shnuboops @shnuboops@qoto.org

When NASA's Lucy mission flew past asteroid Dinkinesh, it discovered a tiny moon. Not just any moon, however, but a contact binary moon with two large rocks gently resting against each other. Of course, it needed a name, so the IAU approved "Selam," which means peace in Ethiopia's language. Everything's connected here. Dinkinesh is the Ethiopian name for the Lucy fossil, and Selam is named after another fossil from the same species of human ancestor.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/lucy/2023/11/29/satellite-discovered-by-nasas-lucy-mission-gets-name/

Today I'm using Montage (http://montage.ipac.caltech.edu/) to make my own JWST mosaics since the pipeline ones are unsuitable. I'm actually having success! It ran straight away without issues on my Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in the PowerShell console.

@DanMorgan @chris
I was everGreen until the local green party member turned out to be a qanon conspiracy nutbag.... and the greens in canada really dropped the ball over the last few years... like, really droppped it. They were not ready for leadeship, which was heartbreaking.

Mastofriends! Put the moss down for a moment. I am lucky enough to have work in a sensational Clarkesworld issue! Again! Part 1 of my novella is in November's issue, 206, the rest will be in December issue 207. Huzzah! https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/

When Enrico Fermi formulated his famous "Fermi Paradox," he wasn't wondering why we hadn't found aliens yet but why they weren't already here. An advanced civilization should be able to spread through the cosmos in the same way life spreads on Earth. In a new paper, researchers studied the theoretical growth of civilization across the Universe. They found that it should match the behavior of other phenomena, such as how fire spreads or chemical reactions.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.06575.pdf

Why is it that we keep blaming our kids' depression and anxiety on social media and smartphones instead of the fact that we've turned the entire planet into a burning dumpster fire for them to deal with

Solar Sails Could Reach Mars in Just 26 Days

While SpaceX is working on Starship to carry huge payloads to Mars, the fastest flight times could be accomplished with solar sails. A new paper suggests that a 1 kg payload with a 100 square meter solar sail could reach 65 km/s relative to Mars. They could blast out of the solar system going 109 km/s, and if it's first directed towards the Sun, they could reach 148 km/s, getting to the heliopause in just 4.2 years. This opens up a range of possible missions, like the outer planets, interstellar space, and the solar gravitational lens.

#solarsail

http://arxiv.org/abs/2308.16698

✨ Solo by Pixelfed

We've been secretly building a single user federated photo sharing server (based on Pixelfed), with minimal setup, and built-in import

Solo is simple, download the code, drag your photos to the media directory and open your browser

So simple, yet super smart, Solo won't get in your way, but it will impress

Launching Oct 2023

@nickmartin Acted alone? Perhaps. Was part of a republican extremist movement that includes tens or hundreds of thousands? Yes. Law enforcement doing much about it? Not really. The occasional preventative arrest. Just one drop in the ocean, when there should be a massive operation that included purging the military and law enforcement itself of similar terrorists.

Sure why not https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2257684035907

@shel @yezzer @namdoan @laurenshof

So without wanting this to be personal at all …
there are two ways of “consuming science” … the concluded outcomes we can now buy off the shelf, and the messy process between nothing and something.

School and mass media have shaped the common image of science into the former, and very problematically so IMO.

Actual science is the latter, and is what I refer to in finding #lk99 interesting, which is not dependent on becoming a proven technology.

#nowplaying #music #musica #musique #WeAreTheRadio #MastoMusic #MastoRadio #PouetRadio #RadioPouet #NowPlaying #FediRadio #TootRadio #RadioToot #fedimusic #jazz #jazzmusic @jazz

https://song.link/s/6nQocCdBEDoy6aGxk1vGwt

@Christo @sellathechemist

Oddly enough, for me the first page of search results on both Google and DuckDuckGo show perfectly reliable results. Mayo Clinic, Wikipedia, NHS etc.

OUCH. Canada has enacted laws to require big tech companies that generate ad revenue while sharing links to stories from Canadian news outlets to compensate those publications, and the response of Google and Meta is… to start removing all Canadian news links from their pages.

That means Canadian news just won’t appear in Google searches. It spells disaster for Canadian journalism, all because they asked to share the profits from their work. https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-block-news-links-canada-over-law-paying-publishers-statement-2023-06-29/ #Canada #news #Google

The failure of the Internet to deliver its promise is particularly noticeable when you hunt for repair manuals for a product from the 90s. Used to be, the information would either be there or not there, finable or unfindable.

Now, there are hundreds of algorithmically generated sites claiming to have it just because it appeared in their search logs, generating potemkin village content traps with endless paging, broken-thumbnail named-like-the-file-you-want but actually-just-ebay-photos bullshit

“We wanted to alarm the government on the international stage.”

These architects selected to represent Canada at Venice’s Biennale disrupted impressions that Canada is a well-functioning social democracy that has housing all figured out.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2023/07/03/Canada-Housing-Woes-International-Art/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_content=070423-m&utm_campaign=editorial

Did you know that many Canadian universities, including my own, are having a recruitment and retention crisis? We just can’t get people into the classrooms since the Pandemic. You know what would solve that overnight? All governments abolishing Post-Secondary tuition for all education. (and forgiving student loans for those that still have them).

Time to break away from our US-style educational hangups. No matter your age, education should be free, always.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/supreme-court-student-loans-1.6894002