> How about putting our astronomy experiments into space as well? There'd be no light / em pollution there, as well as no atmospheric interference etc.
One would need to put the telescopes into fairly high orbits in order to avoid the interference. I think that even images made with the Hubble space telescope have sometimes seen the impact of satellite constellations.
> In space there are no limits, see Radioastron for example, and that was decades ago.
Radioastron required cross-correlating the signal with ground-based radio teleacopes in order to do science. The collecting area, dish distributons, etc. would need to be fully replicated in space if one wanted to avoid using ground-based facilities entirely.
There's at least two issues with this line of thinking:
1. many astronomical observations are long integrations (many minutes of open shutter) and you often cannot read out the pixels during the exposure. So you can't selectively ignore pixels on a "by moment" basis. And with enough satellites, enough pixels could be affected to render an entire image effectively unusable
2. It seems you're thinking only about optical astronomy. There's also a ton of radio/millimeter wave astronomy that's done from the ground. Satellites have radio-wave downlinks that can be powerful enough to destroy the electronics used in radio astronomy receivers. The US's National Radio Astronomy Observatory has been working on data sharing with Starlink to mitigate this, but it's basically up to companies to agree to work together. Other satellites / companies don't engage in this coordination and so some radio telescopes need to go to a "safe"/stow position to protect the electronics. This costs valuable observing time.
Can you elaborate on how this is doable (in, say, Racket) and what tooling is needed? I'm afraid your reply doesn't add much information beyond the same assertion that I quoted that was in the article posted to HN. And I haven't been able to find information on this with Racket.
> You can pause, inspect objects, change values, and even redefine a broken function on the fly to test a fix in any environment (yes even in production, while running).
I see this mentioned often, and it sounds amazingly useful (especially the part about fixing in production!). But how truly widespread is it among the Lisp dialects to be able to connect to a running program, debug, and hotfix it? I understand Common Lisp has it, but I struggled to figure out how to do it in, say, Racket. Admittedly I'm am relatively inexperienced Lisp programmer, so maybe I wasn't looking in the right place or for the right words. Which Lisp dialects do indeed support the extreme version of this capability to inspect and edit running programs?
> In fact, relativity was only recently fully backed up with experimental data.
Can you elaborate on the assertion you made here? In addition to the important points @elbasti made about tests performed approximately a century ago, what does it even mean for a scientific theory to be "fully backed up"? Such theories can be tested and the tests either passed or the theory disproven but it's not possible to _prove_ such a theory. And to some extent we already know that relativity cannot be the final answer because it doesn't mesh well with quantum mechanics (which has been experimentally tested substantially, arguably even more than relativity has).
I don't use it often, but have you tried the Wikipedia current events portal? A reading of their brief daily summaries from the past week might be close to what you're looking for.
> Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money
In addition to what @tokai said, I think it's also important to keep in mind that before Open Access the journal publishers charged subscription fees. The subscription fees were paid by universities and that was also likely largely taxpayer funded (e.g., using money from overheads charged to grants).
I thought the same thing too, when it was announced. But I suspect, in addition to the price, that not being able to buy a medium or long bed version also harmed fleet sales. The short bed being the only option is probably a pretty big limitation for groups who are buying them as fleet vehicles.
An interesting theme here in the comments (that I am sympathetic to) is "TUIs have steep learning curves but are fast/efficient for people with proficiency". I wonder if a small part of the modern preference for GUIs is related to a lack of employee retention. If companies aren't necessarily interested in working hard to keep employees then training new hires needs to be faster/easier and that could work against TUI and keyboard-based tools.
Of course, if that's a factor I'm guessing it's a small one in comparison to expectations about what "modern" software should look like.
@sharweek said
> Some of his writing often covered what just a slight altering of our societal moral compass might look like.
@JKCalhoun
> in my world-view most humans want to be kind.
These two views aren't necessarily in conflict. Individuals can overwhelmingly want to be kind but still be in a system where society pushes them to behave to the contrary.
About me: I'm have 10+ years of experience as a research astrophysicist. I primarily deal with heterogeneous datasets and apply statistical and numerical models to interpreting them. I'm 70% an observer/experimentalist and 30% a theorist -- I'm comfortable with data-driven projects as well as physically motivated models. I am particularly interested in opportunities to apply my skills to address energy or climate issues, though would consider any interesting job that doesn't center around trying to get more eyeballs on advertisements.