Day: May 3, 2019

Lily Collins – really cute, dumb as a rock

UncleScoopy

“Actress Lily Collins said she believed the spirits of notorious serial killer Ted Bundy’s victims visited her while she was preparing for her role in a new film about the mass murderer.”

“She said that these paranormal visits came at 3:05 a.m. every night. She never knew why she woke up at that exact same time every night, until she learned a little more about the schedule of ghosts. ‘I discovered that 3 a.m. is the time when the veil between the realms is the thinnest and one can be visited,’ she said.

It’s good to know that even in the ethereal realm, ghosts still maintain daylight savings time.

What a maroon!

UncleScoopy

This is so dumb in so many ways.

First of all, the First Amendment doesn’t apply to corporations or organizations, only to the government. Twitter is a corporation and can ban whoever the hell they care to ban. In fact, Twitter can ban President Trump or Bernie Sanders if they care to. They do not because it would be a foolish business move, not because they respect freedom of speech. Their goal is to have as many (real) users as possible, so if they ban anyone, the must believe there is a good reason for it. If you get banned and don’t like it, use a different form of communication or start your own social network. (That’s basically how Fox News was born. People thought that conservative voices were not adequately represented on the major networks.)

Second, social media is global, not American. If some Twitter user makes posts in violation of European hate speech laws, or libel laws, he’s going to get banned, even if he hasn’t broken any American laws. Different countries have different opinions about whether Twitter is responsible for the content posted by its users, so Twitter has to take a cautious position.

Third, Trump has no clue who on Twitter is an American, or a foreigner, or even a bot, so how exactly would he know if Americans are being systematically censored?

“THE LEGACY OF HUBBLE: ONE IMAGE, A QUARTER MILLION GALAXIES”

UncleScoopy

Astronomy has to be the sexiest science. Everything you produce elicits “oohs” and “aahs.” This image is so impressive that I downloaded the full-size version, just to stand back in awe. It portrays a quarter of a million galaxies, some of them seen by us as they were near the beginning of time as we know it.

And it represents only a tiny fraction of the full panorama of the universe. It takes up only about as much of the sky as a full moon. When astronomers do the math, they end up with an estimate of 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the universe, but that estimate is based on our limited technology for observation. Astrophysicists speculate that the true number is probably something like two trillion.

How many stars are in that universe? It’s difficult to say because we don’t have a good handle on the average number of stars per galaxy, for many reasons, not the least of which is that even when we know that specific galaxies exist, we see them in the past, at different stages of star formation. We can estimate that if the Milky Way is as average a galaxy as it is a candy bar, then there may be between a sextillion and a septillion stars, but that is little more than a guess. Let’s just say the number must have a shitload of commas in it.