rob mahurin

I have read that, for the first few years of the Constitution, the justices dressed like normal people. But they found that they weren't taken seriously, and so resorted to costumes.

No source for you — I'm not sure whether I believe this factoid myself.

Minor quibble: it wasn't until the Bill of Rights was ratified in December 1791 that the Constitution *explicitly* protected free speech.

I think this still counts as "AI slop."

This "hemisphere of water" view suggests, incorrectly, that all seven continents should be crammed into a "hemisphere of land" that you could view from above the antipodal point. There's a pretty strong horizon effect here. I haven't tried to figure out the simulated altitude.

Nifty, but tricky.

Despicable The bully-in-chief is targeting women in the White House press corps

It's pronounced "deplorable," Mr. Rather.

Bayesian spam filtering was one of the early successes in machine learning. Maybe they've put a fictionbot in charge of it now.

Longrich describes the total sequence of events associated with this extinction as being sufficiently improbable that, if it were fiction, it might be criticized as a badly-written just-so scenario. He kind of has an emotional experience about it. I don't begrudge him that.

Highly recommend.

6/6

Even so: Chixulub-sized asteroids can stay in near-Earth orbits for only about 10⁷ years before getting scattered away by gravitational chaos. There are currently two such asteroids known, so in 10⁹ years of there being an Earth there have only been a couple hundred which haven't hit us.

5/6

This part of the Yucatan is particularly rich in gypsum, which has a lot of sulfur; pulverizing this and putting it in the upper atmosphere would have acidified an awful lot of rain.

It's also petroleum-rich country. Petroleum lifted from the crater would have instantly dirty-burned to soot.

4/6

But the existence of other very large craters without associated mass extinctions suggests there was something else remarkable about this particular collision. One possible factor is the composition of the parts of the Yucatan which were vaporized in the impact.

3/6

A metaphor for the impact that I haven't properly checked: "Imagine giving every human alive today a WWII-size nuclear bomb, and they all detonate at once. That's the scale of the energy exchange we're discussing here."

2/6

YouTube video by Nick Longrich Evolution and Paleontology Where Did the Asteroid That Killed The Dinosaurs Come From

I really enjoyed this colloquium-style talk 🔭 about the origin of the Chixulub impactor — a carbonaceous chondrite which must have formed in the outer solar system, beyond the "snow line," and then scattered into an Earth-crossing orbit.

1/6

Everybody's favorite extremophile, the tardigrade, is sometimes also called the "moss piglet" because supposedly that's where you can find them in your yard.

Now we have learned about an extremophile moss, so future space tardigrades can have a place to come home to!

🧪

Is it an anachronism to put this kind of acrostic into Chaucer's mouth? My understanding is that acronyms are (more or less) a twentieth-century development. But there are acrostic poems going back to antiquity.

Manufacturing stymied by lepton number conservation

That acerbic mystery-solver lived in several different Holmes over the course of the television series.

Well, we might imagine a rule where the unpunctated quote (here, "features)" must ALWAYS take following punctuation inside the quote marks. But that's an abomination.

Well, we might imagine a rule where the unpunctated quote (here, "features)" must ALWAYS take following punctuation inside the quote marks. But that's an abomination.

Thd IMDB page for Cynthia Black currently says "she is an actress" but does not list any acting credits since Bewitched, filmed before Black was old enough to speak.

I learned that if you're following an unpunctated quote (here, "features") with a period or a comma, that mark moves inside the quotation marks. But what if you are asking a question about these "features"? Big punctuation marks like exclamation points go outside.

Aesthetic, perhaps, but illogical.

Apologies for responding in English — my French is so rusty I am afraid I need a tetanus booster before I try to write with it.

Is this in real time, or does the video play faster or slower for some time-lapse reason?

Can you (or another astronomy 🔭 nerd) comment on the amount of energy released here? It would be neat to predict what size crater to hunt for when the sun rises again.

Excellent shot, congratulations.

Part of the fun here is trying various accents until the pun works.

This showed up in my feed of soothing photos of plants, to my brief confusion.

I had a friend in 2020 who insisted that it wasn't a "pandemic" if there weren't Black-Death-level fatalities. She insisted that, because people weren't dying in the streets, it was all overblown. (She also thought the mobile morgue trailers were fake.)

The linked thread is a bit more thoughtful.

The "chomp" sound effects are a nice touch.

Oh, interesting. Did you also send to the spelling with a "v"?

"fresh popecorn"

Meanwhile an unverified account called "the department of war" is posting snuff videos of boats exploding with the text "we will kill you."

A yery subtle typo in the email.