stargazer-3

Here's an article mentioning the data transmission rates in SKA, up to 20 terabits per second:

https://www.skao.int/en/explore/big-data

For context, Diamond argues that the collapse occurred around 1600, much earlier than the 19th century slaving raids you mention. The first European contact occurred around 1720, with a 1770 Spanish estimate of 3000 people living on Easter Island. Honestly, it's not an outlandish thought that 887 gigantic statues were crafted by a larger population.

Actually, genetic studies found that Al-Andalus did leave a sizable admixture behind.

Lots of references here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_the_Iberian...

It is mentioned in the linked article.

The library is not forcing you to use plt as a shorthand. Nothing is stopping you from calling

from matplotlib import pyplot

pyplot.plot([0,1,2], [0,2,4])

It's funny that lots of folks complain about the game being oversexualized while me and my partner - 120 hours in, in Act 3 now - somehow managed to completely fail triggering any romance subplots despite actually trying to raise approval of all the companions (okay maybe we gave up on Astarion). Not sure if it's a somewhat clunky split-screen handling of approval mechanics or just bad luck.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1294/

Yes, Nárdil (or Nárndil?) could've been a Tolkien name meaning fire friend in Quenya.

I thought it was well accepted

I was in a museum in Sardinia (was part of Carthage) sometime ago and saw some of the tophets mentioned in the article. The argument from the linked article was repeated on one of the info boards - that the Romans demonized their enemies and lots of our sources on alleged child sacrifice come from them. I am not sure about the Carthagenian sources on the matter, but they did not make it into the argument, so I assume the evidence was either slimmer or newer.

A dam on the same river was blown up by retreating Soviet troops in WW2: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/02/second-world-w...

If a woman bears many children throughout her life, you can still have a situation where the first pregnancy occurs much earlier than today's average yet the overall conception average is roughly same as nowadays.

There was little support for joining NATO before Crimea was annexed. Ukraine wanted to join NATO precisely because it realized that it will be devoured piece by piece by its imperialist neighbor unless it does.

Zoomed-in part in the center, "1400 light-years across the centre of the Galaxy." as a linked paper indicates. Milky Way is long, 105700 light years in diameter.

They could be aligned with the magnetic field lines around the Galactic Center: https://media.springernature.com/original/springer-static/im...

The cost of Ariane 5 rocket is below $200m, which is a rather small fraction of the overall budget of $5-10b. If the main reason for the huge cost is to make it so lightweight, why didn't they go with more capable heavy-lift rockets to cut some R&D costs already? At least, Delta IV Heavy seems to have a significantly larger max. payload [1]. The JWST was still in re-planning phase as of 2005 and Delta IV Heavy was already operational at that point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy-lift_launch_vehicle

Around 5e-14 per year, assuming random impact location, small (i.e. not town-sized) projectiles, and head impact cross-section the size an A4 paper.

You can sleep safely. Waiting for 10^14 years will take a while - by that time, no new stars are born in Milkomeda, and the Sun's white dwarf remnant has cooled down to a point of no longer being visible by naked eye. (edit: of course, it's not reasonable to assume that the 500 impacts / year will be constant till the end of time)

Hitting a random human on Earth, though, is a munch higher likelihood - around 0.04% per year if I did my numbers right.

A more interesting bit of the paper:

It is worth speculating that a remarkable catastrophe, such as the destruction of Tall el-Hammam by a cosmic object, may have generated an oral tradition that, after being passed down through many generations, became the source of the written story of biblical Sodom in Genesis. The description in Genesis of the destruction of an urban center in the Dead Sea area is consistent with having been an eyewitness account of a cosmic airburst, e.g., (i) stones fell from the sky; (ii) fire came down from the sky; (iii) thick smoke rose from the fires; (iv) a major city was devastated; (v) city inhabitants were killed; and (vi) area crops were destroyed.

You can try it yourself with the chrome translate feature.

Good suggestion, but the data is semi-private and I have no ownership of it. May be worth a shot though, thanks!

I was playing around with MegaDetector and it's wonderful. Works surprisingly well, although it does have a tendency to classify tree stumps as animals. Wish it would come with some kind of sequence aware background removal feature.

I, for one, would be uncomfortable with AI removing my accent. I understand it's for other people to understand me better - and I am fine with AI-generated subtitles - but altering the way I speak would reduce the amount of "me" in ways I'm not fully ok with.

That is true, but the prize was awarded to Genzel for “for the __discovery__ of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy” (emphasis mine), not for the (impressive no doubt) follow-up work, so my comment was done in that context. That being said, I should have been a bit more enthusiastic about the infrared group's work to not appear dismissive on their ongoing contribution.

Fun fact: looks like we're both in MPE (although I left two years ago).

Back in the day they each led research to detect irrefutable evidence of it. This isn't anything new and groundbreaking.

We smile on the outside yet cry on the inside.

It's easy to miss that the article is published under the same username as the one described as an "anonymous source", in, for example "... Wirecard desperately wanted to know who this memyselfandi007 was to sue the shxx out of him, but the police didn’t pass on the real identity."

No, herd immunity means "enough people are resistant so the vulnerable ones don't get infection spread to them at all". There's a big difference there.

> wildly misrepresented the role of women in Russian society during those times

Women were better represented in USSR's STEM fields that in the US. For example, Between 1962 and 1964, women were awarded 40 percent of the chemistry PhD, while in the US that number was five percent [1].

I recently went to see my grandmother, and she showed me her Physics collage graduation pics - there was only one man in their class of ten students. And no, it was not due to WWII raising women/men ratio - born in the 30-ies her generation was too young to be drafted.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/soviet-russia-had-...

> Also I'd be interested to read how they got around scintallation of the Interstellar Medium.

One of the reasons they've imaged M87* rather than a black hole in our own galaxy was to avoid dealing with ISM scattering - we don't have to look through our edge-on disk, so it's easier to image another galaxy's center somehow. But the Sgr A* image might be in the works already, it was mentioned in both the press-conference and one of the paper's future work section.

The collecting time is important, but mainly to 1) sample the rotation of the Earth in the Fourier space for better angular resolution and 2) for raising your overall signal-to-noise ratio is the image (but the one released is already pretty good, so not much improvement can be done there unless you're trying to go for the faint features in the image).

Unfortunately, you can only do interferometry with simultaneous measurements (we need information about the difference in the phase of light hitting the receiving antennas), so the motion of Earth around the Sun is largely irrelevant, unless you can park another antenna at a trailing orbit (see space VLBI for that).

What you're thinking of is probably parallax measurements of distance - that's how missions like Gaia can pinpoint distances to stars in Milky Way (and some in its satellites as well).

One thing missing from @petschge's reply: adding more telescopes! This will not improve the imaging the smallest possible features, but will make features larger (disk and / or jet components) more prominent. The more telescope pairs with different distance between them are added, the more complete the picture will get - up to a limit of having a single antenna roughly the size of Earth.

Furthermore, adding more telescopes will help better image the fainter features in the image (due to larger total collecting surface).