> Very well argued. It's such a stunning dereliction the US let things get to this point. We were doing the "pivot to Asia" over a decade ago but no one thought to find TSMC on a map and ask whether Intel was driving itself into the dirt? "For want of a nail the kingdom was lost" but in this case the nail is like your entire metallurgical industry outsourced to the territory you plan on fighting over.
What's annoying about this is that it's the same people who drove the outsourcing and decline of American industry who are using the same framework they've been using to drive that stunning dereliction to argue that this is the wrong approach.
This is a fantastic recap of everything Juno discovered and the value of this kind of mission - there’s multiple discoveries in here that are at odds with our theoretical understanding of planetary formation, physics, and chemistry that can inform new science moving forward. One that stuck out to me in particular was that Jupiter’s massive magnetic field isn’t generated by a metallic core like we expected, but rather Hydrogen under pressures sufficient to tear free electrons.
Combine that with the fact that the Juno probe has now more than doubled its expected life, and this whole mission serves as as good of an argument for continuing to fund NASA as you’re going to see.
I am generally well read across a wide variety of fields, but now and again I come across a sentence or paragraph where the sheer density of information packed into a small number of well-chosen field-specific terms just stops me in my tracks. The abstract for this paper is a testament to the ability of jargon to increase the information carrying capacity of the limited bitrate of human language - it hit my head like a zip bomb.
As another reader who has no idea what any of this is about, I've coerced my favorite LLM to digest it into ooga-booga format in the style of this essay[1]:
# grug see big sky boom
- sky make ooga FLASH but not light, just invisible whoosh (radio).
- whoosh so strong, like sun work many day, but all squish into blink of eye.
- smart sky-people have big ear rock (CHIME). ear rock say:
"boom come from there, galaxy far, but not too far (only 130 million fire-circles (light years) away)."
- ear rock also have many little ear-brother rock across land, help point finger very good.
- finger point so good, sky-people know spot of boom smaller than tree forest (13 parsec).
- then, magic glass eye (James Webb) look at spot. see old fat star (red giant) glowing soft.
- but fat star not make ooga boom. hmm. maybe fat star have sneaky tiny angry friend (neutron star).
- tiny angry friend go "KRAK!" → make fast radio boom.
# lesson for tree-brain
- boom in sky still big mystery.
- now smart sky-people can say where boom come from.
- if know where, can watch with other eyes, maybe find secret of why.
- grug think: many sky boom = maybe angry tiny stars yelling far away.
# Ooga booga translation:
"Tree no know why sky yell. But now tree know where sky yell. Soon, tree maybe know why sky yell."
Nature really, really, really wants you to have kids. It took us collectively as a species most of our existence to find genuinely effective methods to alter our biology sufficient to block this process, and we still have a hard time doing it without dramatically impacting the host organism.
(For further exploration of the ideals of maps, James C Scott’s Seeing Like a State is excellent treatise for pulling the boundaries of the question back.)
All of these things are possible, but the cost difference between “put the plant in the dirt” and “put the plant in a specially constructed climate and humidity controlled box” are why large-scale hydroponics are only really used for high profit margin crops for which there’s a good reason not to just plant them outside.
Something that occurred to me a while back that I can’t stop seeing is that Americans fundamentally do not expect laws to actually be enforced and will get angry if they are, even when they voted for those laws. It’s something baked deeply enough into American society that we don’t consciously notice it, but no American actually expects to actually have to follow the laws they’re voting for.
An unfortunate aspect of the American system in today's political climate is that there are many veto points and it's even /typical/ for any new actions to be struck down by courts, so there is a sense in which it's rational to expect any new policies to never actually take effect.
I think from so many examples that many don't think the laws will be imposed on them. See so many latino republicans tearful interviews when their relatives get deported after supporting the Trump 2024 campaign. Or farmers who's business is selling their crops harvested by migrant laborers to overseas buyers. Factory owners or resellers dependent on imported goods. The list goes on and on, with the common theme of "I didn't think it would affect/happen to me!".
This reminds me of my interactions lately with ChatGPT where I gave into its repeated offer to draw me an electronics diagram. The result was absolute garbage. During the subsequent conversation it kept offering to include any new insights into the diagram, entirely oblivious to its own incompetence.
What's annoying about this is that it's the same people who drove the outsourcing and decline of American industry who are using the same framework they've been using to drive that stunning dereliction to argue that this is the wrong approach.
reply