ope...a life
operating on the road without a permit.
soar on the coast.
The year was 1999. Jesse "the mind" Ventura was running Minnesota. and Real Player was Corporate America's streaming tech of choice.
A star has been destroyed by a wandering supermassive black hole
Back in 2024, a system set up to identify objects that suddenly brighten found something unusual. Unfortunately, the automated system that was supposed to identify it couldn't figure out what it was looking at. Now, about a year later, we know it's the first tidal disruption event—meaning a star being ripped apart by a supermassive black hole—identified at visual wavelengths. It's also a rather unusual one, in that the supermassive black hole in question does not reside at the center of its galaxy. Instead, there's an even more massive object there, which is feeding on matter at the same time.
All of the observations indicated that AT2024tvd is a tidal disruption event. For example, it maintained a high temperature throughout the observations, unlike a supernova, which tends to cool down over time. There were also fewer high-energy X-rays than one would expect from a supernova. The UV spectrum also looked like previously identified tidal disruption events, with the signature of elements like carbon and nitrogen that don't require a supernova to be produced. That makes this the fourth tidal disruption event we've identified that's the product of a supermassive black hole not located at the center of the galaxy. It's also the first that was initially identified at visible wavelengths.
Hummingbird friend playing in the spray while I water the yard. (Hard to see our little friend, look for a quick darting movmement in the center of the video...they blend in with the spray very well.)
A neon sign that switches from "open" when open to "ope" when closed.
Freedom by Dorothy (TROY NōKA Remix) ft. Angel Haze
so. much. pollen.
I will concede that AI has made tremendous progress in these two critical areas: A) pretending to know what it’s talking about. B) stealing from artists.
BY THE WAY, it’s very on-brand for Earth 2023 that our robots are designed to sound plausible rather than be correct. Remember in Star Wars how C-3PO delivered a precise survival probability of flying into an asteroid field? (3720 to 1.) And Han Solo was like, “Shut up, C-3PO,” because he was too cool and handsome to be bothered by math. OR SO WE THOUGHT, because that was the kind of AI we were imagining in the 1980s: AI that was, before anything else, correct.
ChatBots are good at figuring out what comes next when you start a sentence with, “The capitol of Antigua is…” That’s pretty cool. We didn’t have that before. But it’s not intelligence. It’s almost the opposite of intelligence, like the difference between the kid in high school who was always studying and that guy who never studied but could talk and is now a real estate agent. Both can sound smart but only one knows what he’s talking about.