SCOTUS conferenced on whether or not they’ll grant cert today, but there is no world about the result. We now won’t know before Tuesday.
[Tuesday-morning update]
We hoped we’d hear today, but the good news is that this time, it was apparently conferenced on Friday, and has now been relisted. The alternative would have been a denial, but now we may hear on Friday, and they will likely grant it.
[Bumped]
How to be rational about it.
…with hyperlong telomeres.
“These unprecedented results show that longer than normal telomeres in a given species are not harmful but quite the contrary: they have beneficial effects, such as increased longevity, delayed metabolic age and less cancer,” concludes the team.
The telomere theory has been around for decades, but we seem to be getting closer to actual implementation.
Yes, they were probably warriors though, as the article points out, they would have had to have a different fighting style.
It could (maybe) be done in a century.
But no, I don’t think they’d have to learn to eat crickets. The paucity of imagination in studies like this is always amazing.
…continues to flatline.
It will be cosmically hilarious if, after all the climate hysteria, the glaciers return in the next few decades.
AIAA announced a couple weeks ago at IAC that they are renaming their annual Space Forum “Ascend.”
Having gotten that announcement out of the way with the plug for AIAA (which graced me with a media pass to the conference, on top of my delegate badge), this cannot go without comment. As I was ascending (see what I did there?) the escalator to the plenary this morning, someone was handing out a flyer called “ASCEND TODAY.” In it, it had two op-eds.
The first was titled “The Argument For Riding Out Humanity Here At Home And Nowhere Else,” by “B. Line.”
Chances are it’s one of those survival tools ingrained into our genes — the notion that “humanity” as well as other species are conscious, sentient beings, aware of their own mortality and filled with the same emotions, desires, regrets, and consciences as though they were an individual.
It’s what leads us to feel sad at the notion of something becoming extinct as if the thing possessed a collective soul that would experience immense angst or anguish if it disappeared from the planet.
The reality is unless there’s a cataclysmic event, the end of humanity of any other species typically would mean nothing more than a gradual tapering of populations until there was none left. “We” wouldn’t be missed. But again, it’s not “we.” Or “us.” “We,” after all, are not part of a larger collective consciousness. Just as “we” don’t really win when our favorite sports tea does. “We” had nothing to do with it.
But while the end of humanity would not in reality cause any actual sadness — as human-caused global warming is proving every passing day — humanity’s presence is causing real pain and real harm to living, breathing sentient creatures. Our presence is slowly (quickly in geologic terms) making the earth uninhabitable.
This is why, personally, I don’t think we should attempt to perpetuate humanity beyond our own failed experiment here at home. Humanity has caused so much damage to our planet and the life that inhabits it, there’s little justification to inflict or scourge anywhere else in the universe.
I may have missed transcribing the first paragraph. I was going to fisk this, but haven’t had time, but I thought I’d at least toss it out as chum for commenters.
No, they’re not a climate-change story. It’s about rampant insanity and corruption of rent-seeking “green”-energy firms.
And this seems like cheating: Texas lures California businesses with promises of electricity.
What did socialists use to light their homes before candles? Electricity.
[Late-morning update]
California is approaching Puerto Rico territory.
Speaking of which…
[Thursday-morning update]
California is “winning” its way into the Stone Age.
And is the state becoming pre-modern?
Apparently. Pat Brown has to be rolling in his grave at what his idiot son has wrought.
[Bumped]
They’ve had a good run, but let’s face it; it’s over.
For the record, I love women.
Judith Curry, on a new paper concerning how to escape from it:
Naïvely, we might hope that by making incremental improvements to the “realism” of a model (more accurate representations, greater details of processes, finer spatial or temporal resolution, etc.) we would also see incremental improvement in the outputs. Regarding the realism of short-term trajectories, this may well be true. It is not expected to be true in terms of probability forecasts. The nonlinear compound effects of any given small tweak to the model structure are so great that calibration becomes a very computationally-intensive task and the marginal performance benefits of additional subroutines or processes may be zero or even negative. In plainer terms, adding detail to the model can make it less accurate, less useful. [Emphasis added]
Computer models can be useful in some circumstances, but they are not science.