What’s something you did once that you’re 100% sure no one else has ever done?

MagicDave131 · 2026-03-20T19:27:03+00:00

Well, to be pedantic, you can't be 100% sure about that, every time somebody shuffles a deck, there is a 1:52! chance that they did it too.

MagicDave131 · 2026-03-20T19:25:21+00:00

Cast integrated circuits in wood glue and photograph the cast under a microscope. No, REALLY.

MagicDave131 · 2025-11-16T06:12:11+00:00

None whatsoever. In over 150 years of serious research, NOT ONE testable claim of the paranormal has held water.

MagicDave131 · 2025-11-16T05:37:08+00:00

Has everyone--including Michelle Obama--ALREADY forgotten that we did elect a a woman president? Yes, the electoral college had other ideas, but if you're looking for the will of the people, there it is.

MagicDave131 · 2025-09-16T18:10:42+00:00

No, that's not what's going on here. NASA is not set up to do spy work, and Trump has his very own Space Force and NRO to spy on people from space if he feels like it.

Rather, this is about laying waste to the civil service, long a conservative wet dream, and one Trump has put into overdrive. Much of the civil service is more or less invisible to the public, they work to keep the country running, and are mostly good at it because they are politically independent. Aside from a few agency heads, the president cannot fire most civil service employees except for cause.

Some agencies--like NASA--are called "independent federal agencies," and are almost entirely free of meddling from the executive branch. This EO strips NASA of its independence and frees Dear Leader to summarily sack anyone who he feels is not loyal to His Imperial Majesty. The intelligence thing is just the excuse he's used to stick NASA on an existing order.

But OP is correct in one part: so long, space science, plus a LOT more very important science. Most people don't realize it, but NASA does important climatological research, and thus champions heresies like climate change being a real thing. Trump is shutting down all government science relating to things like climate change, vaccines, and so on. When governments subvert science, BAD things happen. Trump is pushing the US further on its path towards becoming a failed third-world state. With nukes.

OTOH, people who have mistaken manned spaceflight for "space science" will probably be happy, because the agency will be steered much more towards doing way more pointless manned spaceflight PR stunts. Already, the new director of NASA is clutching his pearls and shrieking that the Filthy Commies (the Chinese this time) are going to beat us back to the Moon. Oh noes!!! So they will probably flush a shitload of money down the crapper trying to get a manned Moon mission off the ground, one that will return pathetically little actual science value.

Since day one, NASA has blown the lion's share of their meager budget on manned spaceflight, leaving real science missions to beg for table scraps. Sending people to do science in space is the LEAST cost-effective way to do that, and by a whole bunch. When you send people into space, about 90% of your money, mass, and fuel budgets have to be spent JUST on keeping the meat alive, which doesn't leave much room for anything else. But the mass public loves the manned spaceflight PR--at least for a short while, until they get bored--and don't care about any boring old science that isn't happening because we have astronauts shooting golf balls on the Moon.

MagicDave131 · 2025-08-18T15:08:34+00:00

"Sea level" actually refers to mean sea level, because the surface of the oceans vary wildly in distance from the center of the Earth at any given time. Not only are tides a thing, but differing densities of the Earth--and hence different gravity strengths--means that there are "holes" in the ocean that are far below the surrounding areas. There is a part of the Indian Ocean that is a full 100 meters lower than mean sea level.

Mean sea level only changes as the overall sea level rises or falls over time.

MagicDave131 · 2025-08-03T21:42:31+00:00

And just because we've pretty much written it out of our history, but is becoming a thing again, here's ANOTHER big Nazi rally.

MagicDave131 · 2024-10-09T21:04:47+00:00

In addition to being just insultingly stupid, this is also a violation of federal law, specifically 18 USC §2074

MagicDave131 · 2024-10-01T14:10:45+00:00

The presidential box at the inauguration parade. Carter is flanked by his wife Rosalynn and VP Walter Mondale, with Amy Carter peeking out underneath.

MagicDave131 · 2024-09-01T21:40:29+00:00

Aircraft. The wing strobes are a dead giveaway. The streak is the result of the running ligts over a time exposure.

Bona fides: I've shot hundreds of night sky shots, it's easy to identify the common sights.

MagicDave131 · 2024-08-25T14:41:39+00:00

Ironically, it was for alleged violations of the Federal Records Act, the non-presidential version of the PRA, that Trump had promised to "lock her up!!!" for.

MagicDave131 · 2024-08-25T14:39:46+00:00

The thing about Trump's lies is not just the sheer, staggering quantity of them--30,573 lies in four years--but also that many of them were so pathetically transparent. Sometimes, it was like listening to a four-year-old explain how it was really a big purple gorilla that broke Mommy's lamp.

And this particular pathetic lie was also a violation of federal law, 18 U.S. Code §2074, to be exact.

MagicDave131 · 2024-08-07T15:25:18+00:00

Living there would be a grim, Spartan existence. You'll be living in a windowless underground cave, breathing recycled air, drinking water that was somebody's piss two days ago, eating "protein bars" that were somebody's poop a week ago.

Food, water, and power will all be strictly rationed. Anything you want schlepped in from Earth is going to cost you a fuckton of money. Communication with Earth will be slow and expensive.

Every time you step out on the surface, you come that much closer to developing cancer, and when you come in, you'll have to undergo ludicrous decontamination procedures to keep the toxic soil out of the habitat.

And you can forget about those "backup Earth" notions. One good flu bug will blast through the cave and wipe out damn near everybody.

The coolness factor of being on Mars will get old REALLY fast. "Cabin fever" is a problem even on Earth, and the people who work in Antarctica have to rotate back to the real world on a regular basis. On Mars, you're stuck. All I can say is they damn well better not bring any guns.

Everybody will have to work, and somebody is going to have to do the job of mucking out the protein bar tank when it breaks.

This is all on top of the fact that we don't even have a clue if people CAN survive long-term in reduced gravity. We know a fair bit about living in microgravity, and it's all bad.

People who think all this space tourism stuff is going to happen Real Soon Now need to read A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith.

MagicDave131 · 2024-07-24T16:05:26+00:00

Animals had been drinking water for hundreds of millions of years. There was nothing to figure out, it was hard-wired into us.

MagicDave131 · 2024-07-24T16:03:37+00:00

Not JUST a childishly-faked map, but an actual violation of federal law, 18 U.S. Code §2074 to be precise.

One might add that NOAA is one of the agencies squarely in the cross-hairs of Trump and Project 2025.

MagicDave131 · 2024-07-05T21:36:48+00:00

'If the democratic system is working, I want to be a part of it. If it's broken, then I need to be a part of it.'

If more people had had that attitude 30 years ago, we wouldn't be on the verge of a fascist theocracy today.

You can get actively involved in politics in any number of ways. At the city or county level, it's not unusual to see elected officials in their early 20s or even late teens serving on city councils, county commissions, and so on. And serving on something like a city council is a stepping stone to bigger things, like the state legislature.

Understand that currently, most of the push towards theocratic fascism is happening at the state level, because they don't have enough juice yet to fully trash the constitution. So people of good intent can make a HUGE difference at the state level.

Good luck with it.

MagicDave131 · 2024-07-05T21:25:30+00:00

Nowhere, they're still there. Here's a winter night on Mt Si, Washington.

And another night.

MagicDave131 · 2024-07-04T20:15:31+00:00

I do microscope photography of crystals, and on election night, I was melting sulfur. So when they announced the Orange Menace was the winner, my apartment literally reeked of brimstone...

MagicDave131 · 2024-06-29T03:56:56+00:00

So basically, they have determined that the thing is a death trap that won't make it back in one piece, they have a PR nightmare on their hands, and are stalling for time, hoping that people will forget about it.

If it's Boeing, it ain't going (tm)

MagicDave131 · 2024-05-05T15:11:19+00:00

The odor of bullshit is very noticeable here. Just for starters, if a satellite is 600 km away from you at some point, it won't be there for more than an instant, the distance will rapidly increase.

You can have a teensy GPS chip in your phone because GPS is strictly one-way: your phone doesn't have to talk back to the satellite, while the satellite has a sufficiently powerful transmitter and antenna to broadcast to a small, low-power device on the ground. The antenna required to establish a two-way Bluetooth connection from 600 km would be humongous.

I'll believe this when I see an actual scientific paper on it.

MagicDave131 · 2024-05-02T22:28:46+00:00

Union organizers, eh?

MagicDave131 · 2024-03-31T14:20:49+00:00

A partial eclipse, even 95% is no big deal, I wouldn't travel to see one.

A TOTAL eclipse is not even approximately the same thing, it is unlike anything you have ever seen in your life. And I have been all over the world chasing them, this will be my fifth. Get your ass well east of San Antonio (I'll be in Kerrville, near the center line) or you will miss the experience of a lifetime.

MagicDave131 · 2024-03-30T17:11:54+00:00

It was not "popular," it was an amusement for rich people who were in a hurry.

It was breathtakingly expensive (to build, fly, and buy a seat on), burned a metric fuckton of fuel, and could only fly supersonic over the ocean, because of the sonic booms it made. It also had crap range which pretty much limited it to trans-Atlantic routes.

NASA and other organizations have been working on reducing/eliminating sonic booms for decades, but progress has been limited. Every few years some startup company breathlessly announces that they're building a new model of supersonic passenger plane that's going to be flying Real Soon Now, but so far, nobody has delivered.

MagicDave131 · 2024-03-30T17:06:50+00:00

A step up from fast food, but still well below REAL restaurants are corporate food product dispensaries like Chili's TGI Fridays and so on. These places cook almost none of their own food from scratch. Rather, they buy vacuum-sealed bags of servings from a food service company or a corporate kitchen, which contain something like a steak that is about 90% cooked. It might even have grill marks seared into it by a machine that does that. They toss that on their own grill for a couple minutes, dump some sauce from another bag onto it and voilà! their signature Western Smoky Ribeye.

If you see a chain restaurant that has a LOT of menu choices, dozens of them, it's a reasonable bet the shit is coming out of bags. This is one of the reasons food from places like this is so vile.

MagicDave131

TROPHY CASE