The Great Outdoors

[TDub]

I'd prefer you spoke English instead of using poor attempts at humor in miscommunication

[ousdahl]

That was a legit question.

I have another - what’s with the grease soaked sponges?

Do the wolves eat em and it plugs em up?

[KUTradition]

cruel and unusual

but, blame the wolves, i guess

smfh

[TDub]

it's not a great, or humane way to deal with the problem.....I agree

[KUTradition]

it's not a great, or humane way to deal with the problem.....I agree

i know some are going to “have” to be killed. i don’t agree with it, but i know it’s gonna happen

[KUTradition]

this boils my blood more than just about anything

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... bar-photo/

Images of injured wolf, muzzled in a bar, draw fury over Wyo. hunting laws

…A man seen posing with the wolf in a photo allegedly struck the animal with a snowmobile before muzzling it, showing it off at a Sublette County bar and later killing it, the Cowboy State Daily reported in early April. Videos later released by Wyoming’s Game and Fish Department show the wolf muzzled and slumped on a wooden floor, as one of its hind legs twitched and bar patrons talked in the background...

somebody needs to run that motherfucker over with a snowmobile

[TDub]

yea I read that the other day. it'd pretty fucked up. unacceptable really

[jfish26]

This go here?

The Closer We Look The Smaller We Get

https://defector.com/the-closer-we-look ... ler-we-get

Part of the difficulty in conceptualizing the imaging power of the James Webb Space Telescope is that the universe is very large, and frames of reference are unfamiliar. You can look at something like the Whirlpool Galaxy and be told that it's 32 million light years away but that doesn't mean anything to a human brain which never evolved to consider light years. So it's helpful when Webb images capture something we know intimately—even/especially if it's a minuscule slice of that thing, now capable of being seen in its universe-spanning glory.

So, let's take an aesthetic page from Powers of Ten and zoom in on the Horsehead Nebula.

You know the constellation Orion. Humans have known it, and drawn pictures in it, since the dawn of human history. Even in light-polluted urban areas, you can spot the three blue supergiant stars in a row that make up its "belt." It took until 1888 for Williamina Fleming, a Scottish astronomer working at Harvard, to spot a curious, dark region right below the easternmost of the three stars in Orion's Belt. It was one of the earliest identified dark nebulas, a region of interstellar dust and gas so dense that it blocks light. It's part of the larger Orion molecular cloud, a stellar nursery where untold numbers of stars are being born—including the three older stars making up the Belt, which have since drifted outside the cloud.

But let's go back to considering scale. Dubbed Barnard 33, the dark nebula needed many, many more years for telescope technology to improve to the point where it could be resolved. When it was, the nebula displayed a feature so clear that its nickname became obvious.



The above image was captured by the ground-based Samuel Oschin Telescope in the late 1980s. To orient yourself: the three brightest, bluest points are the stars of Orion's Belt. Just below the leftmost one is a bright filament interrupted with a dark column. That column is the Horsehead Nebula. See it?



This image, from ESA's Euclid Space Telescope, is pretty arresting. To ground ourselves on Earth again, the Horsehead Nebula appears to us about eight arc minutes across, or 8/60 of a degree, which itself is 1/360 of the night sky. Very small, and still we were able to make it shockingly clear.

But we could get clearer.



In 2013, NASA published the above image from the Hubble Space Telescope, of the "head" of the horse. We've come a long way.

But a funny thing happens when you look at our big honking universe. Anything with a sense of scale breaks down under enough magnification, because there is something smaller, older, farther away behind it. Lots of somethings. Zoom in far enough and you realize you were only scratching the surface. Which is how we get the Webb image published this week in Astronomy & Astrophysics:



The structure at the bottom is a tiny, tiny part of the dust clouds at the "top" of the Horsehead Nebula. (Check out the scale of this thing!) And beyond it? Well, beyond it is everything. In this image, the six-pointed dots of light are stars in our own galaxy—they appear that way because of Webb's hexagonal mirror. Everything else in the infrared image are galaxies—older, distant galaxies, each with their own hundred-billion-or-so stars, and countless nebulae pumping them out. Zoom in far enough on any patch of sky and this is what you will see; the universe operates on orders of magnitude our eyes cannot comprehend. And just as Webb pried deeper into the cosmos than Hubble could, and as Hubble improved on what came before it, some day something will make Webb seem as primitive as Williamina Fleming making out a dark smudge on a photographic plate.

There is value in close-imaging something like the Horsehead Nebula for what it can teach us about star formation, but this requires astrophysics beyond my comprehension. Instead I'm content to be taken by the clamor and congestion of the background: The more we can see, the more we learn just how infinitesimal is the part of creation that we can know.

[KUTradition]

yields a feeling of insignificance…not unlike standing on the edge of the continental shelf and looking out over the pacific

[Shirley]

...You can look at something like the Whirlpool Galaxy and be told that it's 32 million light years away but that doesn't mean anything to a human brain which never evolved to consider light years...

Thanks for posting that fish.

Same thing, only different:

I was listening to Prof G the other day and he was talking about difficult it is to get people to save when they're young. He said it's because people haven't been living longer than ~ 35 years for long enough to appreciate the power of compounding, of saving when you're young and letting it grow until you retire at 65-70 years of age.

[Overlander]

yields a feeling of insignificance…not unlike standing on the edge of the continental shelf and looking out over the pacific

The opening sequence in “The Tree of Life” was one of the most emotional scenes I have ever witnessed

[KUTradition]

yields a feeling of insignificance…not unlike standing on the edge of the continental shelf and looking out over the pacific

The opening sequence in “The Tree of Life” was one of the most emotional scenes I have ever witnessed

can’t believe i never saw that. gonna have to check it out

[KUTradition]

sounds like grizzlies are coming back to the northern Cascades

[ousdahl]

Isn’t that one of the few areas they were already a recognized population?

[KUTradition]

the last confirmed sighting was ‘92, i think

[TDub]

3-5 bears a year for the next 5-10 years sounds like.

I spent some time in the north cascades, rugged, beautiful country. But we never were concerned about grizzlies. It is definitely grizzly habitat though (I mean, mid 20th century habitat, not early 19th when they roamed from the plains north.


Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho nd maybe Colorado? only places with current populations right?

[KUTradition]

i believe that’s right

fun fact: when Custer invaded the Black Hills during the gold fever, they were still in the dakotas and even out on the plains of western nebraska and kansas

[TDub]

i believe that’s right

fun fact: when Custer invaded the Black Hills during the gold fever, they were still in the dakotas and even out on the plains of western nebraska and kansas

it's crazy to think of a Grizzly wandering the plains

[KUTradition]

i believe that’s right

fun fact: when Custer invaded the Black Hills during the gold fever, they were still in the dakotas and even out on the plains of western nebraska and kansas

it's crazy to think of a Grizzly wandering the plains

right?

elk too, actually

hooray hoomans

[TDub]

i believe that’s right

fun fact: when Custer invaded the Black Hills during the gold fever, they were still in the dakotas and even out on the plains of western nebraska and kansas

it's crazy to think of a Grizzly wandering the plains

right?

elk too, actually

hooray hoomans

and sooo many buffalo. so so many. we fucked up.


starvation strategy worked. ..but...didn't.