I’ve been watching the development, they’ve been very open about it. The developers still have a lot to do, but I’ll hold on to hope.

Yeah, it’s not there yet. But soon.

I mean, I wouldn’t doubt that it will achieve its goals, it’s very close already. If all they wanted was a single use rocket with a reusable booster and greater payload to orbit than the Saturn V at a fraction of the cost, then that has already been achieved, and that is not nothing.

I think that’s probably right. But personally, I want more and I think it’s worth caring about, worth encouraging people to think about.

I have models of both Hubble and Chandra telescopes hanging in my room. 😃

It’s a great telescope, it made a whole slew of discoveries possible. But yeah, digital imaging has improved a lot over the last 27 years, do you remember what digital cameras were like in 1998?

What we have is great, and what we’ve managed to do with it is astonishing. But… I believe we are doing ourselves a disservice by not updating these space observatories more frequently and by not building enough of them for all of the observations we want to make. Because we could, but we aren’t.

Oh absolutely! But why not more?

Why are scientists around the globe competing for small chunks of time on the jwst when we could have several more telescopes like it? Or perhaps even a few slightly less advanced telescopes. I know designing it was a huge challenge, but even with the design complete, just constructing it presented a number of serious challenges. Given that the jwst was such a complex project, I wonder if a series of telescopes with optics and instruments still significantly more modern than Hubble would still be useful to astronomers as well as much easier to produce than the jwst.

Honestly, Hubble is old, very old. It was based on a spy satellite that the US developed in the 70s, we built 5 of them. There were essentially 5 hubbles looking down at the earth and only 1 looking up.

But those spy satellites were retired years ago, they’re 4 generations old now. Since then, we’ve gradually launched 14 other spy sats to replace them.

All that is to say, why are we still content with our 1 ancient Hubble telescope? Clearly there is a budget for more. If the military can point 19 satellites down at the earth, surely we should be able to point 5 upward, right?

Yeah, the Hubble is struggling up there in LEO, but this isn’t a hubble problem, it’s a US prioritization problem. You get what you pay for, and apparently we’re only willing to pay for war.

Multipurpose lasers?

Slightly less research has been done to investigate that possibility, I’ll get back to you.

Yep, that’s where the shuttle could reach it.

Yeah, it’s a little weird that it’s in Leo. Seems like further out would be a better choice.

It would be higher up if we built it today.

I mean, we could do it again. There’s kind of no reason not to, we could put more advanced instruments on them, we could send larger probes with more instruments, more experiments longer lived power sources…

Well, I said there’s no reason, but actually there are a few reasons we aren’t doing it currently. First, everything costs money, NASA’s budget keeps getting cut, and we have other important missions already planned. I certainly don’t want any new projects to jeopardise missions like dragonfly for instance. Also, we’re running out of available nuclear fuels… I believe the Voyager probes used plutonium 238 for their RTGs, but we have these nuclear proliferation treaties with Russia and long story short, we haven’t been making that stuff for the last 70 years and there’s not much left.

It’s probably just downloading an update over and over and over again because it doesn’t know to stop.

That theory seems extremely likely to me! As soon as I read it, I thought “oh, yes that’s exactly what happened”.

Probably it automatically downloaded an unnecessary large update, it had enough storage space to finish the download, but then it started to decompress and install the update, at some point it ran out of usable space, so it started the whole loop over again, forever…

I buy the smallest phone I can find… But they keep getting bigger, there just aren’t smaller options available.

I love the idea of a flip phone, if only for the promise of increased durability, a more protected screen. But so far I think these foldable phones have been generally less durable than more traditional phones. So yeah, I’ll wait until the tech matures.

I mean, if nobody was using them…

The worst part is that for most of these services, the child accounts are still functionally useless for parents.

We have a kid who actively seeks out content they know they’re not allowed to watch, which means unfortunately a Netflix subscription simply won’t work for us because Netflix doesn’t allow you to actually password protect your profiles. So our kid can just select the parent profile, or make a new one if they want to watch whatever they want.

As far as I know only Disney+ allows you to put a login pin on parent accounts to lock kids out. That would be useful, except the Roku we use to watch things on the tv doesn’t password protect all of its channels, so we still have to be on top of him to make sure he’s staying within disney+…

I gotta be honest, I kinda miss cable tv.

You think that 727 you flew in last was built in the 90s? Heh, you don’t want to know how old they are. I’ll just say this, those passenger jets cost millions of dollars and airlines don’t like to throw things out. Ever.

A private twin engine plane could literally be built any time in the last 50 years, could be brand new too. That doesn’t mean it isn’t airworthy though, being old wouldn’t make it unreliable.

The Jewish community has been speaking up. The problem is that the global Jewish community doesn’t actually control the Israeli government, so there’s only so much that speaking up can do. Also, the population of Israel tend to see things quite differently from American Jews. It’s very unfortunate that Jews in Israel do seem to have forgotten the Holocaust…

That is not typically how Judaism works though. At least for the Jews around me, Judaism is a culture centered around asking critical questions. God doesn’t even enter the equation for a great many Jews, that’s not the point. The point is using the tradition, the rituals and the community to remember and better understand the past and to use that understanding to prevent the same kind of tragedy in the future.

Anyway, that’s the kind of thing we talked about at my sedar.

Could we please just say that bees are dying? When you say disappearing it makes it sound like a conspiracy, which it isn’t. The CIA has not partnered with bigfoot to kidnap the bees as part of a secret operation in the time war…

It’s not a conspiracy, they’re dying probably because of something we’re putting into the environment. And by “we”, I mean most likely the agriculture industry operating perfectly legally under current law. I specified “legally” to point out that it’s not the fault of farmers, they’re just doing their job, the problem is that we’re not regulating the use of chemicals carefully enough - and that is our fault.

And all that is to say, can we please just call this what it is?

How does formatting give it away?

I’ve honestly struggled a lot trying to figure out what posts are just chatbot trolls and what posts are people worth trying to create a dialogue with.

I mean, sometimes posts will say things that seem like they’re intentionally misleading or inherently malicious in some way and it’s like… Is this person for real? Are they trying to push some specific narrative? Or are they just misinformed? Or is this just a chatbot designed to upset people and disrupt online conversations on this subject?