NASA will announce its 2021 crop of astronauts which was delayed at least twice due to COVID 19.  There were around 20,000 applicants for this arduous job.  Which is surprising since the requirements while not super common are not super uncommon either.  I tried my luck at being the third astronaut from the tiny village of Bellwood IL. Maybe I still have a shot at getting to pretend to go to Mars in a ground based NASA simulation mission known as CHAPEA.  Without a doubt those who are selected are or will be in very rare air.  (rimshot)   

UPDATE: Here are NASA's New Astronauts.

Big words are scary and express ideas that are not easily understood and are not easy to be logical about. Apparently, the word neurodivergent is woke now. While the woke want to call pedophiles “minor attracted people” and conservatives are outraged by this (for all the wrong reasons). Of course, simple mathematical ideas that one would learn beyond grade school are also woke and therefore bad.

Critical Race Theory like so much science, even social science, can be used for good or evil. Physics invented the atomic bomb which can destroy the world. Physics invented the nuclear power plant which can generate carbon free energy and help to save the environment. Chemistry and biology invented medicines that can save lives as well as bio toxic and chemical warfare which can take them. Somehow “CRT” is what people want to ban in part due to a total misunderstanding of what it is and what it is not. In the end I will show how I use these ideas to be sure I am being fair to the diverse groups of students I teach math and science to.

One of the strongest results that Astronomy can produce is an image, a picture of a distant natural event we would never otherwise know about. Gravitational wave astronomy, however, focuses on just detecting gravitational waves. Each detector, which must be large, detects the equivalent of one pixel of gravitational wave. With two detectors we can verify that we have detected the waves and triangulate direction, with three or more we can do this better and better. Currently LIGO can and does produce images which show the probable location of the event that causes the gravitational waves on the sky. However, what I am writing about today is visualization of the gravitational waves themselves.

According to the 2020 Decadal survey published by the National Academies of science the US Large telescope program including the Thirty Meter Telescope are the number one priorities for ground based astronomy in the US.  For many good reasons. However, there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Native Hawaiian situation, which seeks to identify the indigenous stakeholder(s). That misunderstanding is that there exists some sort of duly constituted, or even constituted but not state or federally recognized indigenous Hawaiian only government that might not be being listened to.