it's quite good.

The linked paper -- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.11319.pdf -- isn't about measuring dark energy at all. (It's using data from a study meant to do that, but it's looking at something else.)

Also, > This phenomenon has various names: the quantum foam, the spacetime foam, vacuum fluctuations.

This confuses two different phenomena. The vacuum fluctuation of known quantum fields (electromagnetic, electron, Higgs, etc.) is what is thought to give rise to the cosmological constant/dark energy, and is what this article is about. (A limited version of it involving the electromagnetic field produces the Casimir effect, which has been measured.) "Spacetime/quantum foam" is the hypothetical fluctuation of spacetime itself, assuming a quantum theory of gravity. It has nothing to do with dark energy.

That's simply not true. You don't need energy to create new space (and you wouldn't magically get energy from nowhere if the universe were contracting). General relativity gives you expanding (or contracting) space just fine if dark energy doesn't exist -- in fact, that was the most common cosmological model before the late 1990s discovery that the expansion was accelerating.

The fact that the simplest version of dark energy is the cosmological constant tells us your basic idea is wrong: if that energy was going into creating new space, then it would decrease over time, not remain constant.

In fact, it's worse than that, because the cosmological constant is a constant energy density. So if expansion doubles some volume of intergalactic space, then the total amount of dark energy also doubles (while the total energy in the form of ordinary or dark matter stays the same, and the energy in the form of photons decreases due to redshifting).

Conservation of energy in general relativity is messy and sometimes counter-intuitive; e.g. https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/energy_...

If I remember correctly, a second effect is that the collisions tend to cause the gas to concentrate/pile up near the leading edge of the bar, which causes an offset between the mass of the stars (making up the bar) and bulk of the gas; the stars end up pulling on the gas in the direction opposite to the orbital motion, and so the gas loses energy and angular momentum, shifting onto smaller orbits.

It really has nothing to do with magnetic fields: you readily get this effect in hydrodynamical simulations without any magnetism, and most of the gas in the bar region isn't in the form of plasma anyway (it's primarily a mixture of neutral atomic hydrogen and molecular hydrogen).

Wait, what? The Wikipedia article on SN 1054 has an extensive discussion of the Chinese records (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1054#Chinese_astronomy), as well as Japanese records and the Arabic account of Ibn Butlan.

That's a pretty dubious assertion (and I notice that there aren't any references to which archaeologists supposedly believe this), since:

a) I'm pretty sure there aren't any examples of buildings or structures being "influenced" by this or any other historical supernova in any other cultures; and

b) No mention of the supernova of 1006, which was brighter and longer-lasting than the supernova of 1054?

Oh, bollocks. In what universe did the US go to war with Assad's regime? The US tepidly tried arming a few of the (non-fundamentalist) rebel groups once they appeared, but nothing more than that. (Presumably you think the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were caused by the CIA, too, for some unfathomable reason.) And how, exactly, has the US profited monetarily from what happened in Libya and Syria?

(Gaddafi was actually getting closer to the US and Europe; in 2004 he gave up his nuclear weapons program in return for better relations with the West. As for "pan-African unity" -- sure, from the guy who invaded Chad to steal land from it. No one took his bombast seriously.)

Given that we know about Alexander's parentage from multiple contemporary sources, the idea that a pro-Persian epic poem written 1300 years later is plausible when it tells us something different is not very sensible.

What's probably going on is a bit of retconning to resolve two contrary ideas. On the one hand, by the time Ferdowsi was writing, several hundred years of Arab rule in Iran had made stories about Alexander (who the Arabs thought was pretty awesome) popular. On the other hand, Persians remembered that Alexander had conquered an ancient Persian empire. (We know the pre-Islamic Sassanid Persians hated Alexander.) How do you reconcile this in a patriotic Persian poem?

Solution: make it so Alexander was secretly Persian! (I have no idea whether this was Ferdowsi's innovation or something that had evolved over a few centuries of storytelling prior to Ferdowsi coming along.)

There's a nice discussion of the background to this (including why Ferdowsi did things like refer to Alexander as "Caesar of Rome") here https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/20f0yh/historic...