bruces

troy_frizzell , 10 days ago

@bruces

One of the more pathetic behaviors of the American Nazis is the way they do things that don't make any sense because they believe it will make normal people unhappy. They just want to cause misery because they hate themselves and everyone else.

WhiteCatTamer , 10 days ago

@bruces “DeSantis gave no explanation for [vetoing] $32 million [art grants]”

Lol, how about this:
“Reelect me and I’ll continue to cut government spending to pay for these tax cuts; see how I cut $32 million in excessive spending?”

ramsey , 1 month ago

@bruces @pluralistic I don’t know about humor, but animals certainly do things for the fun of it. When it snows, my dog can’t wait to go out and run in it; she’s old but acts like a puppy in the snow. I saw a recent article about the orcas attacking boats, and it seems more likely that it’s a group of juveniles having fun. The same article mentioned a group of orcas who started wearing salmon on their heads, just for fun.

adriano , 1 month ago

@ramsey @bruces @pluralistic ah yes, the latest craze: “loxing”

uastronomer , 1 month ago

@mastodonmigration @bruces I'm pretty sure nobody's casting aspersions. It seems more an idle speculation.

150 years ago, the biggest argument against Darwin's theory of evolution was that there was no way that the Earth could possibly be old enough for such slow processes to work. Lord Kelvin proved convincingly that the Sun could not possibly be older than... I forget, a few hundred thousand years? Maybe a million? I forget the result but I had to replicate those results as an undergrad astronomy assignment, calculating how much gravitational energy there was in a collapsing cloud of gas, and how long it would take for that energy to dissipate.

But those arguments all took place long before we'd discovered the structure of the atom, or radioactivity, of course. The discovery of nuclear physics, the quantum nature of the universe, and all the other things you learn in a Modern Physics course, those things changed everything.

So I read Bruce's question more as "What further discoveries lie in our future? How dramatically will they change our current understanding?"

And for what it's worth, I think that none of the specific facts he mentions are likely to change. Those are observational data, not theoretical predictions. When Eratosthenes measured the diameter of the earth in 2600 BC, his results weren't affected by the discoveries of later phyisicists because they were simple measurements, reduced with high school trigonometry.

mastodonmigration , 1 month ago

@uastronomer @bruces

Happy to accept your assessment of Bruce's post. Would point out, however, that it did give rise to sarcastic comments disparaging modern day science. We are in a wonderous age of cosmology. New technologies like JWST are providing insights and clues to truly profound questions about the cosmos. Certainly we do not yet understand dark matter or dark energy, but the fact that the universe has given rise to a form of sentience that can ask these questions is truly amazing.

timt , 2 months ago

@bruces @pluralistic "Merdocene" is probably my new favorite era-name

keul , 2 months ago

@timt @bruces @pluralistic mine too, hope to see #Merdocene as a new Italian trending hashtag!