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Transgender women who have been on hormones for years have no advantage in sports.

A study has been making the rounds and has been published in BJSM. It is a meta-analysis of various...

2025 The Year Idiocracy Was Utopia Compared To Reality

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the charlatans now shaping policy at the highest levels of HHS represent...

Charlie Kirk An American On The Level of Louis Farrakahn. Rest In Peace. He often quoted 'science' in a misleading way though.

Charlie Kirk was shot while exercising his constitutional American right to free speech. ...

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Hontas FarmerRSS Feed of this column.

My research focuses on astrophysics from massive star formation to astroparticle physics. Born and raised in Chicagoland I have lived in Bellwood, IL since 1984 and attended public schools here... Read More »

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Physics does not explain everything especially why people who are trying to buck the mainstream all end up “looking alike”.  More likely this is a matter of broader socioeconomic conditions which limit the options of those who wish to exist outside of the mainstream of society.  Unless a hipster makes their own clothing from scratch all they can do is create new combinations of clothing worn by the majority.  The number of combinations being limited means that those who try to dress differently than the majority wind up dressing like one of a small number of possible combinations of clothes manufactured for the majority. 

Oumuamua the object which passed through our solar system in October 2017 with a trajectory that indicates it was not of this solar system was never photographed.  We only saw a point of light that that changes in brightness as it rotates.   There could be many reasons a natural body might change greatly in brightness, trajectory, and velocity as it rotates.  In all the randomness of collisions between bodies in the heavens almost anything is possible.  However, when it comes to alien life, we have to be careful.  No one or two things can give us reasonable certainty.   

 

Explaining something simply is not easy.  Linus Tech Tips has done the best job I have seen of breaking down the computational aspects of how a project like LIGO works.  It helps to have a small video production studio to create good visual aids.  Physicist like me are most interested in the pure physics-based challenges in such a project.  Isolating a signal from all of various types of environmental noise involved in detecting tiny distortions in the distance between points, the space time metric (which is what gravitational waves are.)

Gravitational Waves

So, what is a metric?  In non-technical terms it is a measuring stick that gives the distance between objects in space-time. 

On Kevin Hart, Eddie Murphy could show him what an apology for past anit-gay jokes looks like.  Eddie Murphy managed to do this  in nineteen-hundred and ninety-six.  Kevin Hart never ever did apologize at all.

China has a track record of slow gradual advancement in space flight technology which is unlikely to alarm the US of A into action in the way Sputnik did. The timeline of their advancement suggests no reason to panic about their space program. Their achievement is great. Landing on the far side of the moon (the side which always faces away from the earth is no small feat.) This is a great achievement, but this is not the beginning of a new epoch of history or any such thing.