So, just a quick and long-overdue note to let you know what is going on with me and why I haven’t posted in such a long time. Basically, I’m neck-deep in a big project with a rather urgent deadline and I just haven’t had time to focus on the blog. I will get back to it as soon as I can, but I’m not quite sure yet when that will be. My apologies! And I’ll try to keep you all updated in a somewhat more timely fashion as this thing progresses.
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Inshells dot cow is still up. When you return to making new articles, maybe you could find something to talk about.
Hope your project is going well, David!
Hey, you’ve got to pay the bills, just glad it’s work and not something worse.
I’ll be very disappointed if this doesn’t involve an army of atomic powered super-monkeys and a ransom demand to the UN.
But good luck anyway!
@Alan
Prepare for disappointment…
Why is Cloudflare intermittently interposing itself between me and this site today? It’s not even offering a captcha to solve, just forcing extra reloads to eventually get past it, so I don’t see the point.
Nothing has changed in my browser configuration, so it’s unclear why I’m suddenly triggering it.
This certainly is doing nothing to alleviate my concerns about letting a giant monopolist sit between a growing majority of web sites and their visitors, either. Capricious behavior easily morphs into malicious behavior, particularly when there may be money to be made. At least they don’t (to my knowledge) get network effects lock-in even if it’s quite likely they’ve morphed into a protection racket at this point (the more random DDoS attacks there are, the more companies like it benefit, so it behooves them to ensure there’s a minimum level of DDoS background radiation…and they have infrastructure everywhere, plus the ability to coerce users to let them run scripts in their browsers…I don’t trust them. I don’t trust big businesses, and I especially don’t trust big businesses that have over fifty percent market share, and this one, again, has usually-invisible hands within grasping range of half of all the pies!)
A good meal with Salmon always perks me up.
Just putting this comment here since it’s the most recent post. My local weekly alternative free newspaper has a front page story this week about the manosphere that reminded me of David’s recent post about the whitewashing of the manosphere. This seems part of an unsettling trend and I wonder what David and the community here would think of this article.
Red-Pilled: Unplugging the Matrix
Hope things get well for you David.
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/07/29/congress/cory-booker-democrats-backbone-00482783
Lol and Cory Booker still voted unanimous bipartisan for the fascist state.
I guess being bipartisan genocide advocates is what can bring the United States Together.
@grumpycatisagril:
That article didn’t exactly strike me as ‘whitewashing’, though some of the statistics in it could certainly be abused to do that. (Depression and autism may occur more frequently in self-identified incels than the rest of the population, but they’re only contributing factors, not root causes. I know a lot of people are sick and tired of people who use a self-diagnosis of autism as an excuse to be an asshole.) I think some of it is quite valid: the best way to get incels to stop being incels is to break them out of that self-reinforcing self-blame loop and get them to actually look inside themselves and find other sources of their problems.
Of course, getting most of them to agree to actual therapy is going to be a battle all on its own.
@general:
This just got posted to Not Always Right, and seems appropriate for here:
Well, Actually, It Was The Only Way To Make The Point
My latest random weird thought that I felt like throwing out there, since this is an off-topic thread: Astronomy names. Like, some things are named (or have one of their names, as many have two or three) after an area of the sky associated with a constellation. This makes sense as Earth is the only meaningful vantage point we have presently, and astronomy has only really been in a position to truly catalogue the universe for about 150 years (and some would argue more like 100, depending on what standards you’re going by) and the sky has not noticeably changed in that time.
But on a longer scale, things will change. In tens of thousands of years, the constellations will be distorted and things near the edges of the (arbitrary) sky boundaries might have crossed over to an adjacent zone, rendering their names historical artifacts. Hundreds of thousands, and most of the sky is completely unrecognizable, rendering the constellations themselves historical artifacts. Millions? Sol isn’t even on the same part of the Milky Way anymore, all of the Galaxies will have shifted, and “Zone of Avoidance” will have made some easier to see and others harder.
And it’s not even just an issue of constellation shifts which can render names historical artifacts. At some point between 3000 CE and 4000 CE the closest thing to a true “pole star” will be Errai (Gamma Cephei). (The wide uncertainty is because the subtle shifts in Earth’s axial tilt are unpredictable and part of the equation, so it makes only a very rough estimation possible.) Even later it will be Vega (Alpha Lyrae), and will likely hold that position for longer than Polaris or Errai did. This will make the name “Polaris”, because it’s the current pole star, kind of obsolete. Similarly, “Proxima Centauri”, named because it’s closest, will no longer be closest in 30,000 CE or so (at which point it will be Gliese 905 / Ross 248 / HH Andromedae whichever name you want to use).
And that’s assuming that, several centuries from now, it remains standard to name much of the entire universe based on arbitrary 3-D prism wedges radiating outwards from the inner Solar System. Might seem awfully and pointlessly terracentric to people living around Rán (Epsilon Eridani) or wherever, for whom Earth’s constellations will be largely meaningless.
It’s not an issue which currently needs addressing or anything, and I’m sure I’m nowhere near the first person to bring it up. I’m just moderately fascinated on how legacy systems can become rather arbitrary long after they were created.
…After posting all that, I found that there is at least one star which now has an obsolete name due to constellation drift: Rho Aquilae, which is no longer in the constellation Aquila and is now in Delphinus; it officially drifted across the border in 1992. Name hasn’t been changed to reflect the new reality. All right then. And apparently there are also numerous stars which have an inaccurate name due to brightness shifts, which haven’t been updated either. For example, Delta Crateris is currently the brightest star in Crater, *not* Alpha Crateris. So it’s not even a future issue; it’s a happening-right-now thing.
@ snowberry
Do you ever go outside and stare at the night sky and then just get all freaked out by the scale of it? I’m lucky to live somewhere with really dark skies, so I spend ages outside at night.
But just some random comments inspired by your post….
There are 12 stars within 10 light years of earth, around 120 stars within 100 light years, and 8 million stars within 1,000 light years. That always amazes me; and demonstrates I don’t understand exponential scales or how volume works.
Nearly all cultures who can see the Pleiades have a myth that there used to be 7 stars but now only 6. It’s at least 12,000 years since the 7th star was clearly visible. So that seems to show just how long oral traditions can pass on knowledge.
The proper motion of stars affecting what we see is a plot point in an Asimov novel. It’s used to demonstrate that a supposed historical account must have been produced recently.
If you were on Proxima Centauri the night sky would be identical to earth’s; bar one star would be missing (Proxima obvs) and there would be an extra star in Cassiopeia. Us.
This discussion of astronomical impermanence brings to mind the story “Misericorde” by Karl Edward Wagner; there’s a scene where Wagner’s Gothic Villain Protagonist Kane has walked into a magical trap set by an enemy sorcerer who’s meticulously custom-targeted it to Kane, having researched his physical description, history, family lineage, and even his natal chart.
Except that Kane, as the Biblical Cain, is as ancient as humankind itself; he steps casually out of the array, remarking that the constellations have changed since the time of his birth. (“And I’m surprised that you didn’t know that Eve was only my stepmother.”)
@Alan Robertshaw: As someone who is very familiar with 3-D volumes (and moderately familiar with 4-D hypervolumes) that does not sound right. I’d expect there to be tens of thousands of stars within 100 light-years. And I vaguely recall that 120 is how many there are within 20 light-years, not 100. A quick trip to the ol’ search engine reveals that there are indeed 120 stars within 20 LY, and at least 59,722 (recorded as of 2024) within 100 LY. 8-9 million for 1000 LY is probably about right, though that’s currently uncertain.
Cubic numbers get really big much faster than ordinary intuition would expect… though at 10,000 LY the average density drops off because you start going a bit beyond the upper and lower bounds of the galactic disk, and at 100,000 LY there’s more mostly-empty space than not and you’re running out of galaxy, so there’s a point where the number of stars stop increasing explosively relative to the linear distance. (Well, for around three or four orders of magnitude, anyway. At the highest scales it’s the number of *galaxies* which increase exponentially.)
…Also out of curiousity I checked a 3-D star map, to see if “the constellations would be unchanged except for two stars” thing is really true. It appears that, if you viewed the sky from a world around Alpha Centauri (or Proxima), then Sirius, Altair, Epsilon Indi, Tau Ceti, and Procyon would all be out of place, by a few degrees – and also, said stars would be slightly dimmer, except for Epsilon Indi, which would be slightly brighter. I’m not sure how much that would mess up the constellation lines, but it would definitely be noticeable. But aside from those, the missing Alphacent, and the addition of Sol to the night sky, there would likely be no really noticeable differences, because most of the bright stars are giants hundreds of light years away.
…Which reminds me, Betelgeuse go boom within a few centuries maybe, and big stars have (relatively) short lifespans, so future supernovas will also mess with the whole “ordering by brightness” alpha-beta-gamma-etc. thing. I overthink everything, can you tell?
But yes, there have been a handful of times when I was far from any town or city and had clear skies; I did take those opportunities to get a good, long look, and it’s an amazing sight. Wish I could see that more often.
@Full Metal Ox: Depending on whether he knew that Kane was Cain, either a pretty amusing plot twist, or a message that you can be really clever and knowledgeable yet still miss vitally important things.
Seems Pete Buttigieg is doubling down on the transphobia. This pattern of dems leaning more and more into transphobia a la British Labour is a pattern that needs to end.
@ snowberry
Overthinking is the best kind of thinking!
But thank you for all your work there. That was really interesting. It also makes sci-fi stories like Star Trek more plausible, in that there are potential habitable worlds within a reasonable distance.
Weird to think Betelgeuse may have already gone boom and the news hasn’t got to us yet.
Relativity of simultaneity. It may already have gone boom in some reference frames, perhaps including galactic rest. It hasn’t in the reference frame of something moving at relativistic speeds in the same direction as that from Betelgeuse to Sol. The reference frame where it’s most likely to have is that of a relativistic object traveling in the opposite direction.
@ Sylvia
Yeah, all this What is “Now”? stuff is so mind boggling; but fascinating. The implications of all the worldline shenanigans is that there’s no such thing as free will. From some perspective or another everything that can happen has happened. Still, I’m with Sabine Hossenfelder. Her argument being that free will cannot exist, but what we have is such a near perfect facsimile we might as well act like it does.
@Alan:
I’ve commented before that when you get right down to it, the core concept of chaos theory is ‘deterministic does not mean predictable’. Something can be absolutely deterministic if you have all the information, but if you’re missing any of the current state it could go in all sorts of directions that you can’t predict.
It’s also my experience that most ‘free will’ debates are really arguments over semantics and the definition of ‘free will’, whether or not that’s what either side is willing to admit.
And I have no patience for the ‘if there’s no free will, what’s the point in punishment for something they had no choice in doing?’ argument I’ve heard a few times. After all, we do ‘reward’ and ‘punishment’ for computer algorithms that we train as well, and they obviously had even less of a concept of choice. Besides which, things like imprisonment are often as much about protecting the rest of society from the people involved as they are about punishing the person. At least that’s the theory, sadly in practice many people get too wrapped up in a purely retributive idea of ‘justice’.
@Ooglyboggles: So far it’s just Petey and Gav, unless there’s more I haven’t heard of. Two is still two plus however many Republicans too many.
The argument is that “some people” have concerns, so we should keep trans people out of athletics until those concerns are no longer concerns, despite that the reasoning is false to a high degree of certainty, because strongly-held beliefs are more important than reality. Also keeping trans people out of athletics will prevent that “high degree of certainty” from becoming “close to absolute certainty as one can get”, so in the unlikely chance that someone’s concern is based on there being less than absolute certainty there would be no good way to close the gap.
I don’t know whether they’re catering to centrists who have concerns because conservatives keep saying things, or because they’re that sort of centrist themselves, but it’s not great either way.
I can think of two ways to keep a form of “free will” (really, indeterminacy) in there. Both quantum.
I’ve got a date next Saturday guys!
@Elaine the witch:
Congratulations! What do you know about them so far?
@ full metal ox.
Lots of things at this point cause he the DM in my DND group. He walked me out to my car, open the door for me and asked me if I wanted to go out some time.