We respond…
UPDATE: LAUNCH SCRUBBED.
The countdown of the crewed mission has been ordered to hold at T-minus four minutes to launch just now.
We will keep an eye on it — and you may watch on NASA.gov’s live stream:
…Hold, and reset to T-minus four minutes….
Onward.
नमस्ते
The funny thing about privilege is… that like air we breathe, most walk about utterly unaware of its existence. These people cannot see… what they cannot see.
Overnight, Paul wrote about why (statistically) he feels it is not fair to add black baseball champions into the MLB / Hall of Fame record books. His argument boils down to… these players didn’t face absolute top competition in the days of the segregated Negro Leagues. That may be so — but had they been ALLOWED to play in the AL and NL, starting in 1900 — and perhaps through to today, they would have dominated. This is not idle conjecture. Look at the NBA and NFL.
[The fact is, from 1900 on, whyte players didn’t have to face the best competition — from people of color. They were the ones who got a pass.]
I’ll explain that argument another day, but I write to assail the idea that because we as a nation CHOSE to prevent a class of people (from playing), we also chose to keep held down, throughout society — at the bottom rungs of that society — from finding a way out of poverty by playing baseball (or back then, basketball, either)… we should be allowed as whyte society… to forever minimize their abilities.
That is Lunacy, stacked on lunacy… borne of the privilege that says once we get to the top, no one else may ever be accepted as… worthy of recognition.
Had Josh or Satchel been allowed to play in the majors, the records would have long ago fallen.
And the names of hundreds and hundreds of people of color, who never got a chance to play… would have long ago supplanted most of the whyte names.
Ruth and Cobb would be out of the top ten entirely.
But more important, we would not have frozen an unjust system into the record books, essentially through eternity.
It is very late in coming, this correction — but it is… a small measure of… restorative… Justice.
Sit down, you idiot, Paulie. And you get zero credit for admitting what all knew for a century: Cobb was an odious racist. Just… sit down.
NASA has posted a new podcast, with one of the lead engineers for the ‘copter at left. While designed for five to seven hops, it succeeded in making 71 of them. On fight 72, its guidance system likely mis-identified a very flat patch of fine grain sands… as sky, and tilted to one side, causing the rotors to impact and snap, on hitting the surface.
But as the engineer clearly indicates, this too is a success — we learn more about the edge conditions — in using cameras to fly copters in an atmosphere only one percent the density of Earth’s. Here’s a bit; do enjoy:
…The area of Mars that Ingenuity was flying over towards the end of her mission — which we’ve now affectionately called the place Valinor Hills for nerdy “Lord of the Rings” reasons — was some of the most featureless terrain that Ingenuity had ever experienced. Because of that, it’s kind of a great victory story for us in that we finally found the edge, right? The whole journey over the last three years is, if you imagine the envelope as a sphere, our flight envelope, we’ve been pushing on in every direction between velocity, how high we can fly above ground level, the automatic landing hazard avoidance. In each vector, we’ve been expanding our envelope, and we now found the edge.
That boundary had to do, we believe the leading theory here is, that it had to do with how featureless the terrain was. That’s important because the way Ingenuity flies is she has a downward looking camera, an altimeter, and a set of inertial sensors like an accelerometer and a gyroscope. Very similar to drones here on Earth. Even if you were to take a drone here on Earth, and you were to put it in a white, pure white room, it wouldn’t be able to visually orient itself and figure out from moment to moment where the features are moving in the field of view. And it uses that information to determine and close the loop of where it actually thinks it is in space.
So going back to Mars here, that terrain near Valinor Hills was very sandy, very fine in terms of the texture of the sand. There weren’t a lot of boulders sticking out. And we saw on the logs in flight 70 and in 71 that the number of features that the baby was able to resolve was dropping and going lower, and she was reporting, “Hey, guys, this is getting very challenging for me to, you know, navigate it.”
And there was no other path for us to go. We had to go to the northwest because that’s where the river was headed. So the best thing to do was to keep trying to tweak some parameters if we could, and learn as much as we could and, and we succeeded in that regard. Unfortunately, had the rough landing, we weren’t able to keep flying. But she surprised us still….
Onward — dare mighty things, indeed!
नमस्ते
The boys of the hard right now renounce the oaths each took to uphold the Constitution, promote respect for the law, and help the process work — as new lawyers long ago.
Instead, they’ve chosen… disunion. Sowing cries for a new version of the Confederate States… to rise up. [See the idiot Bill Otis this morning, here as well. Somehow, he thinks “enforcing the law as written” is transmogrified… into Trump as the victim of some vast… conspiracy. Sheesh.]
This effort will fail; America is better than their lies — but the cowardice each exhibits… is shameful.
This is Scott’s, of this morning:
…The …trial bears seeds of alienation, discord, turnabout, and violence. That is the point buried in the clichéd metaphors. That is the implication of the conviction rendered in the… trial…
I often poke derisive fun at these feeble, feckless codgers… but not today. It is the GOP’s insistence on running a felon that leads to this moment; the boys’ own deliberate and… ongoing choice.
This sort of intentionally traitorous action deserves a swift, short rebuke — so this is just that.
Out.
Clinical trials will begin in about six weeks, in Japan.
The idea that the body can regenerate its own new teeth has long been known, but the side effects were considered unacceptable. It seems the Japanese scientists have solved that issue. We will keep a close eye on this one:
…The world’s first human trial of a drug that can regenerate teeth will begin in a few months, less than a year on from news of its success in animals. This paves the way for the medicine to be commercially available as early as 2030.
The trial, which will take place at Kyoto University Hospital from September to August 2025, will treat 30 males aged 30-64 who are missing at least one molar. The intravenous treatment will be tested for its efficacy on human dentition, after it successfully grew new teeth in ferret and mouse models with no significant side effects.
“We want to do something to help those who are suffering from tooth loss or absence,” said lead researcher Katsu Takahashi, head of dentistry and oral surgery at Kitano Hospital. “While there has been no treatment to date providing a permanent cure, we feel that people’s expectations for tooth growth are high….”
Molecular biologist and dentist Takahashi has been working on tooth regeneration since 2005, and hopes this treatment won’t just be for congenital dental conditions but for anyone who has lost teeth, at any age….
Onward, flashing a toothy grin, tonight — for a host of reasons… what a time to be… alive!
नमस्ते
Hinderaker is belching about his nominee’s conviction — on 34 felonies.
Hinderaker says this is precisely why America needs to elect Trump in 2024: so that he can run vendettas against all enemies.
Charming — and just about the level of “thinking” we’ve come to expect from the senile old fart.
That’s all I’ll say. But no sensible voter is going to put a 34-time felon in an office that is largely insulated from almost all legal process… ever again.
See’ya, Johnnie. [Confidential note to John — the Mann case was about knowingly, and falsely, labeling someone a pedophile. I understand you cannot grasp libel law — but that is what it was: Libel. Per. Se. so do sod off, about that as well. Cheers.]
This is brain-freezingly… silly. The pointy-headed local Texas lawyers working for Abbott and Paxton overnight argue that a judge must wait until “Summary Judgment” to decide the jurisdictional (subject matter) question… because… “The Alamo…” or… Texas. Or sumpin’.
The case they cite is so radically different from land based razor wire barriers that are maiming and in at least one case, killing asylum seekers, barriers that directly violate long standing federal law, and international treaties… as to ask how many bicycles that school of fish needs, to go on a field trip to the Smithsonian.
D A M N.
USDC Judge Moses in Del Rio should strike it — as both vexatious, and irrelevant… and a waste of the court’s time.
Out.
Many here will recall that about a month ago we mentioned that a younger and quite capable USDC Judge had been assigned in Newark, to take over this long running, multi-billion dollar Lanham Act case. I am sure the idea was to fill out his relatively lighter calendar — and give Judge Salas some breathing room.
But the USDC Chief Judge has placed the case back with USDC Judge Esther Salas, overnight — which makes sense, since the file alone could / would take six months to digest at this point, spanning decades in the federal courts, now (and, in truth, all the way back to the Treaty of Versailles, in 1917). If you are really going to understand it, you need to read over a century of history, that is. So, wisely, Judge Salas will finish it, thus:
…TEXT ORDER REASSIGNING CASE.
Case reassigned to Judge Esther Salas for all further proceedings. Judge Jamel K. Semper no longer assigned to case. So Ordered by Chief Judge Renee Marie Bumb on 5/29/24….
Now you know. Onward, grinning into the sunshine, and the birthday of my middle guy… a great day, ahead!
नमस्ते
It seems clear that Truth Social, and the stock symbol DJT will be worth about one-twentieth of today’s price, post his felony convictions. That’s just for starters.
But I write to note that all the boys at Ringside and Powerline are already trying to draw the sting of the felony, out.
I am not 100% sure there will not be a jury nullifying holdout among the 12 in Manhattan — but I think the evidence of guilt is simply… overwhelming. And the boys (especially at Powerline) if they are honest, do too. [UPDATED: But now even Bill Otis is… burping on it: Bill sees a 75% chance of conviction on at least a few felonies.]
So all their keyboards are clacking — and, in rhythm, too — trying to minimize the damage that running a convicted felon for 1600 Penn will do, in eternity, to the old-line GOP “brand”.
This makes my heart… quite profoundly glad, for the reality is… Trump is a felon. And we may know it by tonight.
And Devin Nunes may yet go down for felony securities fraud in his materially misleading statements about the stock DJT.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy — a service with around 100,000 regular monthly users… cannot ever compete with one that sports over 340 million of them.
Trump’s “brand” is increasingly a dead letter, not just in politics, but in commerce as well.
Lovely. Out.
Again, this is at the moment immaterial to vast Merck.
But it is smart diversifying / back-filling… for the 2030s — at a very fair price, as well. Very smart. Here’s the bit:
…Merck & Co is nearing a $1.3 billion cash deal to buy ophthalmology biotechnology company EyeBio in an agreement that could see an additional $1.7 billion in milestone payments, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
The deal could be announced as early as Wednesday, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.
Merck did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for a comment, while EyeBio declined to comment….
Now you know — off to the steel and glass canyons, under a bright and sunny sky… grin.
नमस्ते
