Keysh

8 ms·

31.
by Keysh 2y ago
That's not even remotely correct. Just today I heard a talk about people looking at stellar motions in ultra faint dwarf galaxies, because standard dark-model theories predict they should have centrally cusped dark-matter density profi
32.
by Keysh 2y ago
Probably closer to 300 billion stars. (It's roughly the same size as the Milky Way, which is estimated to have ~ 100 to 400 billion stars.)
33.
by Keysh 2y ago
Nemo was indeed originally written as a former Polish rebel against Russian rule, but Verne's publisher objected on the grounds that this might offend Russians[1], and so the published version of Twenty Thousand Leagues had no mentio
34.
by Keysh 2y ago
The main beaches for tourists in the Canary Islands (on Tenerife and Gran Canaria, at least) were built with sand imported from the Sahara. (There are black volcanic sand beaches there naturally, but those were thought to be unappealing to
35.
by Keysh 2y ago
Yes, I did mean "chartjunk", but I agree with you ;-).
36.
by Keysh 2y ago
The "Global internet users" graphic near the bottom of the article is an impressively bad example of what Edward Tufte called "chatjunk". Not only is it visually pretty awful, it's really hard to tell where the data
37.
by Keysh 2y ago
Well, that happened with some European cities as a result of WW2. I remember a celebration in the late 1980s for a retiring British architect/art historian, who reminisced about being an architecture student during the Blitz in London.
38.
by Keysh 2y ago
Are a few brown bears more dangerous to marmots than the many black bears that already live there?
39.
by Keysh 2y ago
Or you can call plt.clf() to clear the frame.
40.
by Keysh 2y ago
Harris et al. 2023, “Diverse African genomes reveal selection on ancient modern human introgressions in Neanderthals” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09609... “… most Neanderthal h
41.
by Keysh 2y ago
> The syntax of python is also a bit verbose. Like, why do we need plt.show(), when I plot a figure obviously I want to plot it! That is kind of annoying. Fortunately, it's easy to turn that off by activating "interactive mode&
42.
by Keysh 2y ago
The preprint version of the main paper being discussed: https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2408.07745
43.
by Keysh 2y ago
The point is not "the fleetingness of life" per se, it's the question of what comes before and what comes after. Bede's implication is that the pagan religion of King Edwin had no explanation, whereas Christianity provid
44.
by Keysh 2y ago
Kandahar is a city; Gandhara was a kingdom. (But, yes, there is a theory that the name ["Kandahar"]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kandahar ) derives from Gandhara, as opposed to deriving from "Alexander&q
45.
by Keysh 2y ago
The site is back up again...
46.
by Keysh 2y ago
A significant amount of carbon-14 was added to the atmosphere from nuclear weapons testing. Since it has a half-life of about 5,000 years, most of it is still around. (The rest of it comes from cosmic rays smashing into atmospheric nitrogen
47.
by Keysh 2y ago
Gandhara (not "Ghandara") is mentioned in the Behistun inscription of the Persian emperor Darius, from about two hundred years before Alexander, so it's clearly not "a corruption of Alexandria".
48.
by Keysh 2y ago
Nitpick: “This event happens” is not in the passive voice. “This event is triggered” is in the passive voice — and so is “this event is triggered by subsystem A”. (What you probably mean is “writing something vague or lacking agency”.)
49.
by Keysh 2y ago
I remember thinking, after watching Margin Call first and then The Big Short, that you could pretty much identify exactly where within The Big Short the (single-night) events of Margin Call would have taken place...
50.
by Keysh 2y ago
The (Nautilus) article is confusing in the way it conflates "megaherbivores" (herbivores weighing more than 1 [metric] ton) and "megafauna" (any animal, regardless of what it eats, weighing more than 45 kg[1]). Also: &qu
51.
by Keysh 2y ago
Pull quotes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull_quote ) have been used in magazines for decades; they’re not exactly new.
52.
by Keysh 2y ago
Blue giants live only a few million years to a few tens of millions of years.
53.
by Keysh 2y ago
If they weren’t gravitationally bound, they would have left the Milky Way billions of years ago. Also, “in the halo” doesn’t necessarily mean “far from the center of the galaxy”; it means “not orbiting in the disk”.[1] Some of these stars a
54.
by Keysh 2y ago
Yes, but that’s not what they’re trying to do.
55.
by Keysh 3y ago
Non-paywalled article about the concept, including renderings of the hexacopter design: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-next-mars-helicopter
56.
by Keysh 3y ago
This is a serious study of actual "raw data" that directly contradicts Graeber: "Despite generating clear testable hypotheses, this [Graeber's] theory is not based on robust empirical research. We, therefore, use represe
57.
by Keysh 3y ago
This was a presentation at a conference; there’s probably no paper to read (yet, anyway).
58.
by Keysh 3y ago
Individual atoms or ions can be excited to "meta-stable" states, from which they can decay via emission of forbidden light, by other photons (usually X-ray or UV) or by energetic collisions with other particles. It has nothing to
59.
by Keysh 3y ago
It actually says it was written by the European Space Agency, for what that’s worth.
60.
by Keysh 3y ago
Speaking as an astronomer: what an oddly pointless (even misleading) press release. Non-expert readers could be forgiven for reading that and thinking this is some sort of "discovery" ("Hubble observes something new and unusu

More ›