“If this isn’t the end for the Republican Party, it’ll be a shame. They dominated American political life for 50 years and were never anything but monsters. They bred in their voters the incredible attitude that Republicans were the only people within our borders who raised children, loved their country, died in battle or paid taxes. They even sullied the word “American” by insisting they were the only real ones. They preferred Lubbock to Paris, and their idea of an intellectual was Newt Gingrich. Their leaders, from Ralph Reed to Bill Frist to Tom DeLay to Rick Santorum to Romney and Ryan, were an interminable assembly line of shrieking, witch-hunting celibates, all with the same haircut – the kind of people who thought Iran-Contra was nothing, but would grind the affairs of state to a halt over a blow job or Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube.”

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/r-i-p-gop-how-trump-is-killing-the-republican-party-20160518#ixzz497j9csoY

TIL that the small nuclear reactor that powered McMurdo Station in Antarctica from 1964-1973 was nicknamed “nukie poo” by the locals.

What I’m about to say might make more sense if you consider that I spent a lot of time building, maintaining, and being generally obsessed with saltwater aquaria, particularly captive coral systems. It also might be relevant that for a while I’ve been messing around with succulent gardening, and have a few different types scattered around the house.

That said: I’m starting to get seriously, like, seriously into moss.

“Our release includes … Parsey McParseface, an English parser that we have trained for you and that you can use to analyze English text. Parsey McParseface is the most accurate such model in the world.”

Google just literally released a public product called “Parsey Mc Parseface.”

I understand that it’s a necessary evil in the Social Platform world, but the fact that every link I click on here burns up to a second or two screwing around with plus.url.google.com really grinds my gears.

Math on paper is apparently very scary.

This is absurd.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2016/05/07/ivy-league-economist-interrogated-for-doing-math-on-american-airlines-flight/

Literally “house of cheesy bread”. I’m gonna miss this country.

Based Ken M

Cascade Effect

In the movie Gravity the driving force of the plot is a catastrophic cascade of space debris. An exploding satellite sends high speed debris into the path of other satellites, and the resulting collisions create more space debris until everything from a space shuttle to the International Space Station faces an eminent threat of destruction. Not unexpectedly, the movie portrayal of such a situation is not particularly accurate, but the risk of a debris cascade is very real.

It’s known as the Kessler syndrome, after Donald Kessler, who first imagined the scenario in the 1970s. The problem comes down to the fact that small objects in Earth orbit can stay in orbit for a very long time. If an astronaut drops a bolt, it can stay in orbit for decades or centuries. Because the relative speed of two objects in orbit can be quite large, it doesn’t take a big object to pose a real threat to your spacecraft. On the highway a small pebble can chip your car windshield. In space it can be done by a chip of paint traveling at thousands of kilometers per hour. In the history of the space shuttle missions, there were more than 1,600 debris strikes. Because of such strikes, more than 90 space shuttle windows had to be replaced over the lifetime of shuttle missions.

While that might sound alarming, it’s actually quite manageable. Upgrades and maintenance were quite common on the shuttle missions, and we tend to err on the side of caution when it comes to replacing parts. Modern spacecraft also have ways to mitigate the risk of small impacts, such as Whipple shields made of thin layers of material spaced apart so that objects disintegrate when hitting the shield rather than the spacecraft itself. We also have a tracking system that currently tracks more than 300,000 objects bigger than 1 cm, so we can make sure that most spacecraft avoid these objects.

But the risk of big collisions isn’t negligible. In 2009 the Iridium 33 and Kosmos-2251 satellites collided at high speed, destroying both spacecraft and creating more dangerous debris. It wouldn’t take many collisions like this for the debris numbers to rise dramatically, and more debris means a greater risk of collisions. In Gravity the cascade happens very quickly, triggered by a single event. The reality is not quite so grave. Instead of happening overnight, Kessler syndrome would occur gradually, raising collision risks to the point where certain orbits become logistically impractical. It could occur so gradually that we might not notice it early on, and there are some that argue it’s already underway.

The good news is that we’re aware of the threat. And, as the old saying goes, knowing is half the battle. Already we take steps to limit the amount of debris created. New spacecraft include end of life plans to remove them from orbit, either by sending them into Earths atmosphere to burn up, or sending them to a “graveyard orbit” that poses little risk to other spacecraft. There are also plans on the drawing board to clear orbits of debris, particularly in low-Earth orbit where the risk is greatest. The cascade effect is a real risk, but it’s also one we can likely manage with a bit of ingenuity.

https://briankoberlein.com/2016/05/04/cascade-effect/

So a lot of folks are like “if Cruz still had a chance before yesterday’s Indiana primary, why doesn’t Bernie have a chance? He has 45% of the pledged delegates and Hillary has 55%, and he won Indiana and a whole string of other states recently, so clearly it’s still really close except GAHH, SUPERDELEGATES WE HATES THEM”

Here’s the problem for Bernie, though: Democratic primaries don’t have winner-take-all states. This is a huge difference from the Republican primaries. With winner-take-all states, there’s a lot more chance for a relatively small number of votes to cause a large swing in the number of pledged delegates for a candidate. Bernie “won” Indiana last night, but he won it by 5%, which only nets him +6 delegates over Clinton. He’s behind by ~250 (non-super) delegates, so winning Indiana by only 5% actually put him further behind in terms of probability of winning the entire contest.

In order to close the gap on pledged delegates (again, we’re ignoring superdelegates here), Bernie needs 70-75% of the remaining primary votes. [1] Sanders “winning” a state by anything less than 70% of the vote is actually losing ground to Clinton.

We like to talk about people “winning” states because it makes for a nice clean media narrative, but the media mostly ignore this huge difference between the Republican and Democratic primary systems. To an approximation, the Republican system is closer to the general presidential election (Electoral College), and the Democratic system is closer to a national popular vote. It’s a simple fact of math that Bernie could “win” every remaining state and still lose the nomination, because that’s how far behind he’s been in the “popular vote” from all the previous Democratic primaries.

With Cruz dropping out, the primaries are effectively over: the next president of the US will either be Clinton or Trump.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/03/30/upshot/trump-clinton-delegate-calculator.html
[2] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bernie-sanders-is-even-further-behind-in-votes-than-he-is-in-delegates/ — note that this article is a ~month old, and he’s effectively fallen further behind since then.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CgeGaxyWsAIN443.jpg:large