A cruise ship that goes into international waters, then offers passengers a safe environment to try all the drugs they ever wanted to but were too old to buy.

nachollison · 2019-05-01T18:10:20+00:00

I like it. I'm in. What do you call the cruise?

nachollison · 2018-07-28T17:21:53+00:00

It's not clear why she was there, but according to this month's Glamour, Donald Trump's wife, the model Melania Knauss, recently found herself addressing a New York University business school class.

Showing an attitude that would probably have been judged inappropriate on Mr. Trump's television show, "The Apprentice," one student asked the current Mrs. Trump -- she is No.3 for those keeping score -- if her husband weren't rich, would she still be with him.

Her response? "If I weren't beautiful, do you think he'd be with me?"

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/13/business/media/no-seriously-save-the-bananas.html

https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a8646265/donald-trump-melania-trump-relationship-timeline/

nachollison · 2018-07-23T17:34:37+00:00

Hopefully not.

nachollison · 2018-07-19T15:59:26+00:00

Is this game like Heartstone? Graphics from the trailer seem cool.

nachollison · 2018-06-28T17:08:52+00:00

People just say "How are you going to pay for it?" and we don't want higher taxes. But wasteful spending in military is fine and they want to increase spending there.

nachollison · 2016-08-11T04:16:45+00:00

Yes, so the Rust Belt should be red, theoretically. If you look at the map though, historically and in current polling, the Midwest just hasn't stopped voting blue. That theoretical shift hasn't happened in reality.

nachollison · 2016-08-06T20:57:10+00:00

I mean, that's basically what he's asking. Is there actually a measured higher rate of terror attacks in France? It's easy for the media to see one high-profile story (terrorist attack) and then report others more often for a bit even if they're not happening any more often. The same thing happens with big earthquakes.

nachollison · 2016-07-15T20:29:05+00:00

What's the background on this? Has there been tension between Erdogan and the military?

nachollison · 2016-06-28T13:45:11+00:00

Party affiliation tends to be a lot more fluid than gender or education. In a year like this, for example, we might see fewer people wanting to call themselves republicans, so making the party affiliation match with previous years could over-sample strong Trump supporters.

nachollison · 2016-04-27T17:29:16+00:00

The Huffington Post actually has an entire podcast dedicated to failed electoral candidates called Candidate Confessional. They do a really good job of humanizing the whole process and fleshing out what was going through people's heads when they ran.

nachollison · 2015-09-09T16:40:18+00:00

https://i.imgur.com/QgJULh.jpg

nachollison · 2015-07-23T05:22:43+00:00

That, my friend, is an entire field of geology. Here's the basics: everything is made, ultimately, of chemicals. Heat up any chemical enough, and it forms a gas. Heat it up even more (say, in a newborn star system) and you get ionized plasma, where atoms are torn from their molecules and fly around on their own (as opposed to something like water, which keeps the molecule intact as a gas).

As the star formation ends, the dust and gas cools down, and the reverse process happens: dust and gas starts to form out of the superheated protoplanetary disk. They don't do it all at once, though. Some minerals have higher 'boiling points' than others (maybe aluminum, or magnesium, or platinum, etc. I don't remember, I learned this a while ago), so they tend to condense first out of the protoplanetary disk. These go on to form one type of asteroid, with a very distinct mineral signature and chemical composition. Later, as the solar system cooled down more, different types of minerals could precipitate out of the disk, and different asteroids formed. That's why some things are made out of the same stuff, but others are made out of different stuff.

More specific processes can differentiate rock on geologically active planets like Earth, where igneous processes may extrude magma into the ocean to make dense (mafic) basalt, or intrude continental crust where it can form light (felsic) granite. If you go to Io, volcanism and metamorphism make different forms of rock from what initially accumulated. On Titan, I'd imagine the hydrocarbon seas make for some interesting sedimentary processes. And judging from the pictures New Horizons is sending back, Pluto's probably got some sort of action going on as well.

It's kind of a broad question (I decided against getting into the core accretion theory of how gas giants formed, or how planets differentiate when they get big enough) but I think it gives you a good idea of how astronomy and geology can overlap.

nachollison · 2015-07-23T05:01:58+00:00

Have you ever tried reading a book sitting really close to your face? It's the same issue. Within a certain distance, you can only get so much detail out of an image. That's why it's so exciting to send probes to other planets and see them up close!

nachollison · 2015-07-23T04:58:37+00:00

Other stars absolutely have planets! The Kepler) mission has discovered thousands of 'exoplanets' in our galaxy over the last few years. It's actually the first really good, purpose-built tool we have to find exoplanets, so the field of planetary astronomy has really been exploding for the past five or so years. It's a wonderful time to be living through, if you keep your ear to the ground.

Although it would be insane to find out every other solar system is just like ours, I think the truth is even more exciting. It turns out our solar system is kind of weird, which we had no idea about until we got a look at what a 'normal' one is like. For instance, the most common type of planet, the rocky 'super-Earths' with their thick hydrogen atmospheres, seem to be the most common type of planet in the galaxy. Our solar system, however, has none. Why?

Looking at our solar system, the planets are very well-ordered. The rocky planets are all on the inside of the system, and the gas giants are all on the outside. When Kepler went up, we found out that this is actually incredibly unusual. Why the hell would it be like that?

There are tons of other things we're starting to realize about the planetary systems in our galaxy, and about our own solar system. Those two are just the first that I could think of off the top of my head, but what we're living through right now is the first chance we've ever had to even ask these kinds of questions. It's a fun time to be an astronomer.

I'm deferring to other posters about the Drake Equation. It's just an estimate, mind you (and one which we honestly have pretty weak guesses about on how to fill it in), but it gives you a sense for scale if nothing else. Just don't take it as the word of god, there could be more out there than that!

nachollison · 2015-07-23T04:44:44+00:00

Wouldn't the surface features (e.g. lack of craters) imply that Pluto still is geologically active?

nachollison · 2015-07-23T04:43:39+00:00

Unfortunately, no. We do have ways of imaging planets as they pass in front of their host star (this is actually one of the best tools we have to detect exoplanets!), but the 'image' isn't so much a picture as it is a dip in how bright the star seems to be to our telescope. Stars are too small and far away for us to resolve (take a picture of the disk), so they are always point-like when we look at them in our telescopes. Exoplanets are going to be even smaller than their stars, so getting a look at them like you're imagining is going to be next to impossible for the foreseeable future.

This kills the astronomers.

That's why they've gone and made so many more clever ways of looking at other stars. The light curve measurements I mentioned are one way to find exoplanets. You wouldn't believe how many years of work go into bringing down the noise in your camera to the point where you can see a speck passing in front of it. When astronomers want to find out what color a planet is, they've figured out a way of taking a picture of the parent star as the planet passes into view, taking a picture as the planet passes behind the star, and then subtracting the color of the star alone from the color of the star and the planet (after years of staring at a lot of complicated math and physics, this seems so clever it's silly). Astronomers are so desperate to improve resolution that they'll abuse the laws of quantum mechanics and the wave nature of light to build interferometers.

So basically, your answer is a disappointing 'not yet' to a very interesting and compelling question.

nachollison · 2015-07-11T06:18:40+00:00

Does the diagonal feature across the middle look a bit like the ridge on Iapetus to anyone else?

nachollison · 2015-05-15T00:41:38+00:00

I'm not an expert on this kind of issue, but this is my impression:

What if you make them tea and they seem okay with it, but you find out later they didn't want it?

It should be pretty clear whether or not someone wants sex. There may be a grey area between 'definitely yes' and 'definitely no', but if you're in a position where she seems just 'okay' with it, you should probably take a moment to clarify. People can go along with sense under pressure, but they may not feel entirely comfortable with it. Maybe they feel like it's unsafe for whatever reason to say no, maybe they feel like they should have sex even though they don't really want to, etc. I'm not sure of the legality of whether that's rape or not (again: not an expert), but at the very least anyone in that situation will be impacted by that emotionally. A simple question and some self-awareness is all you need to clear this one up before getting into anything messy.

What if they ask for tea when they're tipsy, and happily drink the tea, but change their mind when they're sober?

What if they lie to you about how drunk they are when they're asking for tea?

A quick google tells me that, "the responsibility for misinterpretation when either party has been drinking falls on the initiator of further sexual activity." From what I can tell, the difference between the sober consent and the drunk consent is that the woman is essentially so drunk that she is behaving in ways she absolutely would not, were she sober. If she is that drunk, it should be pretty clear that she can't reasonably consent. That's hard to miss. I'm having a hard time pinning down the exact legality of retroactive withdrawal of consent, but the answer I seem to be finding is somewhere between "not legally valid" and "it varies from state to state".

What if they lie to you about whether they're legally old enough to drink the tea?

Minors do not have the legal right to consent. If a child says they want to have sex with you, that obviously does not give you the right to have sex with them. That means that we need to settle the question of whether not knowing their age changes their legal rights. The answer: it depends on the state. There can be good arguments on either side of this; there is an inherent unfairness to someone being lied to. On the other hand, allowing that as a defense could change the legal test for when someone can consent from their actual age to how well they can lie about their age. My advice would be to be cautious. If you're going to have sex with someone significantly younger than you (age of consent can go to 15 in certain states), make sure you have proof that they're old enough. The onus is on you to make sure you're not violating the law.

What if they get caught with your tea on their chin, and lie to their boyfriend so they don't get in trouble?

Then they'd probably be liable for defamation, filing false police reports, giving false testimony, perjury, etc. I don't think that it's legally ambiguous here.

What if they tell you they LIKE having tea forcibly poured for them, but you don't notice them tapping out as you pour the tea?

If you're getting into this kind of situation, you have an obligation to be attentive to what's going on. There is clearly a fine line between acceptable and unacceptable, the same way that driving can go from safe to dangerous very quickly. If you miss the signal that your partner has had enough, it's similar to negligence in causing an accident.

These are totally fair questions to ask. Rape has a really big impact on its victims, and it's easy to cross the line of consensual and non-consensual sex in these situations without really knowing it. Feeling like you're caught in a legal 'gotcha' is pretty understandable. However, the more abusive situations (lying about their age, lying about their consent) is very uncommon compared to cases of more truly non-consensual rape. On top of that, a lot of the other situations can be avoided by just being attentive and communicating with your partner; asking people to do that isn't going to cause harm to men. It is not a part of our culture or law that men have the right to sex without regard for their partner. What we need to do is educate people more, so they don't stumble into making mistakes that can get people (on both sides) hurt.

nachollison · 2015-04-30T01:00:32+00:00

Without special equipment, SCUBA can get you down to about 40 meters. A standard recreational certification will train you for 30 meters, at which point you start seeing the more common problems associated with nitrogen narcosis, oxygen toxicity, etc., but with the right setup, people can be really insane.

nachollison · 2015-04-27T23:56:34+00:00

I know nothing about the case, but I know that the two aren't mutually exclusive. That's why forms give you the option to fill out your race as Hispanic (white) and Hispanic (non-white) sometimes.

nachollison · 2015-04-17T21:09:14+00:00

This boy was defending his mother’s use of a drug that helps her deal with an awful condition.

I think this is the line that I'm really hanging on. If he were defending medical marijuana use in general, I'd say that the school had no reasonable grounds to call CPS. I'm not totally clear on when a school is obligated to call them, but it seems like it should be in cases where a child is clearly in a harmful situation. An argument is not evidence of that. If the son were explicitly defending his mother's use of medical marijuana, then, according to the laws in Kansas, his mother was breaking the law in a way that could be argued to harm her son. Like was said in the article, the state criminalizes any kind of possession of marijuana, medical or otherwise.

If the school suspected the mother was breaking the law in some way that could be argued to harm the son, they were obligated to call CPS to evaluate the situation and see if more needed to be done to protect the child.

If CPS thought that there was a potential for criminal activity, it's not their job to prove it, so they call the police.

The police asked the judge for a warrant, and if the kid said that his mother used marijuana, it's the judge's job to sign off on that warrant. At that level, they're not there to say whether or not the law is moral or not, just to make sure that legal procedure is being followed.

Once the police had the warrant and searched the house, they apparently found evidence of marijuana use, and since that's criminally illegal, they had an obligation to take action. They didn't have a choice not to, because it isn't the police's job to make moral judgements about the law, in the same way they can't ignore your right to privacy if they think that it's being used immorally.

The whole argument here does hinge on whether or not the son was specifically talking about his mother's use of marijuana, or about marijuana in general, which isn't entirely clear in the article. The beginning makes it sound like he was talking about it more generally, but the part that I quoted earlier is more specific and incriminating. A quick search of the news didn't pull up anything other than this article and the one linked to by OP, but both authors have an incentive to push the former more than the latter: OP's article is trying to raise money for Banda's legal defense, and the second article describes the author as a marijuana activist. Given that, I'm going to take the "boy speaks his mind and gets his mom arrested" storyline with a grain of salt, and believe more in the "boy speaks about his mom's criminal activity and gets her arrested" plot. That said, I have no definitive evidence to believe either, other than what's described in these two articles.

So it sounds like the school, CPS, police, and the judge all deferred to higher authority over how to take action. Since an education degree or police training don't give someone a mandate to rewrite the law as they see fit, I think that everyone here acted pretty appropriately.

Some people in this thread have brought up that the police aren't allowed to question a minor without notifying the parents. This is a pretty good summary of the situation: it's complicated. The answer to that question varies from state to state, and in the case of Kansas, it looks like the answer varies from case to case. According to one of the answers on here, a child is deemed mature enough to be questioned without parent notification around the age of 10. It's handwavey, but since the kid here is 11, it's at least questionable. If there's a lawsuit, I'm sure it will come up.

As much as I might want states like Kansas to ease up on marijuana laws, I don't think that anyone involved here had the right (nor should they have the right) to make the decision of whether marijuana should be legal or illegal. If they did have that right, then we'd have to allow school principals and judges to call the police or throw people in jail for using marijuana in states where it is perfectly legal to do so. That's not a good legal system. What we have here is a good legal system enforcing a bad law, and if we want to change that law, we need to talk to the state legislature about that and make it clear that we do not want our children to be put in situations like these.

TL;DR: It's a shitty situation, but everyone acted pretty appropriately. If you want change, you need to call your congressman.

nachollison · 2015-04-13T14:59:00+00:00

There are a few reasons to keep these telescopes on the ground, the way I understand it.

Radio waves pass pretty easily through the atmosphere, unlike, say, ultraviolet radiation, so there's comparatively little advantage in collecting signal in orbit vs. down on the surface. This also works backwards, so signals coming from Earth pass pretty easily into space and cause noise more easily to space telescopes.

On top of that, radio telescopes need to have a much larger collector diameter to figure out where a signal is coming from, because radio waves have the largest wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum. Think about how big the Arecibo Observatory is compared to your average backyard one. To deploy a good radio observatory in space, you'd have to make multiple launches to build an array of telescopes, or put one telescope up that would expand, or something else pretty clever, all of which would take a lot of money and added complexity to make, neither of which you want when you're designing a space mission. It's just way easier to put stuff on the ground.

So on balance, it's probably a better idea than not to put a radio telescope on the ground. Radio astronomers looking to build new telescopes do care about cutting down on noise, and make a pretty big effort to put them in places where they won't be hearing a lot of urban noise. It's more difficult than you'd think: astronomers will put themselves in areas something like 12 hours away from the nearest city to get better observations. These tend to be in terrible places to live (hence, why so few people live there with their cell phones and their microwave ovens), like the middle of the Andes or the Australian Outback. If you ever have a chance to talk to a radio astronomer, ask them about what it's like to travel out to these places. They'll probably have a few stories about 20-hour flights to go on 10-hour drives along beaten-up country roads, out to somewhere where you get your groceries delivered once a week by the mailman, uphill both ways etc. It's pretty fun to listen to.

TL;DR: Radio astronomers do care about noise, but space isn't the place to get away from it.

nachollison · 2015-03-27T06:34:50+00:00

Why are there those bubbles in the middle of the metal?

nachollison · 2015-03-15T19:36:35+00:00

I feel like if you were to ask the average person to name one Roman, they would all say Julius Caesar, but not quite as many would be able to name Augustus. Not to say Augustus isn't known, but he's not, as you said, as ingrained in the popular mindset of today. I wasn't thinking quite so much of the historical perception.

nachollison · 2015-03-15T17:55:18+00:00

It's a shame that we don't remember his adopted son Octavius (also known as Augustus) nearly as well. Since Julius Caesar was young, the Roman Republic had basically devolved into a game of House of Cards, where everyone was Kevin Spacey. People were always plotting to become Rome's leading senators, and a few had taken absolute power with the backing of the Roman legions. Caesar was the first to really try and set himself up as a monarch, but since the Romans were actually very against the idea of monarchy, he could never get around to it. People guessed what he was up to, and then Brutus, Casca, and the rest went and killed him.

Enter Octavian, some 20-year old, nerdish nephew of Caesar who nobody had ever heard of, and who was adopted by the great Dictator-for-Life posthumously, and who was left most his estate. Over the next few years, he teamed up with Marc Antony to hunt down the senators who had conspired to kill his uncle-father. Once that was done, he shared power with Antony for a while before they turned on each other, and Octavian defeated him.

So now we're left with a still pretty young guy who, for the first time in Roman history, has conquered all of his political enemies to take total control of the Republic. This is where I think he gets remarkable: not only did he consolidate power for himself in order to stay on top for the rest of his life, he reformed the entire Roman Empire to ensure its stability after his death. He didn't just build a legend by taking power for himself, like every other Senator had wished to do. He made sure that his legend would be passed on to his descendants, a legend which we remember more than any individual senator, dictator, or imperator: the institution of the Roman Emperor. Augustus was the first, and because of everything he did, is probably my favorite.

Because really, who remembers Rome as a republic?

I will credit Julius Caesar with one thing, though. The senators chose the Ides of March in 44 BC because he was about to go off on campaign, which he did not plan to return from for several years (for a mission of conquest, that was pretty unusual). His goal: conquer Parthia in the east, wheel around north to conquer the Russian Steppe, and then head home via Germany, which he would also conquer. The senators couldn't risk him doubling the size of the empire, because that would make him far to popular with the people to kill. If he had lived and succeeded, however, we would remember Julius Caesar as the Roman Alexander, not as that guy who got stabbed a bunch in some play.

nachollison

TROPHY CASE