Those of us who have rubbed elbows with our fellow student-athletes in Intro to Astronomy should know that the visible surface of the Sun is known as the photosphere, and it is the first layer at which the gas density has gotten low enough that photons are no longer trapped and can fly off into space, giving what we observe as sunlight.

I thought this was a parody of one time Senator from Indiana and later Vice President:

Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.

On the Dark Side of the Sun, of course.

How about the Statue of Liberty frozen into the ice of Lake Mendota in Madison, WI?

https://news.wisc.edu/history-....

I propose a continuous adjustment of clocks between summer and winter to avoid the step changes between daylight and standard time.

I mean this whole business of mean solar time has us meandering about when the sun rises and sets anyway,

What would say it is that you are doing here?

it's Slashdot.

Just.

Drive.

alter ego George Costanza work at Meta?

only outlaws will have weed-free landscaping?

Wasn't Freeman Dyson at least skeptical of ever bigger and better particle accelerators as reaching diminishing returns on the amount of physics knowledge gleened per dollar spent.

Forget Freeman Dyson. Hasn't anyone taken ECON 101 as a college freshman and remember "diminishing marginal returns." And forget the harm to the environment, isn't the outragious electric bill a sign of more and more resources thrown at something to "scale it up" without considering where the scaling law levels off?

What is the revenue model? Selling what you disclose to the AI?

Or will anything beyond the most brain-dead AI be a big monthly subscription?

Will your employer insist that you not use their paid-for AI for personal use in the way of Cyber Monday that you weren't supposed to use your work Internet to purchase your Christmas presents but people did this anyway?

Or will AI gradually become useless owing to who pays the most coin to train the neural networks a certain way, becoming useless like Web search?

The Heliocentric Theory had a problem with a negative result for the parallax of stars. Think of it as the Michelson-Morley result of its day.

This is why Tycho Brahe rejected the Copernican interpretation, the best observational astronomer of his day--he couldn't measure any shift in stellar positions as the Earth went around the Sun. No one had the imagination that the nearest stars were so freakin' far away.

There are other large horse body parts.