Now, yes, there are predictions that you could get a supermassive black hole launched into space, especially during a galaxy merger if the velocity of the smaller black hole exceeds the escape velocity of the combined galaxy.

But I'd be wary of assuming that it's a launched black hole, unless we can find the merger it comes from. There may be ways for such a black hole to form that cause the stars to be launched away rather than the black hole being flung, and if a galaxy isn't rotating fast enough to be stable, one could imagine that a sufficiently small galaxy was simply consumed by its central black hole. Both of these would seem to produce exactly the same outcome, if all we have is the black hole itself and a velocity.

I'm not going to say either of these is likely in this case, or that astronomers haven't examine them (they almost certainly have), but rather that we should be cautious until we've a clearer idea of what the astronomers have actually been able to determine or rule out.

The key thing that somebody reported was a suspicious gray Nissan. Once they zeroed in on looking for a grey Nissan at the crime scene, they looked at the surveillance cameras, found one that had in the right place at the right time, and used the Flock cameras and license plate readers to discover it was also present in Brookline at the MIT professor's shooting, then used the Flock cameras to follow it to the storage facility.

Maybe "regular police work" could have followed it through the change of license plates to a facility two states away, but maybe not. You do know not all crimes are solved.

I'm not sure why you think that. America does have this political belief that the government shouldn't be doing research, but should instead fund outside entities to do so, in the belief that outside entities are more efficiently run. NCAR, of course, reports to the National Science Foundation, why do you think it would somehow be different or run "more efficiently" if it were "absorbed" by the NSF?

What in the world do you find "shady" about it?

What in the world are you talking about? There are many government agencies for which the budget has no accountability-- when the military misplaces a billion dollars, their response is "Well, it hard to keep track of everything," but the NCAR budget is public and completely transparent.

Interesting link, thanks!

The war against using the word "literally" to mean "figuratively" was lost years ago. Even the dictionaries have conceded, although I'm amused that the definition 2 in the web Merriam-webster actually uses the word "literally" to mean "literally" in the text of the definition of "literally" meaning "not literally."

2 informal : in effect : VIRTUALLY —used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible
I literally died of embarrassment.
" will literally turn the world upside down to combat cruelty or injustice."—Norman Cousins

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.merriam-webster.co...

When people are starving, it is the calorie value that is the problem.

It's the Washington Post that Bezos owns, not the Wall Street Journal.

No, the executive tells the civil service what it needs to do, but the civil service is wholly independent.

Interesting.

For much of the world, avoiding starvation is the principle goal, so for these areas, higher crop yields are beneficial despite lower nutrient density.

For most of the developed world, getting enough calories to avoid starvation is not a big deal, and lower nutrients in food is undesirable.

Another thing to keep in mind, of course, is that increased carbon dioxide is going to play havoc with existing farms and fields due to climate change, with areas currently producing high crop yields becoming less farmable, and (presumably) other areas not currently farmable due to drought or other climate-related factors becoming more farmable. This will create an unknown amount of economic disruption.

I did. And gave a link.

No article was linked. Your assertion, on the other hand, contained both a fact ("the pollutants were actually causing clouds to form, cooling the environment") and an editorial ("a bad idea".) The fact is accurate. The editorial addition is an opinion.

If you had linked an article, probably this one, you would discover that it nowhere contained the editorial you added to it, "a bad idea."

The phrase "a bad idea" is editorializing. It is true that sulfate aerosol emission from shipping had a cooling effect, and reducing these emissions had an (unexpected) warming effect. Whether reducing these emissions was a bad idea or not depends on whether the beneficial effects of reducing sulfate pollution outweighs the negative effects of the slight reduction in cooling. The cooling effect of the marine sulfates was estimated at about 0.12 w/m^2, which is small compared to the anthropogenic greenhouse effect, currently estimated at about 3.5 W/m^2.

True, but it turns out that waste heat is a very small contributor to the global temperature change compared to greenhouse gasses. Basically, if you emit one erg of energy from a heat engine, that's one erg of energy one time, and done. On the other hand, if greenhouse gasses absorb one erg of energy and reradiate it downward, that same carbon dioxide will keep on absorbing and reradiating energy for the lifetime of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, estimated to be hundreds of years under current conditions.

It's the difference between a one-time input of energy and a continuous input of energy.

This guy either socially engineered his way through a line, analyzed a weakness in the line, or time-traveled from the '90's not realizing we've set up an incompetent but totalizing police-state control grid to interpose every tiny aspect of our lives.

To be fair, "pay on board" is less applicable to airplanes than trains because seatbelts are important in turbulence.

That said, the lack of capacity is widely acknowledged to be a feature of wildly incompetent management.

We just heard they've started a new project to rewrite the air traffic control system for the umpteenth time (and billions and billions later) to hopefully allow for more frequent landings and departures. I fear it won't be specified for AI-assist takeoffs and landings and will be obsolete before it's done.

Better make some more 8" floppies.

You do not appear to understand what a republic or a democracy is, so I'll ignore the last sentence.

"Independent" does not mean unaccountable to the people. The President is independent of Congress, and vice versa, but both are accountable to the people. Well, the current president doesn't seem to think so, but legally he is.