rjshae

Well I suppose it has the psychological effect of implying further escallation if Iran inflicts a massive retaliation. Seriously, I'm not sure how wars ever end in that region. Maybe they don't.

Well that article doesn't actually say. I would be a little surprised that Israeli didn't use this opportunity to go after Iran's underground nuclear weapon program.

America is has been involved in many wars over the last century, so there's a segment of the population that is very familiar; I'd say more so than most nations. What we haven't experienced is what war does to the civilian population.

Two weeks of campaign stupidity remain.

Possibly he's referring to radiological weapons. That wouldn't take long to assemble, and might be used as a weapon of last resort.

I went to see The Wild Robot with a family member. It's mostly family fare with a traditional Disney-like anthromorphization of the characters. As an adult I found it only mildly entertaining; it isn't in the same class as Wall-E for example.

I persevered through two seasons of The Ark and I have to say it is one of the dumbest-written sci-fi series I've ever seen. It's like the writers have absolutely no understanding of physics, or science in general. But I suppose it's entertaining in its own way. Mostly eye candy space opera stuff with plenty of plot twists. One of these days we'll see an actual good movie or drama series about a generation ship and its crew.

It's unclear that it was an assassination attempt. Just a guy exercising his 2nd amendment rights, perhaps.

The landing capture is super cool!

After trying various approaches I'm finding that using pure grapeshot for the cannon fire reaps seemingly unrealistic benefits. It kills off enemy combatants prior to boarding, it causes the opponent to waste a bunch of rounds swapping crew members around, and it can cause sails to burn or become battered. When I finally close to board, the foe has been significantly whittled down as demonstrated by the dead bodies on the deck. Why bother with cannon ball or chain when you can take out the crew?

I stink, therefore...

I concur. Even many of his supporters say he'd be great, if only he'd shut up and stop saying stupid things. I find now the news services are grabbing just the bits and pieces of his rambling that they can assemble into a rational statement. It almost doesn't matter what he says, people will just pick out what they want to hear. Expect four more years of stupid concepts, instability, and a misguided foreign policy. I plan to tune him out as much as is humanly possible.

N/M

I've been enjoying the Fargo serials on Hulu. Typically I don't like police procedurals, but I do seem to enjoy crime series that show both sides of the story and take the time for character development.

The thing I don't really get about MAGA is, where's the plan? If supporters want to succeed, how are they going to do it? Nobody seems to be asking about that. About all the first term administration of DJT accomplished in that regard was adding tariffs, but that's a recidivist approach that history demonstrates will fail. Nations become great through advancing knowledge and technology, combined with resources. If you don't keep up with advances, others will leave you behind. But the MAGA party is decidedly opposed to various aspects of modern science: just take their views on RNA-based vaccines, for example. They merely seem content to roll back the clock, and succeed by making it worse for others. It's a zero-sum perspective with little chance of success.

Is it actually free speech when a significant number of said posts come from bots? Once nobody can spot an actual human opinion, you're just polluting the discussion.

Possibly. I do think the strong streak of isolationism that's now appearing was heavily influenced by DJT. I'm also not convinced that the party's embrace of disinformation and conspiracy theory would have been as strong. Although the distrust of science and an independent press was certainly in the works and likely has allowed the party to gain greater control of their messaging.

That is perhaps true for M-dwarfs (or a selection bias effect?), but this hypothesized star has 80% of a solar mass. A comparable star is Epsilon Eridani, which has a jovian planet and an rich asteroid system extending out to 75 AU. There may be other planets around Epsilon Eridani, but the star is active so radial velocity signals get drowned out. Planets in wider orbits may not show up because of the duration of the orbit and/or stellar activity. We need better technology.

I suppose the difference this time is the application of numerous computer simulations that are used to reproduce essentially all of the observed properties of TNOs. A K-type star is a significant interloper that would have been even more severely disrupted by the more massive Sun, possibly losing members to the Solar System. I wonder if this happened while the Sun was still part of its origin stellar association?

A Stellar Flyby Jumbled Up the Outer Solar System (Universe Today) It does explain a lot. I wonder if it does better than the 9th planet hypothesis that was raised a few years ago to explain the orbits of TNOs? Here's the original paper: Trajectory of the stellar flyby that shaped the outer Solar System (Nature) If they could find a captured object from the other star, that would be solid evidence.