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A Personal Update: The Day To Day Work Of One Physicist.

A brief personal update as to what I have been doing.  There has been much interesting science...

A Simple Way To Assess The Likelihood K2-18 b Host Alien Life. The Odds Are Almost 50-50.

How can you as a person who is not a scientist know if a given claim of having found alien life...

Reported Failure To Reproduce Superconductivity, But Replication Of Apparent Diamagnetism, At Room Temperature In LK-99

Last week it was claimed that a material that would be superconducting at  normal pressure...

Understanding The Great Discovery of A Universal Gravitational Wave Background by the Interational Pulsar Timing Array Collaboration.

What are gravitational waves? What are Pulsars and what does it mean to time a pulsar? How does...

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Hontas FarmerRSS Feed of this column.

Currently I am an adjunct professor at the College of DuPage. My research focuses on astrophysics from massive star formation to astroparticle physics. Born and raised in Chicagoland I have lived... Read More »

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The pixels of the James Webb Space Telescope's first image just released today, that are the least interesting to the public, will be the most instructive to astronomy and astrophysics. The tinest faintest dot you see is a distant billions of years old galaxy. If an ordinary picture is worth 1000 words when that picture is of a ordinary looking scene here on a single planet, then every pixel of this image from the James Webb Space Telescope will be worth 1000 x1000 words. Without careful analysis of each pixel there is not much that can be said scientifically right off the bat.

Blaire White had an interview with a male to female post op transsexual / transgender who regrets having the operation in part due to complications of having had the operation.  Research has shown the overall satisfaction rate is about 91% with a rate of out and out regret of 2% (Boustos 2021).  The story of Shape Shifter a, detransitoner with regret is not unheard of.

Bored Ape Yacht Club has been exposed as a ironic or post ironic racist meme using modified Nazi iconography mixed with one of the oldest and worst types of anti Black iconography.   The crypto currency crash has taught us all that it was foolish to trade hard tangible, trade able money for intangible non legal tender and call it an investment.   NFTs have taught us not only will people do this, they will then trade their currency for artwork that is a cryptoracist anti-Black meme.   This is not the oh "everything's racist" kinda racist.  It's face smackingly obvious.   Yes many of the creators are non-White or non Anglo, but anyone of any race can be racist.  It's racist when a wealthy Black comedian makes fun of

The situation with Roe VS Wade has lead to a call by Justice Clarence Thomas to, in scare quotes, write of revisiting sodomy laws, contraception laws, and many other cases based on substantive due process. Why stop there? Many things we hold dear come from interpretations of the 9th and 14th amendment. People like Justice Alito now need to have it spelled out for them that rights exist even if not spelled out by name, but by custom.

Proposed below is a bill of rights that would solidify things all US Americans left and right have come to hold dear even if they do not know it.

The public perception of Black astronauts is best summed up by a line from the TV show "Archer".  That they are so rare they are like unicorns.  The truth is while there have been fewer than our African American share of the population would imply there have been many Black Americans involved in the space program, including astronauts since day one.  Everything big and important done by the United States of America, in peace and war, has been a team effort.  We have never had a diversity problem, but a problem of inclusion.  

The racially motivated terrorist in Buffalo is just the latest example of people in our communities who everyone knows are nuts, but no one will do anything about them. Part of this is because in our country we won’t take constitutional rights until a crime is committed. A bigger part of this is because our communities will not confront such people out of pure FEAR. A Critical Race Theory perspective of this would say that, regarding the Buffalo shooter, White racial solidarity was why he was not confronted by another White person about his beliefs. Beliefs that are extreme even by the standards of people who believe the “White Replacement” conspiracy theory. He has a manifesto that makes the organized KKK look sane and rational by comparison.