Tavern on the Meta

Shadow Wizard

6:29 AM

@MarkAmery agree it's wrong on the verge of mod abuse, yes. Flagged the question asking to undelete the answers.

@M.A.R.TheChemicalWizard actually Visualstudio

Get Answer Wizard

@ShadowWizard Looks like your wish got fulfilled

M.A.R. The Chemical Wizard

@ShadowWizard Now that's user abuse

User ShadowWizard has too many powers. Someone stop him

Shadow Wizard

@GetAnswerWizard heh. That was super quick. Hopefully that mod won't do it again though. Will keep an eye and if he do it again, start meta discussion.

Get Answer Wizard

I guess 16 answers is the best compromise rather than 3 answers or 3 pages...

M.A.R. The Chemical Wizard

I don't get the math

Get Answer Wizard

6:36 AM

16 > 3 or 3

Shadow Wizard

M.A.R. The Chemical Wizard

That's philosophy not math

Shadow Wizard

This will stop me ^^

@M.A.R.TheChemicalWizard "One is equal to the sum of its parts" is philosophy. ;)

Sonic the Wizard Werehog

6:50 AM

@ShadowWizard A CM has been going through and doing similar things to FAQs here, and actively deleting answers posted to FAQs with requests to edit the info instead.

I don't think that it's abuse if it's done to a de-facto community FAQ (e.g. the NullPointerException question on SO).

@Shadow Should I VTC this so you can reopen it? Or is that abuse?

Shadow Wizard

@SonictheWizardWerehog it's different.

and CM isn't just a site mod.

@SonictheWizardWerehog abuse is to close and reopen instantly with a hammer just to clear pending close votes. If it's closed by others, it's not abuse of the hammer.

Voting to close just so it gets reopened isn't abuse, but not needed IMO... if it gets closed ping me and I'll reopen.

Sonic the Wizard Werehog

@ShadowWizard So if I VTC it as a strategic move to enable you to bindingly reopen it so that technically you are not "clearing out the close votes" as per that definition, is that OK? (Can I get input from others on this curious question? I don't plan to do it, I reviewed Leave Open in the queue)

@ShadowWizard It got reviewed "Leave Open" in the queue, but received a fourth external vote

Now that I think about it, it would be abusive if you pinged me saying "hey Sonic, would you please VTC it so that I can reopen it?". But if I out of the blue, without asking you, go ahead and VTC on my own volition and then tell you, "hey Shadow, I've VTC'd this so that you can reopen it", would you follow through on it?

Shadow Wizard

7:16 AM

@SonictheWizardWerehog yes, that's correct

John Dvorak

9:06 AM

TIL: Google Maps has a feature that lets you buy tickets for tourist attractions directly from the map.
Also TIL: Apparently the price they ask for is 12x the price you can get at the place.

Shadow Wizard

10:18 AM

@JohnDvorak well, Google is a business, they have to pay their bills somehow. No? ;)

Think how much they pay for electricity for all their computers.

Won't be surprised if they plan to build, or already got, their own nuclear power plant.

Shadow Wizard

10:32 AM

plz-delete Google duplicate meta.stackexchange.com/questions/326772/… @rene @Bart @TravisJ

rene

11:00 AM

voted on, needs 1 moar

Tinkeringbell

gone!

rene

\o/

Shadow Wizard

Gone with the shadow of a tinkering flower.... :D

user437611

@ShadowWizard Uh, hi. Sorry, I deleted my answer temporarily as I am myself not sure about a few things. Regarding your comment: "I think there is notification only if there are answers posted during the bounty period. (So it's pointless to notify the user, no answer can be awarded the bounty.) ": note that it isn't really pointless if there were answers posted before the bounty period too. Often bounties are placed to reward "existing" answers.

Journeyman Geek

@SonictheWizardWerehog it's exactly the same

Shadow Wizard

11:11 AM

@Blue oh so maybe no answers at all. Both cases I checked had no answers at all.

user437611

@ShadowWizard Martin's bountied question did have an existing answer.

user437611

12

Q: Brushing teeth before or after breakfast

Usually in the morning I brush my teeth after breakfast. But my dentist told me that it's better not brush them right after eating food, because eating makes them soft. So now I brush my teeth before breakfast. Is this the correct procedure? PS. Just found this article, the author has the same ...

Shadow Wizard

@Blue also, I'm special case, no need to be sorry for pinging me, on the contrary. I love pings. ;)

user437611

Also, per the faq:

user437611

> Note that even if no one else answered during the bounty period, the grace period is still in effect for 24 hours.

Shadow Wizard

11:13 AM

@Blue oh. Well, we need someone who really knows, maybe with access to the code, to tell for sure then. e.g. Shog or Adam...

What's "NIO" anyway?? bah

user437611

@ShadowWizard Hehe, will keep in mind. :P

rene

@ShadowWizard Yeah, I was about to ask, possible spam seed

user437611

@ShadowWizard Yep, probably. :/

Shadow Wizard

@Blue cheers! And if you also love pings, jump to Den and you'll surely get many. :D

@rene yup, hence reported

@rene or anyone else... how can I downgrade android 8 to android 7, or even 6? It's a total nightmare. Slow, buggy, laggy, and what's not. :(

Sonic the Wizard Werehog

@ShadowWizard To ensure folks in Charcoal HQ know why you're reporting a given post, especially if it's not obvious, use the reason feature: !!/report [post(s)] "reason"

Shadow Wizard

11:19 AM

I knew it's a mistake, but... hoped they will improve things without making it sloooow. Of course it was false hope.

rene

@ShadowWizard has 2 "normal" looking answers on SO

Shadow Wizard

@rene hmm

meh, still spammy enough on MSE

Journeyman Geek

@ShadowWizard you can't unless the phone once supported ot

Even then it's tricky

Shadow Wizard

@SonictheWizardWerehog tried it once it didn't work, thought the reason is another post.

@JourneymanGeek :(

Sonic the Wizard Werehog

@ShadowWizard It works; the reason is a text string. It doesn't show up in the chat message due to technical constraints, but it does show up in the metasmoke page

...and to users using userscripts

rene

11:21 AM

@ShadowWizard I've posted a cv-pls in socvr for the SO question.

Aibobot

12:14 PM

worldwide whatsapp outage ;p

Journeyman Geek

theverge.com/2019/4/14/18310069/…

Tinkeringbell

@Aibobot Apparently the Netherlands aren't a part of this world ;)

Shadow Wizard

@Aibobot likely @nical fault... ;)

Tinkeringbell

12:27 PM

@JourneymanGeek Downdetector is fun too: downdetector.com

Shadow Wizard

I wish Facebook will stay down for good.

Go go hackers! Or whoever took it down!

:D

Tinkeringbell

@ShadowWizard noooes! my crochet group friends :)

Shadow Wizard

@Tinkeringbell meet them in person, much better :D

Tinkeringbell

@ShadowWizard expensive though

Shadow Wizard

oh no facebook.com is not down :(

Aibobot

12:44 PM

lol

My workplace relies heavily on whatsapp soooooo

Shadow Wizard

WhatsApp is a must, yeah.

But Facebook is "evil for fun".

So can be safely closed.

No dancing cats, people will live with that.

Journeyman Geek

I don't like whatsapp 😭

Shadow Wizard

But it's a must these days to contact other people. :/

@user49915 hey, hope you understand by now that downvotes are not personal?

Sleepy? Maybe coffee will help then...

!!/coffee user

SmokeDetector

@ShadowWizard brews a cup of Cappuccino for @user

Shadow Wizard

waffles!

Tinkeringbell

12:50 PM

*stroopwafels

Journeyman Geek

@ShadowWizard whyyyyyyuuu?

user508672

@ShadowWizard I looked up the transcript above; some folks here simply had fun on what I wrote. Alright; do it. Btw., I hate coffee; I prefer tea ;-). But you couldn't know it; thanks anyway.

Journeyman Geek

@user49915 I do feel the way you ask questions dosen't help. It's very much 'i have an opinion. Change my mind'

Mark Amery

@ShadowWizard Why do you think those answers are useful to preserve?

user508672

@JourneymanGeek I do have an opinion - everyone has, you too. But I do my best to formulate my questions with my opinion hidden or, if it's not possible, allow the folks to disagree in an answer.

Mark Amery

12:55 PM

(Have already reflagged a couple of the most obviously duplicate / harmful ones for redeletion.)

Shadow Wizard

@MarkAmery they give different ways to solve the same thing

@user49915 well:

!!/tea user

SmokeDetector

@ShadowWizard brews a cup of darjeeling tea for @user

Shadow Wizard

Here you go ^

Mark Amery

@ShadowWizard Some do, yes. But is there any situation at all in which those different ways are preferable?

user508672

@ShadowWizard @SmokeDetector Thanks folks!

Mark Amery

12:57 PM

I can maybe see the case for keeping one regex-based answer around

Shadow Wizard

@MarkAmery I didn't look that deep. But I do know for sure that many times I pick a different answer, not the accepted or highest score, because it's the most simple for me to write. So yes, it's useful, even if not 100% ideal.

Mark Amery

@ShadowWizard I can't imagine a situation in which the regex-based answers would be simpler than includes or indexOf

Shadow Wizard

If answer is not ideal and may result in delay of 0.0001 seconds, a comment can say it, maybe downvote. But NOT deleting it.

Mark Amery

@ShadowWizard That seems to be at odds with the idea of a wiki-locked question

Apply a wiki-lock means we've already decided that adding more answers is doing harm

And that we instead want a smaller, carefully curated set of answers

Shadow Wizard

@MarkAmery so merge all the answers into one big canonical answer, don't just delete all the "smaller" answers.

Mark Amery

1:00 PM

Okay, but should every possible solution be preserved, no matter how pointless?

Ry-'s objective was to trim down to the smallest set of answers that all had some actual justification for existing

Shadow Wizard

Anyway.... feel free to discuss this on MSO, I'll be fine with any action resulting from such a thing, but I'm not fine with a mod deleting answers on what appears as almost random spree.

@user49915 no problem, hope you feel better. :)

Mark Amery

@ShadowWizard I'll wait and see what extra fat can be uncontroversially trimmed off, first

user508672

@ShadowWizard Not at all, but thanks anyway!!!

Shadow Wizard

@user49915 oh. Well if there's anything we can do, just ask. Can't promise anything, but asking here is for free and you won't lose any rep. ;)

Mark Amery

@ShadowWizard Any beef with removing stackoverflow.com/a/1978419/1709587 (which has devolved into a three-way argument masquerading as an answer) or stackoverflow.com/a/1789955/1709587 (bad duplicate of the accepted answer)?

user508672

1:04 PM

@ShadowWizard Don't worry about my rep, man, it's alright.

Mark Amery

Those are the two I've currently got flags on

Shadow Wizard

@MarkAmery the first was found useful by 900 people with account and 15+ rep. This alone means it should not be deleted. So it's not ideal. It can cause bugs. So can any line of code in any answer on SO.

No cause for deletion.

Mark Amery

@ShadowWizard Many of those votes will have been before includes was specced. Now, even if you really really want a method on the native object's prototype, you have the saner option of shimming the ES6 method

Shadow Wizard

@Mark the second one is a very simple one liner for those who skip long answers. I'll keep it as well.

Mark Amery

i.e. there may historically have been a case to be made for doing it the way that that answer recommends WAIT NO DOESN'T RECOMMEND OI NO SRSLY DOES RECOMMEND but it no longer exists

And when it's no longer useful, I'm not sure what to do with such a schizophrenic answer besides delete it

@ShadowWizard We have... very different curation ideals, I think. I'll see how the mods decide to handle the flags already raised, then take to Meta

Shadow Wizard

1:11 PM

Many programmers are still coding for pre-ES6 JS, and millions of people still use IE, which doesn't support ES6 and will never support it, so those programmers will always have a job. So deleting answers because they're outdated is also very wrong.

Mark Amery

Again: they can shim the ES6 method

Shadow Wizard

@MarkAmery yup, best course of action. :)

Mark Amery

That is strictly better than adding a non-specced method to the prototype; it gives them all the advantages without any disadvantages

Shadow Wizard

@user49915 I'm not, no worry. :)

Heh, two Mar's now in Tavern.

And one @M.A.R ;)

@user49915 if I may ask, what site you come from? You obviously have 200+ rep somewhere, but you Hide MSE so can't easily find it. :(

user508672

@ShadowWizard Sorry, I cannot expand on that it public for exacty that reason. My apologies.

user508672

1:25 PM

@JourneymanGeek Which parts exactly do you consider broad in meta.stackexchange.com/questions/326785 ?

Journeyman Geek

@user49915 demanding specific users who fit the criteria. Asking if any new user ever...

user508672

But the answer proves that these were easy to find out. New means "3 years", and it's there. I don't think I ever wrote "ever" in the OP.

Journeyman Geek

It's still too broad...

In spite of SEDE

user508672

I removed the first questionmark so that it doesn't sound like a question to you. What's wrong about using SEDE to answer the question?

Journeyman Geek

If you're going 'I feel this way - I need all the counter examples in X period of time that matches this criteria to change my mind' it's too broad

It also doesn't really solve a problem the community faces Imo, in the context. It's more 'people downvote my posts so the site must be hostile to new users'

user508672

1:33 PM

I intentionally distanced myself from writing 'feel'. Moreover, I never asked for "all", but only for "one". I never claimed the meta SE would be "hostile". If you think I have, feel free to raise a flag regarding a violation of CoC, but it would not be "too broad".

Journeyman Geek

Still. That form of question works badly

Pet peeve. Abuse of COC.

If you're violating the COC, I will throw the book at you.

@user49915 well that's the sentiment I pick up

John Dvorak

Throwing books at people is a CoC violation

user508672

@JourneymanGeek Well, you may feel free to mention CoC or not, but I don't see why you think that the question is still "too broad". After all, I've set the background and posed a mathematically very precise question. You cannot accuse me for that.

Journeyman Geek

@JohnDvorak but but... I can do so kindly!

user508672

@JourneymanGeek You may or may not criticise me for the relation to the so-called "problem the community faces" (I don't think this term is properly defined anyway), but the definition of "too broad" in meta.stackexchange.com/help/closed-questions doesn't mention it.

Journeyman Geek

1:42 PM

@user49915 Well if the community or other mods disagree....

meta.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask

You would do yourself good to read that.

user508672

@JourneymanGeek You may or may not claim a violation of that, but you need a different reason then. "too broad" doesn't count imho.

Journeyman Geek

@user49915 as I said. The community or other mods are free to reopen the post

Shadow Wizard

@JohnDvorak depends what books

Get Answer Wizard

2:10 PM

@ShadowWizard TeX - LaTeX

Also, voting behavior on Meta is weird, because it has been used to indicate disagreement, not useful, no research (even though it's not on feature request)

So, just ignore those votes and you'll feel more peaceful

Tinkeringbell

2:36 PM

sloooow :P

Journeyman Geek

On my phone ;p

Mark Amery

3:15 PM

@ShadowWizard Looks like the mods played it out the way I wanted, in the end. Letting you know as a courtesy in case you want to take it to Meta, since I've no longer got reason to do so.

Get Answer Wizard

throw a yellow page at someone

M.A.R. The Chemical Wizard

4:10 PM

Wheesh, some vitriol

And kerosene

The smell is intoxicating

M.A.R. The Chemical Wizard

4:21 PM

@GetAnswerWizard -1 I disagree it's weird

hides from @Bart

Welp, probably not going to get a response to my newest comment.

All the better, I guess

Now everyone can move on to be annoyed by more important things, like coffee at work.

user302202

4:40 PM

Very annoying, especially when you work in a coffee shop.

user302202

Abortion pills spam is something new.

Aibobot

It is

user302202

More precisely, this is the second such report in Metasmoke, the previous one was 3 years ago.

user302202

Previously UAE and Oman; now Zimbabwe. Oddly, no US-based spam of this kind.

M.A.R. The Chemical Wizard

0

Q: Photo upload on iOS app in gardening exchange fails most of the time

App fails to upload the files most of the time, I've seen some incidents succeed also, but very rarely. Screenshot for details

support bug uploader ios

Does Apple deny climate change?

@AskQuestionWizard I was about to make an inappropriate joke.

Aaron Hall

5:03 PM

@MarkAmery I'm not really a JS'er, and I really don't want to parse those answers. Were all those deleted ones totally redundant?

Tinkeringbell

@M.A.R.TheChemicalWizard Just in time for dinner ;)

Aaron Hall

5:20 PM

@ShadowWizard and I'm not saying I think you should take those answer deletions to meta, but if you gave those deleted answers a critical eye, would you say that they are redundant? I'm personally hawkish on noisy "me-too" answers - I think new answers to canonicals need to bring something to differentiate themselves. Were all of those answers undifferentiated?

Mark Amery

@AaronHall They were a mixture of a few things:

1. Completely redundant answers

2. One answer that originally proposed a bad practice and had had two opposing retractions clumsily edited into it until it was ultimately arguing with itself

3. Several answers that proposed genuine alternative solutions but were just plain inferior to the more ordinary and straightforward ones in the accepted answer, and made no attempt to argue otherwise

The ones in #3 are the most likely to be controversial deletions

You can see Ry-'s rationale through the edit message he left when removing most of the approaches from the (wiki) accepted answer:

> focus on being useful over trivia. drastic, i know. if there’s something else to talk about, it’s probably unicode

In other words, he viewed most of the answers as being impractical trivia, and culled them on those grounds. I think that's the right thing to do - but it's radical, as he acknowledges, so I'm not surprised some like Shadow find it alarming

John Dvorak

If I had to pick something to be upset about for a while, it's the trolls on the Internet slamming the lead researcher / team leader behind the world's most famous pictures of the last few days for writing only 5% of the project's code.

Mark Amery

@JohnDvorak Where are these trolls?

John Dvorak

72

Q: Was credit for the black hole image misattributed?

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) was used to create an image of Messier 87*, a supermassive black hole in the Messier 87 galaxy. This result has been heavily reported in the media leading up to its announcement 2019-04-10. Recent postings on social media have argued over who should receive cre...

computers astronomy

Mark Amery

All I've seen is:

* Media gives her excessive (sometimes sole) credit for a project where she was in fact an equal contributor in a team of 7 or 8 people

* She and her colleagues protest on social media that the PR campaign is bullshit and she is not as responsible as claimed

* Others discuss this

* Progressives accuse those others of "slamming" / "shitting on" etc the researcher

Tinkeringbell

5:35 PM

@JohnDvorak I thought the team lead was Dutch? :/

I need to find a news article.

Mark Amery

Yeah I don't think she was team lead

John Dvorak

Not sure about "team lead", but she's definitely the most visible

Mark Amery

Yes, but that's not what she or her teammates wanted

John Dvorak

Also, she made an awesome presentation about the project and the algorithm behind it

Tinkeringbell

@JohnDvorak Maybe I was wrong too, the Dutch one was a professor that thought of doing this sometime back in 2000 ;)

Mark Amery

5:37 PM

But seriously, where are the trolls "slamming" her? Can you point to a single example? I'm yet to see any.

Tinkeringbell

Article doesn't mention team lead, that's what my mind made of it

Mark Amery

Unless you're suggesting the Big League Politics article counts?

That literally quotes her rejecting the credit as its primary source?

Tinkeringbell

@JohnDvorak Is she the most visible because the media/internet made her that?

Mark Amery

@Tinkeringbell Yeah that's what I'm curious about

John Dvorak

I was primarily referring to / got the sense from the Skeptics question itself.

Mark Amery

5:39 PM

@Tinkeringbell I speculate that the answer is that she willingly went along with being the public face of the project

Tinkeringbell

I mean, the Dutch professor gave a talk at a press conference in Brussels, but probably didn't gain as much publicity because well... he's male.

Mark Amery

But didn't expect that to be turned into a bunch of media articles holding her up as a genius and erasing the contributions of all her colleagues

Tinkeringbell

@MarkAmery I wouldn't be too sure of that either, I got the impression she herself released a statement mentioning teamwork.

Mark Amery

That she did

John Dvorak

Bringing up teamwork was the first thing she did in her presentation

Tinkeringbell

5:40 PM

@MarkAmery Oh wait, misparsed that first sentence... That's what's going to be hard to ever find out, I guess.

@JohnDvorak I think this is typically 'internet'. Someone makes it too big, adores someone more than the rest of the internet feels they should be adored... And then of course the other side of the internet is going to try a lot to destroy the pedestal someone is put on.

Titles like the one in that last answer most likely haven't helped here.

Fact is that there's people on the internet that seem absolutely desperate for female role models, and try a lot to make people into something they aren't... and there's people on the internet that have made it their job to show how bad the picked role models are. Short lesson: Never be a role model on the internet ;)

John Dvorak

That's a sound advice

Mark Amery

The thing is, I haven't seen anybody tearing her down. Just acknowledging (like the Big League Politics article linked via Skeptics does) that she was just one contributor in a team of others who've been written out of much of the media coverage, as she has pointed out herself repeatedly. But that seems to be enough have caused progressive outrage. :/

Tinkeringbell

@MarkAmery I have seen articles?/tweets? ... I dunno what exactly ... that seemed to use that 0.26 percent of the code as a personal attack against Katie, like the claim that she made the whole black hole image herself came from her to begin with. It is nasty...

Mark Amery

@Tinkeringbell Fair enough. I have seen one Twitter user attributing the claims that she was the sole/lead developer to her, and have corrected them with links to her Facebook posts saying the opposite.

Evening, @ArtOfCode. I've ignored Shog's wisdom from last night and hopped back into the argument about this :P

Tinkeringbell

Huh wait what.... Shog said not to discuss this? What did I miss?

Mark Amery

5:53 PM

Nah he didn't per se

yesterday, by Shog9

The sad thing is, I gotta wonder how many folks are reading this sorta stuff on Facebook or whatever who have no idea what software dev is like and think any of this matters at all

Tinkeringbell

Oh... pfew. I guess that means I get to keep my diamond a little longer ;)

Mark Amery

He merely observed that, ultimately, it's all a load of nonsense that doesn't matter

Tinkeringbell

Well, too often he's right ;)

Get Answer Wizard

The OP had a 'history" on Academia though

Tinkeringbell

Though I did see a good Twitter thread on why pictures of black holes may actually matter for scientific progress :D

Mark Amery

5:55 PM

Oh, sure - I don't think he's saying the work doesn't matter

Just that the media & social media treatment of the team doesn't

In the end, it will pass, and all their careers will be unscathed

It's obnoxious, but that's all

Tinkeringbell

@MarkAmery That, I can only hope. Things like this can be very discouraging, and even might cause a certain amount of discord within a team :/

theverge.com/2019/4/13/18308652/… seems like a sane analysis.

Mark Amery

@Tinkeringbell Yeah, fair enough. And I can imagine being a girl considering studying compsci, looking at this circus, and deciding "screw that".

@Tinkeringbell I will read later. First, dinner.

Tinkeringbell

@MarkAmery You might already have read it, it's in the comments on that Skeptics question

Enjoy dinner!

Aaron Hall

@MarkAmery known inferior answers are still instructive and create value, as long as they are properly critiqued in the comments.

Get Answer Wizard

Great... that Skeptics question is also a black hole for questionable comments...

John Dvorak

6:08 PM

Hm?

user302202

6:26 PM

> I just presented my candidature so that Hasan doesn't feel alone moderating..
Also it's always good to have more than one moderator to avoid concentrations of power and to have plurality of opinions to better guide a community.

user302202

As it currently stands (with nominations closing tomorrow) this will be a winning nomination on elementary OS. (Pro tem election, 2 candidates for 2 positions => both win)

Get Answer Wizard

Will tomorrow be +2, or actually +2/-2, that's the question...

M.A.R. The Chemical Wizard

Ugh, the black hole thing again

Can we just . . . move on?

Tinkeringbell

@M.A.R.TheChemicalWizard But it's a black hole!

M.A.R. The Chemical Wizard

All I see that would ultimately matter is a progressive/non-progressive fight

Tinkeringbell

6:39 PM

@M.A.R.TheChemicalWizard We... kinda basically came to the same conclusion I guess.

rene

due to gravitational forces we have no other way to go ...

M.A.R. The Chemical Wizard

Keep spinning

rene

dizzy

Tinkeringbell

@M.A.R.TheChemicalWizard 'spinning' is what got the internet into a mess in the first place, journalists spinning up stories/titles that weren't reflective of reality ;)

John Dvorak

My opinion is that, while yet another confirmation of general relativity is neat, the primary contribution to science is the development of the algorithms for VLSI.

Tinkeringbell

6:42 PM

VLSI?

Very Little Smiling Intelligence?

John Dvorak

Very Large Scale Interferometry

Tinkeringbell

Ahhh.

Makes just as much sense as the abbreviation..

:P

John Dvorak

Very-long-baseline interferometry

Very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) is a type of astronomical interferometry used in radio astronomy. In VLBI a signal from an astronomical radio source, such as a quasar, is collected at multiple radio telescopes on Earth. The distance between the radio telescopes is then calculated using the time difference between the arrivals of the radio signal at different telescopes. This allows observations of an object that are made simultaneously by many radio telescopes to be combined, emulating a telescope with a size equal to the maximum separation between the telescopes. Data received at each...

Tinkeringbell

> Interferometry is a family of techniques in which waves, usually electromagnetic waves, are superimposed, causing the phenomenon of interference, which is used to extract information.

Now that makes sense :)

rene

it does?

Tinkeringbell

6:48 PM

@rene You make wave, you make second wave... study waves, get data :P

John Dvorak

The bigger the dish, the finer the resolution. We can't make an Earth-sized telescope, but we can spread telescopes across Earth. Each telescope alone can't see anything, so you instead throw crap-tons of algorithms onto 5 petabytes of measurement data to find correlations, then more algorithms to fill in the stuff you can't measure, then do a Fourier transform of the data and voilá... image of the year.

rene

I'm not a surfer

@JohnDvorak what happens when we run out of Earth?

Tinkeringbell

@rene Space telescopes!

John Dvorak

You could put giant telescopes into space, do VLBI with those and then get a much finer image of M87BH. But then, someone would have to put the money into building those massive structures and putting them into deep space.

Instead of, you know, smoking marijuana during a livestream :P

Tinkeringbell

They're much more useful than space cars, that's for sure...

John Dvorak

6:54 PM

FWIW, Space Oddity, isn't even a good song...

Journeyman Geek

@JohnDvorak pfft. No respect for the classics

John Dvorak

Classic? Mozart was super-progressive and yet I still doubt he'd talk over his own symphonies...

Shog9

Tall poppy syndrome

The tall poppy syndrome describes aspects of a culture where people of high status are resented, attacked, cut down, strung up or criticised because they have been classified as superior to their peers. The term has been used in cultures of the English-speaking world. == Etymology == The concept originates from accounts in Herodotus' Histories (Book 5, 92f), Aristotle's Politics (1284a), and Livy's Ab Urbe Condita Libri, Book I. [Periander] had sent a herald to Thrasybulus and inquired in what way he would best and most safely govern his city. Thrasybulus led the man who had come from Periander...

Magisch

We should land another probe on an asteroid

Tinkeringbell

7:09 PM

@Shog9 Meh... Perhaps. Though the media kinda created a high status when there actually wasn't as much, and not with the intent of cutting her down, as far as I can see

@Magisch Sounds fun :)

I kinda want commercial flights to the moon as well :D

Magisch

the black hole photo is pretty nifty though

They used a lot of cool techniques to image that

John Dvorak

indeed

It did spawn more memes than I'd like hough

Commercial flights to Moon will find it rather difficult to obtain enough demand to be viable.

M.A.R. The Chemical Wizard

@Tinkeringbell I wanna call my future wife VLSI

Magisch

whatever. In a hundred years, noboy will remember the memes but they will remember the fact that we took a photo of a black hole

Tinkeringbell

@Magisch And laugh at us for doing it ;)

Magisch

7:13 PM

Maybe if they put a full on colony on the moon

make it some sort of high end vacation destination

Tinkeringbell

@M.A.R.TheChemicalWizard I'm not really up to date on my foreign languages, but it seems like a strange name for a wife ;)

Magisch

Imagine a concessions store up there selling "I was on the moon and all I got was this lousy tshirt" tshirts

John Dvorak

A moon colony would make commercial flights there viable, yes :P

M.A.R. The Chemical Wizard

7:26 PM

-6

Q: Why couldn't Julian Assange have escaped this way?

(1) you find out what he is actually going to be wearing on a given day (2) on that day, 29 very convincing lookeylikeys enter the Embassy (3) five minutes later, 29 lookeylikeys and the real Assange scarper from the building What are the police going to do, shoot them all?

law-enforcement

Erm, because life isn't an Indie movie?

Magisch

7:53 PM

new idea for when we set up a moon colony: Weave clothes up there, call it mooncloth or moonweave

Mithrandir

8:15 PM

@Magisch I'm pretty sure memes are going into the history books.

M.A.R. The Chemical Wizard

Ayep

Black hole images might or might not

BTW, what was the new thing that was discovered or understood with the image?

AFAIK it's only consistent with general relativity and that's supposed to give you a warm and fuzzy feeling

Mithrandir

Proof of black holes, I think? We had never actually seen one before, just supposed based on mathematics and models

Get Answer Wizard

1000 years later, students have to learn world history from -6000 BC to AD 3000?

M.A.R. The Chemical Wizard

Things like "indeed there is no surface" and "indeed there is maybe probably perhaps potentially an event horizon"

Mithrandir

Things like "oh, cool, we were actually doing something right the past few hundred years and don't have to throw it all out"

Get Answer Wizard

8:19 PM

Hmm, the curriculum will need to adjust from knowledge inflation...

(I don't know what I'm talking about, time to sleep! 💤)

Mithrandir

@GetAnswerWizard Just transmit data to the brain chip directly.

M.A.R. The Chemical Wizard

@Mithrandir just one hundred, no?

@Mithrandir Damn I keep dreaming about that every now and then

If I find a genie, that's definitely my first wish

Mithrandir

Just... you'd have to be careful with the implementation of the idea.

For instance, other people can't transmit stuff directly; you need to authorize all data entries into your brain.

And that novels don't suffer that fate.

You'd have to make sure that forgetting bad stuff still works, while increasing the storage for other stuff - not forgetting pain and bad stuff will lead to psychological problems.

And account for the possibility of overriding old information with new from a more traditional data source.

...I'm probably waaay overthinking this brain data chip thing, though.

Still your first wish, @M.A.R.TheChemicalWizard? :P

Transcript for