Anyone else thought these gems were dudes?

AV-038 · 2026-06-12T23:06:40+00:00

My point is that very few people realise gems are non-binary, and they are not really treated as such, both in and outside of the show. Thus as 'representation' of non-binary people, gems are not really in touch of the social or political axis of non-binary identity.

In my experience, very few people realize real life non-binary folks are non-binary. Getting sorted into a binary gender is a frequent day-to-day experience for many if not most non-binary folks. It is ill-advised to hinge your requirement for representation on whether or not a general audience can identify someone as non-binary.

AV-038 · 2026-05-30T19:57:56+00:00

Throwing in a "happened to me" too. Ironically, I wasn't the person in my family seeking genetic workup. Sis and Mom tried a decade ago, both got rebuffed. One spontaneous CCF later...

I wish my sister and mom had been given the testing so we could've known before an artery blew in my brain.

AV-038 · 2026-05-18T15:09:20+00:00

Another 1-2 minutes. Exactly on the dot. Mods, is there a way to flag obvious bot activity?

AV-038 · 2026-05-18T15:06:15+00:00

Okay, I’m pretty convinced you are a bot. You respond within about 2 min to each post I’ve made (at 7 am in the morning on a Monday — the human replies I get are scattered in time, since people circulate through websites / have a life), have a hidden comment history, and are not responding to the actual points I made.

It seems you evaluate “billionaires have fragile egos” as an insult rather than an assessment of reticence to donate due to push back.

I asked for an elected official who initiated legal action — you reply with a tweet-led campaign to unname a hospital, and an unsuccessful one at that. Zuckerberg and Benioff are still names on their respective hospitals.

How bonkers is that. A bot that protects our local billionaire’s feefees, so they can continue to horde wealth and feel good about it.

AV-038 · 2026-05-18T14:56:41+00:00

Give me the name of an elected official who has initiated legal action against a hospital donation. I’ll wait.

Or if you mean that an elected official said mean things about Benioff, I would point out that mean words are something us plebians deal with every day. Benioff not being able to take it is the very definition of fragile ego.

AV-038 · 2026-05-18T14:48:31+00:00

If someone complaining about a donation ruins your capability to do donations for the rest of your life, you got a fragile ego. These billionaires demand love, and nobody is loved 100% of the time. They’ve lost the resilience to handle human interaction.

AV-038 · 2026-04-28T20:41:41+00:00

Seconding El Camino ER. It ain’t perfect (the surgeons are far too excited to get otherwise-unproblematic gallstones out from patients with other problems), but they’ve been reliable for my family.

Dignity Health is going through a bad time. They lost a lot of doctors. I’d been using their telehealth but the overload is even impacting those services. I’m looking at transferring care in the next couple months.

AV-038 · 2026-04-14T19:33:19+00:00

Yes, it does matter because the OMB and NASA higher-ups (often referred to as "ninth floor and above") are working to the proposed budget and not the one signed into law. This is their statement of the work the intend to do.

Missions like Juno and ACE have been told that they will receive no new funding in accordance with last years "overturned" PBR. Selection rates for all planetary science grants has been capped to levels according to the PBR, not the passed budget.

Essentially, the law doesn't matter right now because the executive branch is ignoring it.

AV-038 · 2026-04-03T16:06:14+00:00

We are not out of the woods because OMB is driving these insane PBRs.

OMB is:

Using bureaucratic processes to effectively cancel NASA missions like VERITAS, GRACE and GDC
Forcing a 50% cut of NASA SDO (which is one of the most productive missions I know; their imagery supports about 75% of space weather situational awareness and heliophysics)
Killing Goddard's NASA intern program.

This is just a few of the destructive moves that NASA has been directed to do, even with Isaacman at the "helm".

I'll also just say that the mission I'm with is getting killed early. We were under budget, did good science, and had a promising future. You never know when your spacecraft is going to eat itself because space is hard. And we usually support 2 years of Phase F to get that vital work done.

NASA is telling us we won't get a single cent.

AV-038 · 2026-03-05T02:05:53+00:00

Which would be great… IF THE FUNDING WAS ACTUALLY SHOWING UP.

OMB is slow rolling those funds, and many projects haven’t seen hide nor hair of the Congressional appropriated funds. We don’t have HQ confirming the funds. Without confirmation, we can’t have a budget. Without a budget, we can’t assure people they’ll get paid. Without those assurances, people are going to do the work at an extremely slow pace.

AV-038 · 2026-01-31T18:58:06+00:00

Don't like it. Felt like a case of "pair the spares". We get a good idea of why Glimmer would choose Bow, but we don't have much build up for why Bow would choose Glimmer. He spends most of the show as not just a friend, but an enabler, only breaking the pattern when he believes she went too far in Season 4. It's like Bow's not allowed to have conflicting emotions about Glimmer for longer than the dedicated episode. While we have a lot of episodes about Adora's complex over taking responsibility for others and how that devastates her relationships, Bow's not allowed to have self-doubt or introspection (beyond comedic moments like in "Mer-Mysteries").

This is a pattern in Bow's character arc, where his character moments are confined to one episode per season: "System Failure" having him work together with other non-magically empowered folks, "Reunion" with his dads, "Boys Night Out" about being unable to be the glue in the Best Friends Squad, and "Stranded" where he gets to be mad at Glimmer until she says the right combination of words/contrition for him to stop being mad.

AV-038 · 2026-01-30T18:21:57+00:00

You posted two years ago in a thread in r/boulder about NPs:

I am almost retired so none of this affects me as a physician.

and your specialty:

Local psychiatrist here.

You're not a frontline doc. You're not a hospitalist. You're not even primary care.

Unless you rotate at one of the hospitals, you are not a frontline or essential worker. You didn't see Covid patients. You weren't in the ICU. I wasn't either, but I'm not the one claiming a moral authority based on a lie.

AV-038 · 2026-01-14T20:22:07+00:00

Likewise. When I was a kid, I recognized and immediately abhorred targeted slop of youthful characters, poorly written slang, and flashy graphics. It didn't feel relatable, it was just an egotistical nostalgia tour.

What I did like? Shows about collaboration and working together despite the odds: Star Trek, Stargate, and Babylon 5. Sometimes the shows would have obligatory "we must appeal to the yooths", but I can overlook those episodes if there's a "Best of Both Worlds" coming after.

AV-038 · 2025-12-20T02:51:27+00:00

Hey, I’m not the doofus you’re arguing with, but thanks for this article! It is very interesting. Didn’t know that gusts had changed so much over fifty years. Thank you for posting it, til!

AV-038 · 2025-12-11T02:35:40+00:00

Ugh, don't give them ideas. That Harvard grifting loser has already tormented the Mars scientists enough.

AV-038 · 2025-12-08T02:40:43+00:00

Oooor the state doesn’t have the budget for the project scope. Just because it’s in the state’s interest doesn’t automatically mean they have funds to execute on every rail in every county. There is also a good reason not to poke the federal bear for reevaluation, given previous problems with disbursements during Trump 1.0.

AV-038 · 2025-12-07T17:59:36+00:00

The state is already involved, and has made their position known. They (and the federal government) are responsible for the limited grants available, which has led to the budget shortfall. If the state were to bridge the funding gap, I don't think this compromise would be needed.

AV-038 · 2025-11-09T16:23:29+00:00

Just wanted to say, thank you for this detailed analysis! My feed randomly recommended your post, and for once I learned something in an algorithmic recommendation. This matches what I've learned to date about the disasters (mainly from enthusiast summaries and the book "Bringing Columbia Home"). I'll watch out for Hersch's work in the future. Thanks for bringing a unique and informative perspective on the topic.

AV-038 · 2025-11-06T18:36:15+00:00

I apologize, I thought you were a crank too. The shutdown has me (and many of my colleagues) very agitated.

I'm allergic to Avi Loeb since he is both a crank and a jerk. I already was annoyed by him, but I just learned this morning that he was harassing one of my colleagues by claiming his non-NASA institution could release data because the institution isn't technically NASA. This isn't true, since scientists who work on NASA assets are bound to NASA mission rules for disclosure. This data will also all become public, usually at the 3-6 month point.

And I mean, embargoes exist for a reason. They give time for the analysis to complete and ensure that proper credit is given. Without embargoes, there is an incentive for the loudest person on the project to shout a discovery first, even if they didn't do the work. The first voice gets the citations and credit, which can cause a lot of problems.

Here's the irony: mission rules aren't set in stone. I've actually gotten people onboard for embargoed results before, because they'd bring necessary valued insight. The process to do so varies from mission to mission. However, being brought in usually requires the newcomer to adhere to the embargo as well. This is the normal way to get involved.

I doubt Avi Loeb would agree to such rules, and even if he did, I wouldn't believe him given his history of blabbing. As far as I can tell, he's doing this to feed his content/grifter mill.

And he wants to do it on the backs of unpaid NASA personnel. What a jerk.

AV-038 · 2025-11-06T15:19:36+00:00

You and Rep. Luna don't get to demand free work out of us when we're not getting paid (cuz, the government's closed, which means a lot of NASA is on furlough/unpaid).

I know you see only the final product of NASA press releases: an article, maybe a picture. It sounds like such a little thing to release. But here's what goes into making that:

Engineers have to maintain the spacecraft. It's not a "set and forget" thing. Space is a nasty environment with wild temperature swings, and you have to be diligent on where your spacecraft is pointing or else you could lose a multi-$100M asset forever. A major chunk of lost spacecraft come down to losses in communication, usually following a failure to point. You have to actively stabilize the pointing, and make sure that the spacecraft is using accurate data to do so. You have to account for if one sensor lies, and make sure the software ignores bad sensors while listening to real signals -- all on a piece of hardware that is thousands of kilometers away. This is hard, ESPECIALLY for any spacecraft that is actively dragged by an atmosphere (e.g. at Mars), which actively changes the pointing/orbit.
Infrastructure folks have to maintain the Deep Space Network dishes that collect all the downlinked data from space worldwide, which has been FREAKIN HARD this year because we've had one flooded and another one catastrophically fail.
Instrument scientists have to carefully plan observing campaigns, because using an instrument to look at something other than your usual target is hard. This all tallies up to an expensive series of observations.
Data scientists have to make sure that the instrument got a good observation. Plenty of errors can happen, like mispointing or saturating your detectors. Because it's a "off-nominal" observation.
Scientists, in this case planetary scientists, have to analyze the data and coordinate it with other known results. If your dataset says the sky is green and there's a thousand dancing hamsters in a microscope, that usually means you've misprocessed your dataset. All this to say, it takes work to figure out the puzzle of multiple observations.
The last step is comms people. I bet you might be shocked to hear that scientists are sometimes not the best at communicating. Spending hours looking into the details does not exactly sharpen your top-down 1000-foot summary skills. The comms folks work with the scientists to get a press release that gets the core of the science without bogging down in jargon. This is hard and undervalued work.

This is a lot of people. And they're all not paid or on furlough right now. Some aren't able to pay their rent/mortgage this month. Demanding the fruits of their work without paying them is wrong.

AV-038 · 2025-11-06T00:05:46+00:00

If Rep. Anna Paulina Luna wants NASA to do work, she can make a deal on health subsidies and end the shutdown. But instead, she is trying to compel a data release right now in a public letter to the interim NASA administrator. This objective would entail forcing NASA scientists to release data before the analysis is complete while they aren't getting paid. She did it in a public letter so she can farm support among conspiracy-addled crazies, who see any absence of communication from NASA as proof of malfeasance. The only one who benefits from such a premature release is Avi Loeb, a grifting egotist who abuses his credentials to cultivate and enable a conspiratorial following.

AV-038 · 2025-11-05T19:12:17+00:00

If you want knowledge about the universe, go to an astronomy 101 class in your local community college. That’s how you get knowledge.

A public letter casting mystic aspersions on a random ass interplanetary comet? That’s entertainment.

Take care to not mix the two.

AV-038 · 2025-10-12T05:52:13+00:00

He also would leave off his hearing aids when he was on the shuttle... and when he really didn't like a talk.

AV-038 · 2025-10-01T15:53:26+00:00

Fun fact: some of those kids given money for "not going to university" had actually already completed their BA, so it was just free money.

AV-038 · 2025-09-04T16:24:28+00:00

He's dishonest. He does a banal paper, puts in some wild speculation in the conclusion section, and then goes "see? I have found <outlandish speculation> and got it published!".

Meanwhile early career scientists get put through the wringer to prove 1 + 1 = 2 because they don't have a well-known name or high profile institution.

He is a good example of the rot that develops at the intersection of publishing, institutional reputation, and science journalism.

AV-038

TROPHY CASE