There were plenty of morons in the 80s and 90s. Half the population suffered from severe lead poisoning. The other half were hopped up on neo liberal propaganda.

That checks out.

“When you don’t have any data you have to use reason.” - Richard Feynman, some guy who watch science shows a lot

Technically incorrect. There are no feathers.

But lava rock grinds are not part of the industrial waste stream repurposed for profit. This is innovation!

Microbeads are manufactured solid plastic particles of less than one millimeter in their largest dimension.[1] They are most frequently made of polyethylene but can be of other petrochemical plastics such as polypropylene and polystyrene. They are used in exfoliating personal care products, toothpastes, and in biomedical and health-science research.[2]

-Wikipedia

“Hey I’m people! Ahhhhhhh!.. I’ll kill you dead!” - Homer Simpson?

Maybe it’s because it’s because I just finished reading this section in Range, but I think it’s more than the engineers knew.

When sociologist Diane Vaughan interviewed NASA and Thiokol engineers who had worked on the rocket boosters, she found that NASA’s own famous can-do culture manifested as a belief that everything would be fine because “we followed every procedure”; because “the [flight readiness review] process is aggressive and adversarial”; because “we went by the book.” NASA’s tools were its familiar procedures. The rules had always worked before. But with Challenger they were outside their usual bounds, where “can do” should have been swapped for what Weick calls a “make do” culture. They needed to improvise rather than throw out information that did not fit the established rubric.

Roger Boisjoly’s unquantifiable argument that the cold weather was “away from goodness” was considered an emotional argument in NASA culture. It was based on interpretation of a photograph. It did not conform to the usual quantitative standards, so it was deemed inadmissible evidence and disregarded. The can-do attitude among the rocket-booster group, Vaughan observed, “was grounded in conformity.” After the tragedy, it emerged that other engineers on the teleconference agreed with Boisjoly, but knew they could not muster quantitative arguments, so they remained silent. Their silence was taken as consent. As one engineer who was on the Challenger conference call later said, “If I feel like I don’t have data to back me up, the boss’s opinion is better than mine.”

I think most of us believe decisions should be data driven, but in some edge cases gut instinct is valuable.

It is easy to say in retrospect. A group of managers accustomed to dispositive technical information did not have any; engineers felt like they should not speak up without it. Decades later, an astronaut who flew on the space shuttle, both before and after Challenger, and then became NASA’s chief of safety and mission assurance, recounted what the “In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data” plaque had meant to him: “Between the lines it suggested that, ‘We’re not interested in your opinion on things. If you have data, we’ll listen, but your opinion is not requested here.’”

They didn’t get blown up. The Challenger did.

What a fucking prick. They didn’t even say they were sorry to hear you lost your job. They just want you dead.

Start singing it with them. Do it sincerely. You’ll either kill their joy or you two will have a moment.

Wonder how Andrew Yang is feeling today.

There was a clickbait NY Post article that I’d never link to, this article (archive) is more even handed.

Requiem for a Dying Planet was the sound scape for Werner Herzog’s Wild Blue Yonder. A brilliant film backed by this album, I feel that the album stands on its own.

This recording brings together three very disparate elements into a synergistic whole. They are Ernst Reijseger’s cello, the choral singing of the Sardinian group Tenore e Cuncordu de Orosei and the soaring vocals of Senegalese singer Mola Sylla. Each is a singular expression of music from widely differing traditions; together, they’re indescribable.

Requiem For a Dying Planet is not the anticipated death song for the earth, this music is dedicated to this wonderful planet and the beauty of living which could be heavenly if religions would not exist.”

Gonna play a game of comment roulette. How far do I have to scroll before I see someone say something like, “That can’t be in their museum because they can’t be trusted with it”.

Spinning the chamber now.

Edit: turns out I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. Now I sad.

Americans love salad almost as much as they love talking about rhubarb.

This comment is an old conservative rant.

“Liberals get angry and tell us that the metric system is more “rational” than the measurements everyone understands. This is ridiculous. An inch is the width of a man’s thumb, a foot the length of his foot, a yard the length of his belt. That’s easy to visualize. How do you visualize 147.2 centimeters?”
- Ann Coulter

F#? What? We can’t curse on the internet? Self censorship at dictator levels here. /s

He’s also got great politics and taste in music.

My group recently switched to Matrix and so this would be a tough sell, but it seems interesting. I haven’t been a fan of Matrix and miss the ease of UI in discord, but was happy to leave with it’s direction. How would you sell it with a small group that has small, but mounting usability issues with Matrix?