She probably just thinks it’s weird.

I’ve worked office jobs for two decades, and the only time I’ve ever initiated a handshake with someone is on the first time meeting them. Likewise, the only time anyone ever initiates a handshake with me is the first time meeting me… Anything more than that is extremely unusual in my experience.

Do other people try to shake your hand at the end of every interaction, or are you always the one who initiates? If it’s the latter, then people probably just find it odd that you’re handing out (sorry) so many hand shakes.

oooooo, that’s good.

I’d happily chat with Marie Curie for 3 hours while Einstein and Bohr argue with each other in the background.

For some reason all I can see when I look at this is this guy

It’s literally that.

This has gotta be satire, right?

…right?

I may be wrong, but I suspect that any nearby black holes (i.e. within a few dozen light-years) with active accretion disks would already be visible to us in visible light and would also be bright enough in x-ray emissions that prior searches would have uncovered them.

In my limited googling, the smallest active black hole I could find was A0620-00A, which is about 6 solar masses. Its accretion disk is visible in x-rays from 3000 light-years away, so I assume any small black holes accreting matter anywhere near us would also be visible.

So more sensitive x-ray instruments would be useful for finding more distant SMBHs, but not necessary for finding any small, nearby black holes that we could actually stand a chance of reaching with a spacecraft. Most likely there just aren’t any active black holes in our neighborhood — only quiet ones we can’t see in x-rays.

That’s a pretty good idea, especially when you consider another problem that needs to be solved by any fast-moving spacecraft: dust.

If a spacecraft hurtling through interstellar space at .3c encounters even a tiny grain of dust, the energy released by the collision is going to be enormous — more than enough to destroy the ship entirely. So far, the best strategy anyone has come up with to mitigate this risk is to just… send a shitload of probes all at once. Basically shotgun blast tiny craft at the sky in hopes that at least one of them makes it to the final destination unscathed.

I imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to modify this strategy and stagger the launch times somewhat to create more of a ‘caravan’ of probes that could also double as a signal relay.

The proposal here is very similar to the Breakthrough Starshot initiative that wants to send a probe to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to our sun.

Basically the idea is to take a very small (i.e. low mass) craft with a large solar sail and accelerate it to a significant fraction of the speed of light using very powerful ground-based microwave laser arrays. The neat thing about this concept is that all of the technology essentially exists already — it’s just a matter of scaling up existing concepts and miniaturizing existing sensors.

The black hole rendezvous suggested in this paper is a lot more ambitious than Starshot, targeting a distance of 20-40 light-years (for comparison Alpha Centauri is only about 4 light-years away) and a max speed of 30% the speed of light (vs a speed of ~10% c targeted by Starshot). I think the main problem here (other than the requirement of building what essentially amounts to a microwave death ray) would be developing an antenna that’s both small enough to fit under the strict mass limits and powerful enough to broadcast the data 20+ light-years back to Earth. Maybe space-time lensing effects around the black hole itself could be used to amplify the signal? Another problem is that even at extreme speeds, this is a multi-decade mission — like 70+ years. Considering the travel delay involved in sending back a signal, it’ll be a century at least before any data would arrive at Earth. Unfortunately, century-long projects are an extremely hard sell for the people who hold the scientific purse strings.

Oh, also… We don’t currently know of any BHs within the target range, and the paper’s author even admits that any targets more distant than 50ish light-years are basically unreachable. The current closest-known BH is more than 1000 light-years away, so we’ve still got a lot of work to do in finding a suitable target. Fortunately the field of black hole detection is advancing quickly, and the new Vera Rubin observatory is very likely to spot many previously-unknown black holes in the coming years. Hopefully some of those will be close!

maybe a wide field telescope and a software stack on the ground specifically built to catalog the “wobble” of stars and find invisible binary partners? It would double as an exoplanet detector, and IIRC there are already systems doing this.

This has indeed already been done! In fact, the closest known black hole to earth was discovered by GAIA, a space telescope that collects this kind of data.

We’ve also done what are called ‘microlensing surveys’ that look for the effect of spacetime distortion on background stars rather than the wobble of binary partners. Some of these have already found candidate objects over the years, however the new Vera Rubin observatory that’s just come online is expected to be really good at this sort of thing so we should spot many more over the next few years.

Accretion disks seem to have peaks around 7KeV, so maybe a very specialized x-ray telescope?

We’ve done this too! The Chandra space telescope has discovered hundreds of thousands of x-ray sources throughout the universe, including many, many black holes. Most of those are supermassive black holes at the centers of other galaxies, but hundreds of “local” objects have been found as well.

Would you like to play again?

You have selected . . . . ‘No’.

I’d pretty confidentially wager that most fucks are irrational

We’re not exactly sure, but we do know they’re not from impacts.

They occur in a region of the planet called Tombaugh Regio, which has some of the youngest surface features on all of Pluto. The leading theory seems to be that the pits are caused by ice fracturing as the ‘crust’ of the planet is stressed by internal forces.

We still don’t know for sure what’s heating Pluto’s interior, but one of the great discoveries from New Horizons is that Pluto is a very active world — possibly even as active as Earth’s surface. Warm(ish) water in the interior likely behaves similarly to how magma behaves on Earth, leading to activity analogous to plate tectonics and volcanism.

You can sue for [illegal* thing] or [thing that caused harm to you].

So the devs who’ve had their games forcefully delisted should sue as a class action. Shouldn’t be hard at all to prove they’ve been financially harmed.

No, you’re being Baader-Meinhof’d

DS2 gets a bad rap, but it really is a great game in its own right. Sure it’s kinda chunky to play, but you get used to its rough edges pretty quickly. It also (in my opinion, at least) far and away has the best vibes of the series. All of these games are known for being lonely and melancholy, but DS2 really cracks that up to 11. More than the others, this one really feels like you’re picking through the ruins of something that used to be great — which is sort of appropriate, I suppose, since many consider the first game to be superior…

It also has the most content of the 3 (if you include all of the DLC that you can easily get bundled), and also the most build variety when it comes to customizing your character.

Anyway, DS2 may still be the weakest Dark Souls and my least favorite in a lot of ways, but it’s also the one that I personally can’t stop thinking about. At least give it a go and see if it clicks with you, because the few things it does well, it does REALLY well.

10^9 Joules is roughly the chemical energy of a full tank of gasoline. The mass-energy of the car (or even just gas itself) would be many, many orders of magnitude higher.

ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study

I mean, with the way inflation has been going…

For anyone else who is as curious as I was: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/butterflies-parasitic-wasps-finland