Really Random Thoughts - 2024

Discussion in 'Liverpool' started by newterp, May 17, 2024.

  1. Samarkand

    Samarkand Member+

    May 28, 2001
    Who the f.uck really believes this shit?

    “But the transgender thing is incredible, think of it! Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation, the school decides what's going to happen with your child.

    And you know many of these childs 15 years later say, what the hell happened, who did this to me?

    They say, who did this to me?

    It's incredible.”
     
  2. newterp

    newterp Moderator
    Staff Member

    Jun 6, 2007
    North Potomac, MD
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    haha that's wild!
     
  3. LiverpoolFanatic

    Liverpool FC, Philadelphia Union
    Feb 19, 2000
    Lancaster, PA
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States

    The same people who believed that there were litter boxes in classrooms for kids who identified as cats because some Trans phobic campaigner claimed it was happening.

    https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/01/30/how-furries-got-swept-up-in-anti-trans-litter-box-rumors/
     
  4. zaqualung

    zaqualung Member+

    Jun 17, 2015
    San Francisco
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
    #829 zaqualung, Sep 4, 2024
    Last edited: Sep 4, 2024
    There are actual people in Ireland (or maybe it was England) who have proposed that this would be a reasonable idea if someone felt catlike.

    Whereas a reasonabler idea would be a smack to the side of the head to any human who starts to think and behave as if they are a cat....

    but that's just me.
     
  5. zaqualung

    zaqualung Member+

    Jun 17, 2015
    San Francisco
    Club:
    Liverpool FC

    Of course - it's simples -

    he's also for not having sex with Stormy Daniels at any moment when he doesn't happen to be having sex with her...
    Windmills when he needs a McDonalds bun .... and guns when he doesn;t have to listen to the bang..... ;)
     
  6. zaqualung

    zaqualung Member+

    Jun 17, 2015
    San Francisco
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
  7. Samarkand

    Samarkand Member+

    May 28, 2001
    A dollar to anyone who can translate this answer to what is a pretty straightforward question.


    A: If you win in November, will you commit to prioritizing legislation to make childcare affordable, and if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?"


    A: "Well, I will do that and we're sitting down, you know, I was, uh, somebody, we had Sen. Marco Rubio and my daughter Ivanka were so, uh, impactful on that issue, it's a very important issue, but I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I'm talking about that because childcare is childcare is couldn't, you know, is something you have to have it in this country, you have to have it.

    But when you talk about those numbers compare to the kind of numbers that I'm talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they're not used to but they'll get used to it very quickly and it's not going to stop them from doing business with us but they'll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we're talking about, including childcare, that it's going to take care. We're going to have, I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly very short period of time coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country because I have to stay with childcare, I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I'm talking about, including growth.

    But growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about. We're gonna be taking in trillions of dollars and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it's relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we will be taking in. We're gonna make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people and then we'll worry about the rest of the world. Let's help other people.

    But we're will going to care of our country first, this is about America First. It's about Make America Great Again. We have to do it because right now we're a failing nation. So we'll take care of it."
     
  8. newterp

    newterp Moderator
    Staff Member

    Jun 6, 2007
    North Potomac, MD
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    That's not even poor enough to be a word salad. Indeed, that's actually verbal alzheimer derived diarrhea.

    The Billy Madison - no points, god have mercy on your soul - quote is very applicable here.

    Except that I don't want God to have mercy on his soul. Not one bit.
     
  9. speker

    speker Member+

    May 16, 2009
    Canada
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
    Looking forward to the debate. :)
     
    LiverpoolFanatic repped this.
  10. Samarkand

    Samarkand Member+

    May 28, 2001
    Pennsylvania. It’s all coming down to whoever wins Pennsylvania wins this thing. Lumpy is a lot closer than you might think and he will carry enough states to make this competitive. At the moment, Harris has Wisconsin and Michigan, but only just. Lumpy probably has Arizona, Georgia and N Carolina. Again only just, so there’s plenty of time to change that narrative. If Harris holds WI and MI and knocks off one of AZ, NC or GA, then life gets a lot more suffocating for Lumpy. Equally if he overturns Michigan, Harris could be back in Hillary territory. But everything runs through PA.

    Of course all bets are off if there’s a September or October surprise. The only possible upcoming wrinkles/scandals/surprises are all on the Lumpy side of the aisle at the moment. His DC Jan 6th trial is back on track, his NY sentencing is soon and maybe, just maybe his dementia is becoming more obvious. Then again a surprise is just that, so maybe there’s something in the stars for Harris in the upcoming weeks.

    Harris is playing a smart game and knocking him here and there for his individual mistakes like Arlington, but she is running on what/who she is rather than focusing on the frat boy moron across the aisle. Everyone outside of MAGA world knows what Lumpy is about and while it’s great to laugh at the piggy in the middle with his numerous missteps and errors (I’m definitely guilty here), the truth is that Harris has not used those as the fundamental building blocks of her campaign as Hillary did. It remains to be seen if she’s doing enough to connect across the swing states, but especially Pennsylvania. Bush/Gore was Florida, Obama was Ohio. This time out Pennsylvania is the prom queen.
     
  11. Samarkand

    Samarkand Member+

    May 28, 2001
    Not competent.

     
  12. zaqualung

    zaqualung Member+

    Jun 17, 2015
    San Francisco
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
    Trump's motto...

    ALWAYS be a Giant Cvnt. Never make exceptions - even when you don't have to be even a little bit of a cvnt....
     
  13. hubbabubba

    hubbabubba Moderator
    Staff Member

    May 17, 2002
    Ann Arbor, MI
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Hey all... tonight I'm sharing a new version of the M16 Eagle Nebula collected with narrowband filters. I am pretty sure I've shared this particular constellation before, but not with the new, bigger telescope. I also collected A LOT more light to assemble this image. Most of my previous astrophotography images have been essentially one night's worth of imaging, but this image is the result of ~5-10 times more night sky imaging. This longer imaging lets me pull out a lot more detail in the nebular structures in the final image. I hope you enjoy!
    upload_2024-9-7_0-22-45.jpeg
    TL;DR if you just want to enjoy the image this is all you have to really read. But if you want to know how the image was collected and processed, then read on...

    This image of a part of the M16 Eagle Nebula that I'm sharing is a narrowband image, which means I'm only collecting very specific wavelengths of light instead of the full visible spectrum. This allows you to collect and reproduce images with much greater resolution of some of the finer details of the nebular structures than you would be able to detect and see collecting the entire visible spectrum. In my case, I'm selectively collecting light in very narrow bandwidths; only that light which is within a ~3-6 nm window of the whole visible spectrum (~380nm - 740nm, or a total window of ~360nm). So each individual filter is only collecting about 1-2% of the total visible light spectrum. The Ha (Hydrogen-Alpha, or H-I-alpha) emission is the most common wavelength of light emitted by excited molecular hydrogen in a vacuum. This light is emitted by the excited H atom at a wavelength of ~650 nm, which is in the red region of the visible light spectrum. S-II emission is actually coming from an "ionized" version of a sulfur atom where one of its electrons has already been blown off by the high-energy light from nearby stars. In this case the light emission is coming when the second outer-most electron drops from an excited state back down to a lower level orbital. This results in emission at ~670 nm, which is also in the red region, but a deeper red than the ~650 nm wavelength emitted by excited Ha atoms. To the naked eye, these two colors would look almost identical, and mixed together it would be impossible to separate them, but I'm using filters that can actually discriminate between these two wavelengths and only collect one or the other of these regions of the visible spectrum. The O-3 (O-III) emission line is emitted by a doubly ionized form of an oxygen atom. In this case, not one, but two electrons have been blown off the oxygen atom by high energy sunlight, and we are collecting light emitted when that third, outer-most electron drops down to a lower-level orbital. This light is emitted at ~500 nm wavelength, or in the blue/green region of the visible spectrum.

    Okay, so that's the science and the particulars about how specific light emissions are formed in nebula and what I'm collecting with my specific, narrowband filters... but the next part is equally if not more important to generating the image I have shared with you.

    How, exactly do you then represent the images you collect with these narrowband filter sets?

    We have two visually indistinguishable spectra (H-alpha and S-II) in the red spectrum, and a third greenish-blue O-3 spectral line. If one simply presents these at their nominal wavelengths we get an image that is mostly red with some minor blue/green tints. This would actually look worse than the full spectrum image, because all we have done is remove about 90-95% of all the light we would normally see if we look at this part of the sky. Additionally we essentially lose any of the added detail we gained by looking at the specific wavelengths of the Ha and S-II emissions in the first place.

    Instead I've used methods proposed by Hubble space telescope scientists who were figuring out how to present narrowband images to the general public back in the 1990s (probably they were working from ideas developed even before that...). I'm presenting my image using what is called a "Hubble palette" (Hubble SHO palette). In a simple sense, what they decided to do was to convert the Ha (red), S-II (deep-red), and O-3 (blue/green) colors into R, G, and B colors.

    So which narrowband emission line becomes red, or green, or blue?

    What was decided was that the longest wavelength collected should be the "red" color, and subsequent wavelength colors should be ordered based on their relative wavelengths. So, if I collect H-alpha, S-II, and O-3 wavelengths, the "reddest" of these is the S-II emission, and the "bluest" of these is the O-3 emission. So, in the reconstructed RGB image S-II signal will be red, H-alpha signal will be green, and O-3 signal will be blue. There are additional, very complex equations that go into ensuring that the relative balances of these "artificial" color assignments are balanced correctly. As I understand it, these are based on direct color measurements of the stars in these images. I haven't yet dived into this added science-based level of accuracy. Instead I've balanced these colors based on what look nice to me... I would say that most public domain images of nebulae have little to do with scientific accuracy, and instead (like me) those who assembled them were just trying to generate a compelling image.

    Anyway, even with all that explanation, I hope you enjoy the image.
     
    imasyko, augie, bayred and 2 others repped this.
  14. newterp

    newterp Moderator
    Staff Member

    Jun 6, 2007
    North Potomac, MD
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I'm pretty sure I see Thanos emerging from that picture!!! :D




    But seriously - wowowo!
     
  15. SamScouse

    SamScouse Member+

    Jun 1, 2015
    Toronto
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
    #840 SamScouse, Sep 7, 2024
    Last edited: Sep 7, 2024
    you're so lame, Samark. you expect straightforward answers? the stable genius explains it all to the feeble-minded amongst us:

    I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about, like, nine different things that they all come back brilliantly together. And it’s like friends of mine that are like English professors, they say: ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen,’” he told a bemused audience.

    “But the fake news, you know what they say, ‘He rambled.’ It’s not rambling. What you do is you get off a subject to mention another little tidbit, then you get back on to the subject, and you go through this and you do it for two hours, and you don’t even mispronounce one word.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/07/election-trump-speeches

    interesting stuff - but now we have to make sure we don't mix up "the weave" with his dance routine which I think he calls "the wank".
     
  16. Samarkand

    Samarkand Member+

    May 28, 2001
    Ha! Just about to post that. Best analysis yet of the ramblings of Lumpy.

    It’s easy to be glib and sarcastic about that f.ucking idiot and to use hyperbole to make a point, but I say this in all seriousness, without hyperbole or, indeed, sarcasm. And also without a degree in medicine or gerontology. The guy has early stage dementia. Which means it’s not so bad that he can’t get by most days, but it’s only going to get worse, never better. He’s as good as he’s ever going to be right now.

    Regardless of my political leanings, there is absolutely no way this guy should be anywhere near nuclear codes, CIC of the Armed Forces or have any decision making capabilities beyond what flavor of pablum to have for dinner.


    (That last bit was hyperbole and sarcasm).
     
  17. Samarkand

    Samarkand Member+

    May 28, 2001
    What you’ll find as he gets worse, is that the bad actors around him (Heritage/P2025) will manipulate him for their own political purposes. They’ll achieve this by flattering him and therefore molding him like soft putty to enact their agendas. Even in his good days when the specter of dementia wasn’t hanging over him, once you flattered him, you had him.

    What you’ll have is an angry, bitter, vengeful old man, not in control of his faculties, seeing enemies everywhere who will use his considerable power and the urgings of the many Svengalis behind the throne to fulfill his threats and dementia addled visions.
     
  18. SamScouse

    SamScouse Member+

    Jun 1, 2015
    Toronto
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
    he's the ultimate useful idiot. the GUIAT.
     
  19. Samarkand

    Samarkand Member+

    May 28, 2001
    A lot of times, journalists, columnists, media organizations will purposely take a contrarian view in order to generate hits, views and even discussion.

    The conventional wisdom now is that Harris is leading and will win. The lead itself is thin (~1.5% nationally) and it needs to translate into wins in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Hence winning the popular vote and losing the Electoral College. Pennsylvania at the moment is pretty much a dead heat.

    But, and here’s where it gets interesting and scary, a significant number of these journalists, columnists and organizations are now saying they see or easily see a Lumpy win in November. Now, put some of this down to contrarianism, but it’s certainly a burgeoning subtext or narrative that Lumpy will win.
     
  20. LiverpoolFanatic

    Liverpool FC, Philadelphia Union
    Feb 19, 2000
    Lancaster, PA
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Tim Walz was here in Lancaster, PA this week and told volunteers that it could come down to Lancaster county. Lancaster city is solidly blue, but the surrounding county is red. Our state rep is a progressive, but Lloyd Smucker, our Congressman is a Trumper.

    Third party voters in 2016, myself included, gave PA to Trump. I'm not making that mistake again. Hopefully others will take note as well.
     
  21. Samarkand

    Samarkand Member+

    May 28, 2001
    Obama McCain and then Romney essentially came down to Cuyahoga County for Ohio.
     
    LiverpoolFanatic repped this.
  22. SamScouse

    SamScouse Member+

    Jun 1, 2015
    Toronto
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
    at this point in US eIections, I regard the media reporting, and the polling, in the same vein as footie rumours during transfer windows.

    simply way too much public positioning, bluffing, counter-bluffing and hidden agendas - all intended to sway opinions and behaviour - to make any sense out of the whole thing.
     
  23. Samarkand

    Samarkand Member+

    May 28, 2001
    The comprehensive list of all GOP presidents, vice presidents and losing presidential and VP candidates committed (in public) to supporting Lumpy in November:

    1. Sarah Palin.
     
  24. speker

    speker Member+

    May 16, 2009
    Canada
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
    C'mon, the rest are all lefty commies.
     
  25. royalstilton

    royalstilton Member

    Aug 2, 2004
    SoCal
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    A vote for Harris/Walz isn't a vote for something; it's a vote against someone. That's a personal choice but it's nihilistic.
     

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