you could go to your local library and carry a USB stick.

I don’t remember it this way. Nothing else came close to the portable storage capacity of CD (and thus CD-R and CD-RW). The iomega zip drive was still a popular medium, allowing rewritable 100mb or 250mb cartridge. That was the preferred way to get big files to and from a computer lab when I was an engineering student in 2000.

USB flash drives had just been released in 2000, and their capacity was measured in like 8/16/32mb, nowhere near enough to meaningfully move CD images.

Then again, as a college student with on-campus broadband on the completely unregulated internet (back when HTTP and the WWW weren’t necessarily considered the most important protocols on the internet), it was all about shared FTP logins PMed over IRC to download illegal shit. The good stuff never touched an actual website.

For what it’s worth, that particular format war, the format backed by more porn studios (HD-DVD) actually lost to the one with less porn backing (Blu-ray). Personally I think that the PS3 tipped things over the edge.

Wasteful of what, though?

If a particular farm can produce 1000 kg of meat and 500kg of bones/other waste in a year by raising female meat chickens, would it be a waste to devote that farm to raising 500 kg of meat and 400 kg of bones from male egg chickens? In a sense, that’s a waste of the farm to produce half as much meat as it can produce through killing chicks.

It’s a philosophical difference on what weight to assign to the lives of chicks, adult chickens, other resources including human labor, etc. The lazy shortcut is to maximize return on dollar investment with no regard for any of those moral, ethical, and philosophical considerations, and that’s what most of the industry does today, but even if you shift to a new moral framework you’ll need to decide how to weight those things.

Dual purpose breeds for both egg laying and meat production are poorly optimized at either. So the industry has moved onto specialized breeds that are best at doing one of them.

Plus raising roosters together is much more logistically challenging than raising hens. So they’d need much more space and much more oversight/labor. So rather than devote some resources to raising males of breeds that are good for laying eggs, they’d rather devote those same resources to raising much more meat from females of meat breeds.

We have tons of evidence that it happened but our models for explaining and predicting it are bad at consistently and reliably explaining everything we’ve already seen, and each new discovery seems to break those models even more.

The theory is the model trying to explain how it works. The fact, though, is that we have evidence showing that it did happen, even if we don’t have a unified theory of how it happened.

Imagine a car crash site, where the cars have definitely crashed, but everyone has different debates about what caused the crash. Imagine further that the specifics of any person’s explanation has a few inconsistencies with what we see. So we’d have the fact that a car crash happened, but lousy theories explaining how it happened.

So anybody who says dark matter doesn’t exist is plain wrong, the discrepancies are there plain as day.

There’s dark matter, the real thing that exists and we can “see”.

No, we have observations that are consistent with the existence of matter that does interact gravitationally with regular matter, but does not appear to interact with light or electromagnetic forces. It’s not like any matter we know about, other than the fact that it seems to have gravity.

General relativity works really well to explain matter in the solar system. Bigger than that, you have to use something else. The general consensus is that dark matter exists, but it’s not strictly proven, as there are alternative theories.

Then, even bigger than that, dark matter alone isn’t enough, you need dark energy to explain some observations, if you assume that cosmological constants are constant. If it turns out that they’re not truly universally constant, we might need to modify some theories (including the proposed existence of dark matter and dark energy).

Then there’s the theory of gravity, this is our attempt to explain why gravity exists and why it does the things it does.

Not just the why, but also the what. We didn’t observe gravitational waves until 2015. People have proposed the existence of dark matter and dark energy because observed gravity doesn’t behave as our models would predict at certain cosmological scales.

The dude in charge wasn’t even a billionaire. He was just some founder whose company wasn’t doing all that well, financially. I think his peak net worth was something like $25 million, and that was mostly in stock in his doomed company. $25 million is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s also not quite enough money to explain the dude’s arrogance.

Virtually all marine vessels are certified by organizations such as the American Bureau of Shipping, DNV, or Lloyd’s Register, which ensure that they are built using approved materials and methods and carry appropriate safety gear. It has been widely reported that Rush was dismissive of such certification, but what has not been made public until now is that OceanGate pursued certification with DNV (then known as DNV GL) in 2017—until Rush saw the price. “[DNV] informed me that this was not an easy few thousand dollar project as [it] had presented, but would cost around $50,000,” he later wrote in an email to Rob McCallum, a deep-sea explorer who had also signed Kohnen’s letter.

Later in article:

Reality was more prosaic. Like most startups, OceanGate was in constant need of funds. Rush was trying to save money wherever he could. Interns, who made up around a third of the engineering team, were paid as little as $13 an hour. (When a manager pointed out in 2016 that Washington’s minimum wage was just $9.47 an hour, Rush responded, “I agree we are high. $10 seems fair.”) Rush also downgraded the sub’s titanium components from aerospace grade 5 quality to weaker and cheaper grade 3, says one former employee.

I knew they were being cavalier about safety, but didn’t realize they were penny pinching to this degree.

Oh don’t worry, malicious .exe files were all over the forums back then.

OP is just republishing the comics of the day published on the official Far Side website.

I’m volunteering at an animal hospital.

Animal Hospital?!?

The animals are the patients.

Oh. That makes sense.

Are committee meetings immune to runaway political madness? Who’s on the committee? How does the committee make decisions? Can those decisions be revisited?

I’m not convinced that today’s state of science is any different than in eras past, tracing all the way back to kings and wealthy patrons throwing their political and economic might behind their preferred scientific endeavors.

Science was political in non-capitalistic societies, as well. That’s the point of my second paragraph: science requires resources and however a society steers resources to productive uses, a scientist will need to advocate for their research in order for it to get done.

I think Nathan Pyle’s work is hilarious. The Strange Planet stuff isn’t for me, but the rest of it is.

IMO, HR should hide the identifying information of candidates from people making the hiring decisions

That would shift towards another metric of whose resumes look the best. That might be an improvement, but we’d still be talking about how much bullshit there is in making your resume perfectly tailored to a particular opportunity. And at that point we’re still talking about the skills that go into a grant application or a submission of a paper to a conference. That’s the soft skills that make science possible, even if submissions are anonymized.

Only facts should matter, only agreed truth should be the topic the rest of it is very obviously poisoning the entirety of the effort to understand our world.

I don’t understand how you’d prioritize things using only facts, and not some kind of extrinsic value system that assigns weights to those facts.

Let’s say you have a huge infrared telescope sitting at a Lagrange point, between the earth and the sun. How would you determine what it should be observing at any given time? There’s only 8760 hours in a year, and the telescope was designed to last for 5 years, with the hope of 10 years. How do you divide up that finite resource?

Now do the same for every particle collider, double blind medical study, paleontological excavation, test nuclear reactor, etc., fighting for a finite amount of science money, and you’ll have no choice but to define priorities according to projections and uncertainties and value judgments.

To put it bluntly, science costs money, and persuading people who control money to spend that money is itself a skill.

Or, zooming out, science requires resources: physical commodities, equipment, the skilled labor of entire teams. The most effective way to marshal those resources is with money, and management/sales skills are necessary to get those resources working together in concert.

A private equity firm bought them to naked short the stock

You just like throwing around words regardless of meaning?

They owned equity, so they were long, not short. They owned a stake so they weren’t naked.

What they did was a simple extraction of value from something they owned, destroying it. It has nothing to do with short selling, and has nothing to do with manipulation of stock trading (after all, they took it private so that it wouldn’t be publicly traded, so there were no public traders to manipulate).

Motorola Solutions is a dominant radio manufacturer in the government/first responder space, as well as major infrastructure providers. Yes, that means cops, but it also means firefighters, ambulances, trains, buses, airports, and any fleet of mobile service for mission critical stuff like electric utilities, telecom, and some aviation uses. Back in the day of trunk radio, it used to be common for taxis, too.

Motorola sold its consumer mobile businesses (cell phones) in 2011 in a spinoff as “Motorola Mobility,” around the time it was shutting down and selling off pieces of its space/satellite businesses, but kept most of its other businesses. Today’s Motorola Solutions is the legal successor to the Motorola that invented the cell phone.