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Avi Loeb And Aliens: The Right And Wrong of Science Funding. (Also Bing Image Search Brings up Porno When you Search for him)

Avi Loeb he prolific Harvard astrophysicist, dances on the edge of cosmic controversy. His research...

What Is And Is Not Plagiarism In Scientific Papers? Neri Oxman And Claudine Gay Did Nothing Seriously Wrong. A Basic Guide To Citation.

The online discourse of our time has come to the issue of plagiarism. Now Claudine Gay and Neri...

Asteroid 2007 FT3 Will Not Hit Us, And Other Predictions For 2024. Suppose It Did Hit Us.

In the past I have predicted certain things at the start of certain years.  This is a selection...

UPDATE: Claudine Gay Not Fired By Harvard. Claudine Gay Did Not Plagiarize. Weeks Later Resigns Due To Ongoing Pressure.

Christopher F Rufo has accused the president of Harvard of plagiarism in an effort so clumsy that...

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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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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.

As a test of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity the Event Horizon Telescope image shows us an extreme example of light being bent by the mass of a black hole. General Relativity (GR) predicts that solar mass objects will do this to some degree which is very hard but not impossible to measure. In the case of a black hole it predicts what Event Horizon Telescope saw to within the measurement precision of the EHT. Any modified theory of gravity that stands a chance would have to match these observations.

Real astronomical images rarely look like their artist representations.  The images produced by the Event Horizon Telescope will be no different.  That said, an image of the light near the event horizon of the black hole at the center of our galaxy will be many times more detailed than the famous image of a similar black hole from the galaxy M87.  The main reasons for this are distance and improvements in the instrument.  M87 is about 53 million light years away.  While the center of our own galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is just about 26,000 light years away.