57 thoughts on “Ya Think?”

  2. a belated happy birthday to galileo di vincenzo bonaiuti de galilei (457 years young as of 2/15).  some of the sentiment behind the 2/13/1633  inquisition of the philosopher, astronomer, engineer, and  mathematician sadly lives on to this day.

    Bink ~~~ not that it has anything to do with the above ~~~ here’s a quote of his to think about vis a vis persistence (oops perseverance) and ingenuity 

    “All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered, the point is to discover them.”

  4. That’s a good cartoon because it inadvertently illustrates the modern-day phenomenon of “science as religion”, with Mars colonization as fanciful as a man-in-the-sky.

    Boomers are so indoctrinated to believe that “space program is good” that they obviously can’t even entertain the possibility that a singular endeavor to that end might be frivolous. From my perspective, it’s bizarre and similar to a religious, or cult, mentality.

  5. “the tiny wing of the Republican Party that I represent.” -Mitt Romney

    Translation: Republicans have gone full nutzo (i.e. extremist/nationalist/zealous)😳

  6. If the GOP does that, they give an opening for tRUMPsky/Hawley to start their own party.  (Are WS going to welcome someone named Cruz, even though that’s  the base to which he’s trying to appeal?)

  8. Humans ain’t got a chance.  Might as well just help where you can and sit back and enjoy the ride as much as possible.  It’ll be over soon.

    Thompson………FUCK the doomed!
    –Richard Nixon to Hunter S. while in the loo.

  9. “FUCK the doomed!
    –Richard Nixon to Hunter S. while in the loo.”

    sturge, another motto of the grand old putsch-ers?

  10. Science as religion. Yeah, it’s cultish to believe in the results of the application of the scientific method. Mars colonization?  It’s fun to see as a subject in movies and literature, but it’s science fiction. Nice straw man though.  Singling out boomers as cultish science believers is both over inclusive and under inclusive. As I wait my 15 minutes to make sure I’m not have a reaction to the Pfizer Covid -19 vaccine, I hope my belief that science based research is a proper way to improve our knowledge and protect us against, say, deadly viruses, is not a cultish belief.   My concerns are more about idiots who hold religion up as science or reject reliance on science as a sort of religious, or cultish, mentality. Or was that the joke we’re supposed to laugh at?

  11. You’re more interested in shutting me down (your arguments are all over the place), Mr. P, than having an interesting convo; that’s fine, i stand by all my Mars mission criticisms🤷‍♂️🇺🇸
     
    i should have switched over to reddit to have these types of discussions, years, ago, i’ll concede, but tbh, i have problems with the format: it’s annoying to navigate. Sorry.  i’ll try restrict my contributions, here, to parroting gripes about prominent Republicans, going forward.
     
    Glad you got your vaccines, i’m jealous.

    (mRNA vaccines are way more amazing than the Mars rover, TO ME)

  12. bink, why are you so fixated on or obsessed by the silliness of  mars colonization daydreaming?  the mission, among many other things that hopefully will help us improve the way we are doing things on this planet, is whether & what about life forms elsewhere.  

    i see mars mission more as basic science (aka discovering & understanding fundamentals) distinct from  the current moon missions by us and others which are IMO  commercial/capitalism at worse and applied science (aka application of basic sci. to solve practical problems) at best.

     

  13. Bink…  I like reading your different perspective…  I hear you that we have too many problems down here to fix to spend money on exploring Mars.  I also hear Pogo’s and Old Man’s perspectives too.  It’s fun to ruminate on both views.  But calling fellow trail mixers assholes is not cool.

  14. Well…. it’s that season again.  The sap is starting to run…  fresh made maple syrup on the way.  The roads are becoming a mess…   frost heaves and potholes galore!
     
     

  15. meeting the need for mental health therapy?

    excerpt from dallasnews:

    Carlos and Elvie De La Fuente’s party store is known for its cascarones and piñatas. Last month, they created a piñata that paid tribute to a viral meme of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders at the presidential inauguration. Their selection of timely designs also includes one of former President Donald Trump, and one that resembles the spiky image used to depict the coronavirus.

    Carlos De La Fuente said humor was his motivation when deciding to create this new piñata.

     

    “After all we’ve been growing through, we needed a laugh,” he said. “Something to give us hope and something to give us relief after six days of miserable weather and people going through bad situations.”

    The piñatas take five days to make, and the traveling Ted Cruz piñata made its first appearance Monday around noon. By 5 p.m. the store already had five or six orders for Cruz piñatas, De La Fuente said.

    Piñatas of Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders and former President Donald Trump are being made and sold at ABC Party in Dallas, on Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021.

  16. wapo:

    CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The huge parachute used by NASA’s Perseverance rover to land on Mars contained a secret message, thanks to a puzzle lover on the spacecraft team.

    Systems engineer Ian Clark used a binary code to spell out “Dare Mighty Things” in the orange and white strips of the 70-foot (21-meter) parachute. He also included the GPS coordinates for the mission’s headquarters at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

     

    Clark, a crossword hobbyist, came up with the idea two years ago. Engineers wanted an unusual pattern in the nylon fabric to know how the parachute was oriented during descent. Turning it into a secret message was “super fun,” he said Tuesday.

     

    Only about six people knew about the encoded message before Thursday’s landing, according to Clark. They waited until the parachute images came back before putting out a teaser during a televised news conference Monday.

    This illustration provided by NASA shows a diagram added over the parachute deployed during the descent of the Mars Perseverance rover as it approaches the surface of the planet on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021. Systems engineer Ian Clark used a binary code to spell out “Dare Mighty Things” in the orange and white strips of the 70-foot (21-meter) parachute. He also included the GPS coordinates for the mission’s headquarters at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. (NASA/JPL-Caltech via AP)

    It took just a few hours for space fans to figure it out, Clark said. Next time, he noted, “I’ll have to be a little bit more creative.”

    “Dare Mighty Things” — a line from President Theodore Roosevelt — is a mantra at JPL and adorns many of the center’s walls. The trick was “trying to come up with a way of encoding it but not making it too obvious,” Clark said.

    As for the GPS coordinates, the spot is 10 feet (3 meters) from the entrance to JPL’s visitor center.

    [continues]

     

  17. bink, why are you so fixated on …mars…?  -patd

    i feel it’s a tangent that logically-follows in a post-GretaThunberg/Social-Justice cultural climate where individuals are encouraged to consider the unintended impact of their consumption and actions.  i’m also an Astronomy buff who understands the enormous magnitude of interplanetary and interstellar distances and the impediment that creates to both near and deep space exploration, along with the hazards of cosmic radiation and the deleterious effect to the human body of low-gravity environments.
     
    Also, as aforementioned, i’m trying not to get trolled by disingenuous conservative provocateurs in popular media who are trying to steer the contemporary political discourse, while still contributing: as quixotic as that Rover, likely.
     
    Thanks for the kind words,  RR!  It was the collegial form of “asshole”, not for nuthin’
     
    Ok, always fun, have a good day✌️✌️✌️

  18. Bink, I’m not trying to shut you down – what I’m doing is what I call disagreeing with you.  I am a poor telephone keyboarder, which is what I was doing when I posted that reply.  Tends to lead to inadequately explained responses more akin to twitter and texting than to discourse on blogs.
     
    My arguments are allover the place?  They may be, but they are responding to a series of comments you made, so in one comment of mine they may seem all over the place.  
     
    As to the overinclusive/underinclusive comment regarding boomers and their cult-like mentality about science as religion, my point is that boomers are split fairly evenly between the science is right and religion is right camps, with a continuum of opinion between those extreme positions – how do I know this?  Being a lifelong boomer and growing up with and living with folks in both of those camps.  I suspect a similar dichotomy exists within the different generations that have followed.  
     
    Straw man argument – there’s a world of daylight between enjoying unmanned rover exploration of Mars and believing the science it reflects has merit and thinking the end goal is colonization, which I believe you brought up in the prior thread.  Asserting that boomers are so indoctrinated to think that “space program is good” probably has a grain of truth in it, but singling out colonization as the position of folks like Bob and me who like the rover stuff sets up a straw man.  Still, in my view the research done previously and being done now has merit and may very well lead to answers to questions astronomers and cosmologists have asked for decades if not over a century. Could NASA money be spent more productively if it were redirected to, say, medical science?  Very possibly.  Has Congress decided to do that?  Not so far.  I believe that’s where the discussion should be.  

  19. As to the Mars missions, I see them as applied technology whose advancement may in turn have practical applications that contribute to survival on earth, a possible development that I consider more unlikely by the second.  Human beings are working over time en masse to destroy themselves by destroying as much and as many of the resources and species beneath us on the ladder of life.

    Doomsday clock ticks to 12 seconds until midnight – Pass the Nukes

    Food for billions wiping out other species – Who needs a rain forest anyway?

    Dam up the water – Camels can handle the desertification until we wipe out the camels

    Spread microplastic throughout the oceans – A lot of people don’t like fish.  Who needs them.

    Genocide of Kurds gives all those money collecting charities something to put in an email

    The cartoons of a virus are so cute might as well find some more of them.

    The Ice caps melting will finally provide that northwest passage to no where important

    Luckily I won’t be around to watch the horrors my great grands will face thanks to their ancestors who thought all of the above was just an item on the news.

     

  20. Oh, and if you think that space science is the field that we boomers are so cultishly indoctrinated to hold up as meritorious, and not consider that in the end it might be a frivolous pursuit, it is just one area of science we Boomers have such interest in – others, like medical science, especially cancer research, enjoy a similar spot of our interests, but its incremental development and improvement doesn’t get the press a good space shot gets.  And as a point of curiosity, I wonder how many of the folks who are willing to shell out the money to take a ride on Space-X or the other commercial space flight  options are boomers.  IMHO there’s your space frivolity.

  21. “Human beings are working over time en masse to destroy themselves by destroying as much and as many of the resources and species beneath us on the ladder of life.”

    jamie, sad but true

  23. I’m just sick of it.  I’m sick of hearing about all the people who don’t want to get the covid vaccine when I can’t get it,  and I’m in group 1B. I’m signed up with the county and was number 19,000 and then 11,000.  Yet when they send me a robo call, usually 3 times in a row, it says they’re up to 76,000. What does that mean? A man I know who’s 20 years younger than I just got his.  How does that happen?  Or is it who  you know?
     
    And the CVS website was designed and programmed by squirrely  monkeys.
    It’s a rabbit hole.  A quagmire.

  26. TT –  My dad does not want to get the vaccine.  He thinks it will make him sick.  He also, somehow, thinks he immune because he has been “all over town” for a year.   He wants me to fly up for a visit this summer.  Nope. Not unless I am vaccinated, as well as everyone up there and a large chunk of the population.  Maybe later in the year, but I get stuck in a loop even trying to get an appointment.  Although too young, I think I am 1B for a heart arrhythmia, or at least 1C.   I give up.  
    Is the Johnson & Johnson vax going to be pointless? It uses the old, killed virus, method of inoculation, I believe.  Mutated strains will laugh at it.
     

  27. Jamie…  yeah….  but….  whatever nature does survive us destroying ourselves will have the last laugh.
     
    ps…  Methinks religion is religion.  And in this lenten season….  as usual…  I give it up.

  28. My grandpa is 2nd right from the right in the front of row of this picture. My question is: Is that J. Edgar Hoover in the suit on the far right? I believe this pic was taken in the 1940’s.

  31. Do you know why the pic was taken? I can’t read the name on the door behind them.  Where may be a clue, too.

  32. keeping with today’s thread topic

    in case you didn’t catch because of the mask muffle what liz said:
    “That’s up to CPAC. I’ve been clear about my views about President Trump and the extent to which, following Jan. 6, I don’t think he should be playing a role in the future of party.”

  34. It looks like it was taken in Michigan. I found that pic in a envelope last week. I thought  Hoover being in the picture was what made it so significant.

  35. It is interesting what Fannie did once she survived the heat wave after making her seat wave.

    Little is known of Ms. Battistella’s later life as Annabel Montgomery, although the University of Tampa said she graduated in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in communications and the University of South Florida confirmed she received a master’s degrees in marine science in 2001 and a master’s degree in business administration in 2004.

     

  36. Tip, that’s nuts.  I just think the antiCovidvaxers are out of their minds, but then again, I think anti-vaxers are generally out of their minds.

  40. BiD, fine if he doesn’t want the vaccine.  I’ll take it.  What’ll happen to those who don’t want it, especially the older folks is they’ll eventually get the virus. Some will die and some will survive with long hauler effects, e.g. kidney damage, heart problems, or more likely lung damage. All of which will shorten their lives and give them a poor quality of life for their time left.  I don’t want any of that.
     
    I called and checked the web sites of the 4 major hubs listed for this county. A dead end at ALL of them!
     
    I checked the CVS web site again. Nuttin’.  I asked the CVE pharmacist today.  He didn’t know anything.  I asked my primary doc.  She knows nothing.  No one knows anything here, as usual!

  44. Is the Johnson & Johnson vax going to be effective against mutations, especially since there’s no booster?

  45. Gov. Abbott presser right now.  He is over-acting. It’s hilarious.

    He’s going full-on Shatner in Star Trek!

  46. He thanks everyone who helped Texans last week. (Not you, Ted Cruz.)

    He made sure to mention the failure of wind and solar, as well as gas, oil and coal.

    But, he prays that God continues to bless y’all.

    Thoughts & Prayers

  49. On the news now.  68 year old woman is having open heart surgery but needs 1 covid vaccine first.  None of the doctors in Austin have the vaccine! She went on a neighborhood app and another woman gave her the appointment. 

  51. BiD, I do love the Texas Tribune.  Still no hot water. But, hey, 1 outta 2.  Makes for a cold shower or bath.  Or you can go to the rec centers. 
     
    I’ve come to really, really hate this state.

  52. Close ally of Marjorie Taylor Greene among those in Capitol mob

    In fact, Anthony Aguero, a conservative livestreamer, activist and associate of Greene, said on video following the January 6 assault on the Capitol that he had been among those who entered and attacked those who falsely claimed it was done by “Antifa.”

     

    “We were all there. It was not Antifa and it was not BLM. It was Trump supporters that did that yesterday. I’m the first to admit it, being one myself,” said Aguero in a video posted on January 7.

    “I walked amongst all those people,” he added, later defending entering the Capitol.

  55. Some Republican idiot as on NPR last week, griping about raising the minimum wage for anyone under age 26.   Apparently, if anyone under that age makes “a living wage,” they won’t continue their education.    So, he admitted that less than $15/hour is not a living wage, but that somehow making less money will force you to get a better education.

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