Not That Angry Tho

hell year hell year hell year hell year hell year hell year hell year hell year hell year hell year

(from a 2015 interview)

i hope she’s comfortable

Please don’t forget the best one so far^^^

another example of Koko’s humour by Jane Goodall:

Nothing pleases me more than to learn the fact that apes also will look at a thing and go “it me”

#hardsame

Oh mannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nope I can’t let this one go. A lot of the information I’m going to talk about here has already been expressed in other media (here’s a link to a You’re Wrong About podcast episode and transcript that does great), so I’ll try not to harp on the specific and deplorable state of primate research in the 1970s. Nevertheless, the cutesy interpretation of Koko really bums me out on multiple levels--from the misunderstanding of linguistics to the bad science to the anthropocentrism to the ableism.

There are a lot of things to love about Koko the gorilla. She was a beautiful and clearly very intelligent creature. She showed many humans that gorillas have the capacity for gentle and sociable behavior, which was contrary to many of the cultural stereotypes of the time about primates. However, the narrative of her life and, let’s be honest, her Brand™ have been entirely constructed and controlled by humans, often to her own detriment.

People horrifically fucking up facts about evolution and genetics too support their stupid beliefs or to seem smart and “rational” is probably one of my big pet peeves 

Yeah. An enormous number of racists, misogynists, homophobes and transphobes I’ve met eventually whip out something about evolutionary biology and they never, ever, ever, ever have the slightest shadow of even a half-right idea what any of it means or ever cite a claim ever actually made by a scientific study.

Here’s a quick handy reference list or anyone who isn’t sure:

Hey, so to add to the “evolutionary misconceptions are bad and often hide white supremacy,” an increasing amount of anthropological evidence suggests that Neanderthals were humans. Like, full stop. Not another species at all, but a population who moved to colder Europe generations earlier. Not Homo neanderthalis but Homo sapiens neanderthalis. After all, if “we” interbred with “them,” perhaps the very concept of “us” and “them” is outdated?

Moreover, the idea that Neanderthals were lesser “cavemen” came from an initially misinterpreted single skeleton—that of the “Old Man,” who had pronounced arthritis. Early art of Neanderthals (most famously in The Quest for Fire) imagined them as ape-like sub-humans, and that image has persisted in the public imagination. Early “social Darwinists” (ugh) used this idea of less-evolved sub-humans to justify white supremacy and eugenics. In reality, we find ever more evidence that there was a great degree of cultural interaction between many early human populations, and, as the above commenter pointed out, Neanderthal DNA is most common in Europeans (and is potentially responsible for red hair).

The reason I bring this up is to encourage people to empathize with early humans rather than alienate them. Early humans had language, math, fiber crafts, and jewelry. They carried their babies on their hips, traced their hands on walls, and buried their beloved elders with beads and feathers. The question of when we became “human” is not one that we can truly answer, and the more generous we are with our belief in the humanity of our ancestors, the better prepared we are to grapple with the humanity of other humans on the planet with us right now.

Orbital path of asteroid near miss in 2002. Yah, that’s how close we came to nuclear winter and possible total destruction.

A visitor.

It’s like it’s trying so hard to hit us and it just can’t do it

All I can imagine is every astronomer drinking heavily from 2002-2003 like “There it goes—OH FUCK IT’S COMING BACK”

ohgodohgodohgod

thank you  moon for being Our last defender against space chaos. When Jupiter fails, The moon will aid us.

@official-houston-nasa Houston, did we have a problem????

We almost did but the moon was all “NOT TODAY BRUH” and saved us.

Why didn’t the asteroid *become* a moon? Isn’t it smaller thsn the actial moon?

This wasn’t an asteroid, although some initial observations did identify it as one. It’s a piece of human-made debris. Actually we’re pretty sure it’s the third-stage of the Saturn V rocket that carried the crew of Apollo 12 to the Moon! So that’s cool.

It was supposed to go into orbit around the Sun, basically trailing us in our orbit, but something went wrong. As the gif shows, something funny happened at L1, one of the five Lagrangian points, which are stable(ish) points in a two-body orbit. Anyway, some wacky gravity stuff that we couldn’t have modeled for in 1969 and that’s still pretty hard to math now happened, and that booster fell firmly back into the Earth’s gravity for a bit, did some really impressive three-body work, then left. It could definitely come back some day, or it could be gone forever. Math is hard and this thing is super tricky to find on account of space is big.

Now to address the original claim that it would have caused nuclear winter–haha nah. It’s like 15 tons, which sounds like a lot, but atmospheres are great. An object that size moving that speed has on order of a 1% chance of even getting one little chunk of itself to the Earth’s surface without burning up in the atmosphere. It’s much more likely that it would have (and maybe, in the future, will have) completely broken up on entry and made for some bright shooting stars.

Side note: what asteroid would cause nuclear winter anyway? Not to be persnickety, but I just hate fear-mongering. I’m guessing that they meant an anti-greenhouse effect, which would take a waaaaaaaaay bigger rock. A stupidly bigger rock. Y'all would remember if a 10-mile-wide rock had almost hit us, I promise. You’d have heard about it.

Oh, and if I had to guess, it didn’t go into orbit (i.e. become another “moon”) because it was on the wrong trajectory and going too fast. Also it is very very very small compared to both the Earth and the Moon, so I can’t imagine it would have much chance of establishing a stable orbit.

In conclusion, no, it was a piece of a rocket. No, it wouldn’t have caused nuclear winter. No, it had zero chance of destroying the Earth. No, we didn’t have a problem. No, we didn’t almost get a new moon. Even though that last one could have been neat. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

HOLY SHIT THIS IS HUGE

i don’t know why everyone is so obsessed with the zombie apocalypse when the robot war is a real and looming threat

fooexe Good news Your world is becoming real

Basically they got three robots, told them that two of them were given “dumbing pills”, and they asked one which pill it was given.

The robot of course wasn’t sure if it had or hadn’t yet and said “I don’t know”, but after it looked at the other silent robots (who were actually unable to speak from the start), it realized that its fully functional, and then was finally able to say “I know now.”

It can assess itself and its behavior in relation to other robots and people. It can make that differentiation between “me” and “I”, and understand that it is an individual.

People are shrugging this off, but this is a similar self-awareness test to how people put mirrors in front of animals to see if it treats the reflection like another animal or treat it like a reflection.

angryfactchecker thoughts?

Misleading, which is a shame, because these NAO bots are really awesome and fascinating. 

The idea that there is “the” self-awareness test to pass is probably a big part of what’s misleading about articles like this. There are lots of (usually philosophical) suggested ways to test self-awareness, and yes, this is a recent one proposed by Luciano Floridi in 2005 . However, the ability to mimic certain aspects of a logical, reflective organism is not the same as being self-aware--and it ain’t the team whose robot passed the test saying otherwise. 

The people behind this paper have been very careful not to make any claims as to the robot’s “true” self-consciousness, which is a diffuse and poorly defined concept; instead, they make clear that their robot passed this test. The problem of robots being able to model their world but not their own reaction to it has been a practical problem in robotics, and this is what the research is moving toward solving.

The reason people “shrug this off” is because it’s been sensationalized into a bite-sized headline that states as fact a conclusion that the science does not purport to uphold. Often in science journalism, it’s tempting to jump to the most exciting conclusion that an experiment hints at, but we have to resist getting carried away with stuff like this, even when it seems really cool.

If anyone knows anything more about the case of tsula mwangi send me a link

me too

Damn, every language? That’s wild asf.

She must be a god or something, honestly

When no one wanted to believe God was a black woman 😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊

I REALLY WANT TO MEET HER .

This week on Fact-Checking 101: Read the Bylines! This article is from the Weekly World News, a defunct tabloid that had other headlines such as “SATURN IS A GIANT UFO” and “GARDEN OF EDEN FOUND” gracing its pages, not to mention the famous Bat Boy (last known whereabouts: protesting Prop 8 in CA after having shed his second pair of wings–nice one, Bat Boy). So, no, this is not even kind of true.

Further, it’s true that Africans are often discounted as sources of genius, and that is beyond shitty and undoubtedly racist as fuck. However, this kind of “tribal mysticism” horseshit is racist, too. It is absolutely true that there are women of the Bantu peoples who are brilliant and innovative and powerful–but they don’t have to be able to “speak every language”, “name every actor […] in every movie ever made”, AND “identify every known plant” to deserve recognition. Demanding that those we don’t see as “typical” geniuses be able to do the impossible to deserve the title does them no favors, and in fact, it only serves to uphold the status quo.

do you ever want to gently float up to someone and whisper “this isn’t a debate; i am actually educated on the subject and i’m telling you you’re wrong”

my life

so what kind of theoretical tensile strength are we talkin about here because

The term “solid light” is a total misnomer, and yet another reason to be distrustful of science journalism. 

The research described in the headline involves a phenomenon called “strongly correlated light.” Under proper conditions, groups of photons (light particles) can interact with each other in a manner that is similar to how atoms interact with each other. However, this does not mean that traditional matter will interact with light as if it were solid.

The actual cool thing about this study is more subtle. We might one day be able to use strongly correlated light to simulate exotic materials in a controlled manner, maybe even on a chip. I should go find one of the quantum optics folks down the hall and have them explain it a bit better, but that’s the gist of it. 

No rainbow road yet folks, sorry. 

i think the coolest thing would be to see a new color

right so theres this thing called the bullet shrimp 

and not only are these things totally badass and stylish

they have 16 colour cones in their vision

us humans only have 3

these things can literally see over 5 times as many colours as we can

literally they can look at what we would see as a completely black space and see thousands of colours we don’t even know exist

do you understand how fuCKING COOL THAT IS

not only that but they can punch a hole in an aquarium tank.

that’s pretty fucking radical.

not only punching through aquarium walls too

these little demon-spawn can punch so hard and so fast that

IT BREAKS WATER PHYSICS

their punches cause water to boil and create a bubble underwater, which kills its prey if it has contact with it, cooking them from the outside

BUT IT DOESN’T EVEN NEED TO MAKE CONTACT

the collapsing bubble sends out a shockwave strong enough to kill anything in a 10 cm diameter due to pure pressure 

this fabulous sob is death incarnate and don’t forget that   

Even better - the inside of that little bubble before it collapses is over 400 million degrees Kelvin, hotter than the surface of the Sun.

Heyyy so 400 million Kelvin (no degrees in this scale) is, blessedly, a bit of an exaggeration; the actual measurements of supercavitation are more like 4000 Kelvin (which IS very close to the surface of the Sun–but that is the coolest part of the Sun), or 10,000 times less.

A collapsing bubble of 400 million Kelvin underwater would make certain points in the ocean over twenty times hotter than the current temperature of the NUCLEAR FUSION CORE of the Sun. These underwater hot spots might therefore be hot enough to fuse carbon into oxygen, likely resulting in enough energy to boil our oceans, ignite our atmosphere, and destroy the planet in quick succession. Also, if we could somehow harness one before they melt our tectonic plates, it would solve the energy crisis in like 0.0000001 seconds.

The mantis shrimp cannot fuse carbon into oxygen. This is probably a good thing.

PLUTO 2015

NASA

I AM SCREAMING OH MY GOODNESS

OH MY GOD DO YOU GUYS UNDERSTAND HOW AMAZING THIS IS I HAVE BEEN READING ASTRONOMY BOOKS FOR YEARS AND EVERYTIME THERE’S JUST A PIXELLY BLUR FOR PLUTO NOT ANYMORE. NEVER AGAIN.

Actually, this is an artist’s rendering (...will probably be written on my gravestone). The folks over at APL have lots of neat/imaginary pictures of Pluto (which they pronounce plu-toe, like with a hard “t”). No, my friends, I’m sorry, our best image of Pluto is probably still this “pixelly blur” courtesy of Hubble.

However, the reason this lovely artist’s rendering even exists is because the spacecraft New Horizons is NEARLY AT PLUTO RIGHT NOW. Relatively speaking, that is. Look at the cool image it just released!

Yeah, not that exciting. That’s why all those articles are using the artist’s rendering. (Have I made it clear enough that THESE IMAGES ARE ARTIST’S RENDERINGS?) However, in only two days (May 15, 2015), New Horizons’ imaging resolution will be better than Hubble’s because it will be so much closer, and then we’ll start getting some more detailed images, leading up to the fly-by of Pluto, which is planned for July 14, 2015. 

Until then, tumblr, kindly cool it.