*shrugs*

I *would* argue that Apollo 8 and 13 did not go to the moon, though Apollo 8 is notable for being the first human spacecraft to enter lunar orbit, which means it still a huge milestone. Apollo 13, of course, failed spectacularly in its attempt to reach the moon, and is notable for being one of the most amazing saves in the history of the space program. And clearly they are both lunar missions, in that they are moon-related, whereas when I think of a moon mission, I think of a mission specifically to the moon's surface. Very esoteric linguistic distinction, and I may just be splitting hairs.

About 5.56 billion people have Internet access, but subtract 1.12 billion for China and 130.4 million for Russia, because I'm pretty sure neither has access to U.S. social media, an that leaves 4.3 billion. So it's *maybe* possible that 69.8% of the Internet-using world uses Instagram...

But yeah, a lot of them almost certainly are bots.

Artemis (block 1), not Starship. So more like 50 launch attempts, 1 launch, no explosions. :-D

In all seriousness, three launch attempts, but it felt like 50.

Because an average person reading the headline would think that they are going to the moon, not that they are going around the moon. "NASA plans moon-orbit mission for february" would be clearer and not that much longer.

Yeah, no question. Better to tell them something that they won't understand than to tell them something that they will misunderstand.

The only Iranian I've ever met (that I'm aware of) said that when he met people, he usually called himself Persian to avoid the stigma that comes from saying you're from Iran, presumably out of fear that Americans would assume that he was a fundamentalist just waiting for a chance to shout "Death to America" and blow himself up or whatever. He didn't put it exactly that way, but that was the gist.

Who made claims that oxycontin isn't addictive? The government? No. The manufacturer. The government merely allowed them to do it until their claims were shown to be false.

Spreading claims that would encourage a pandemic to get massively worse by discouraging vaccination falls squarely under "detrimental to public health". At no point were *legitimate* studies that showed safety concerns in any way squashed to favor any company's interest. That's why we know that vector-based vaccines were responsible for a statistically significant number of strokes and heart attacks in otherwise healthy people.

The studies that were squashed were a bunch of very weak, mathematically garbage studies that contained errors so obvious that even I, a non-medical person, could shoot dozens of holes in their methodology. A small number of individuals were behind publishing fraudulent study after fraudulent study, and they kept doing this despite broad consensus that their methodology and their conclusions were pure, unadulterated bulls**t. They did this by publishing in journals significantly outside the areas that were appropriate for the papers, relying on the journals' lack of people with adequate understanding of the subject to shoot it full of holes and recommend not publishing it.

And these folks had a tendency to go on YouTube and spread their bulls**t, using their publication in a "journal" (of physics, social sciences, psychiatry, chiropractic medicine, etc.) to support their absolutely fraudulent claims. YouTube quite literally became a dumping ground for trash science that made the National Enquirer look like respectable journalism by comparison.

It got to the point where my canned response was, "If you are showing me something in a YouTube video instead of a peer-reviewed journal, I automatically assume that what you are saying is pure, unadulterated bulls**t, because out of the roughly one hundred times I have not made that assumption, I have found it to be true every single time. If you want me to read it, write it down, so that at least I can skim it in three minutes and point out why you are wrong without wasting an hour of my time watching your stupid video."

IMO, YouTube was right to crack down on that. When people without medical degrees are basically giving medical advice that contradicts broad medical consensus, this is almost guaranteed to be harming society. And nothing good can come of that. Children dying of measles, smallpox, polio, and other vaccine-preventable conditions is not something we should aspire to. Regardless of whether they have freedom of speech, that doesn't mean companies should be required to be their megaphone. And regardless of whether the government was the group who pointed out how potentially harmful the things they were saying are, the stuff they were saying was still harmful.

The closest thing I can think of would be the "There are no studies showing that masks are effective when worn by the general public" statements early on when they needed all the N95 masks for medical personnel. But even that wasn't really disinformation; it was just stating the absence of supporting evidence, and later, when supporting evidence appeared, there was no longer a lack of supporting evidence.

There's a difference between being wrong and spreading disinformation. The former requires either knowing that you're wrong or having a mountain of evidence saying that you're wrong, but still saying it anyway. There are definitely some grey areas, particularly in areas related to myocarditis/pericarditis, but there were also a lot of folks spewing stuff way, way on the other side of that grey area. :-)

There's definitely a big difference in my mind between the government pushing industry to not spread claims that it considers to be detrimental to public health and the government pushing industry to not spread claims that it sees as being mean to our current leaders. The former seems way more acceptable to me, in much the same way that regulating commercial speech and licensing doctors are both way less objectionable than regulating political speech.

Along with toothpaste and glue.

The biggest difference seems to be that the young folks are impressed with AI because it can do a lot of things some of the time, just like an inexperienced person. They put up with mistakes from AI because they're used to a certain level of errors in their work.

The older folks are unimpressed with AI because, unlike their juniors, whom they put up with because because they know that they are teachable, AI isn't teachable, so they have no real use for it. And they aren't too thrilled about their juniors using AI, either, because that means the quality of their work probably won't improve over time, which means more work for them fixing the mess, without the promise that things will eventually get better.

Nazism isn't an internet insult. It was an actual, real thing that happened in this world, with an actual, real ideology, and the core of this ideology was racial-based social Darwinism.

BTW, re: the Congo in particular: the most common traditional type of fishing is basket fishing with woven funnels suspended in the rapids. You sure as hell better know how to swim if you want to do that.

Famous angler Jeremy Wade referred to the local Congo fishermen as nearly suicidal, just diving into the rapids to get nets unstuck and the like.

SIGH.

There were 10 people chosen and people with dark skin in the USA make up about 1 out of 8 Americans.

1 in 8 is 12,5%.

African-American without mixed race in 2024 is estimated at 46,3M, or 14,2%
With mixed race, that rises to 51,6M, or 15,8% of the population.
Some hispanics have dark skin, some light. In 2023 there were 62,5%, representing 19% of the population (though there's a small overlap with black - doesn't affect the numbers much).
In 2023, Asians were 25,8M people, or 7,7% of the population. This is again a diverse group with mixed skin tones (for example, the Indian subcontinent)
In 2023, there were 1,6M people (0,49%) of pacific island ancestry and 3,3M native Americans - again, mixed skin tones.
People of Mediterranean European ancestry often have so-called "olive" complexions.

With a strict definition of dark skin, you're probably talking like 1 in 6 or so (~16,7%). With a looser definition, you could be talking upwards of 40% or more of the population.

The chances of the 10 people to be a perfect representation of the racial demographics of the USA is quite small.

Here are the actual odds of selecting no dark-skinned people at different population percentages being "dark skinned", by one's definition of "dark":

15%: 1 in 4
20%: 1 in 8
25%: 1 in 17
30%: 1 in 34
35%: 1 in 73
40%: 1 in 165

Then consider that NASA astronauts are required to pass a swimming test

It is not a test of swimming prowess, just of an ability to not drown. You have to be able to do three lengths of a 25-meter pool without stopping, three lengths of the pool in a flight suit and tennis shoes, and tread water for 10 minutes while wearing a flight suit. This is not some massively imposing task. You don't have to be Michael Phelps to become an astronaut.

and as a general rule those with African ancestry tend to have less stamina in swimming than those with lighter skin

Yes, white athletes tend to have an advantage in swimming. A 1,5% advantage. While a 1,5% advantage may be of good relevance at the highest level of a sport, it's hardly meaningful in a "can you tread water with a flight suit on" test.

Think of the different races as just really big families

That is not how genetics work, and is instead the pseudoscience that drove fascist movements, and in particular, Nazism.

There is far more genetic diversity within a given "race" than between them. Certain genetic traits tend to have strong correlates - for example dark skin and sickle cell anemia - but that's not because races are some sort of genetic isolates, but rather for very practical reasons (dark skin is an adaptation to not die of skin cancer in the tropics, and sickle cell disease is a consequence of a genetic adaptation to not die of malaria which also happens to be found in such climates). But the vast majority of genes don't have such strong correlates.

The concept of "race" as a distinct biological category is not supported by modern genetics.

If we are to ignore skin color and just put one big family up against another big family on swimming ability then just due to random mutations, perhaps some Darwinian selection way back in the family tree, one family will swim better than the other

The main "racial difference" in swimming ability in the US is "inherited", that is, parents who don't know how to swim tend to not teach their kids how to swim. As a result, white children are 56% more likely to receive swimming lessons than black children. One can expect that to directly correspond to an advantage in adulthood. But again, the ability to tread water is not out there knocking 90% of astronaut candidates out of the race - especially given that astronaut candidates tend to be athletic and motivated to learn new skills.

People with light skin tend to have ancestors that had to go fishing for their protein

Utter tripe. Fish consumption has no correlation with skin colour. How much fish do you think your average herder or plains horseman ate? And fish is massively important in much of Africa - in coastal areas (Gabon, Ghana, Sierra Leone in particular note), along the Congo (it's literally the world's largest river, people have been fishing it since time immemorial), Lake Victoria, Lake Chad, the Niger Delta, etc etc. What sort of racist stereotype world are you living in where black people don't fish?

Having a large candidate pool relative to the number chosen makes it easier to show bias and still get high-quality candidaes, not harder.

To be clear, I meant the sensor suite and steering rack and support parts, not necessarily that there would be a working brain available to the general public by then. Leaning towards yes, but no guarantees.

I'll grant you that the liability issue is a giant question mark.

Why would you think that? Cameras a cheap, and LiDAR prices are coming down, too. As companies build them in larger and larger quantities, economies of scale and competition will drive the price down rather quickly. Best guess is that in five years, self-driving hardware will add about $15k to the price of the vehicle if they use LiDAR, or $6k if they don't. And that's including the cost of stuff that a lot of cars come with already, like the electric steering rack. I'd be shocked if it were significantly more than $20k.

So as drivers replace their cabs or semi tractors, they'll spend the extra $20k or whatever to buy versions that are self-driving. For that matter, once the tech is reliable enough, you'll likely see retrofit kits come on the market. There's no good reason you'd replace a working tractor unit when you can just swap out the steering rack, bolt on cameras, and add some electronics, and that's true whether you're an owner-operator or the manager of FedEx's fleet.