Hot Whales In Your Area

Scientists! Long-time Tabs readers will already be familiar with these capering chaos goblins but if you’re new here, a “scientist” is a sort of small child in the body of an adult who goes around asking questions like “what if there were hairy frogs with claws like Wolverine?” or “can you die of hiccups?”¹ It’s apparently “Stand Up For Science Day,” so let’s stand up and see what those delightful scamps have been up to lately.

Humpback Mountain

In the journal Marine Mammal Science, Stephanie H. Stack, Lyle Krannichfeld, and Brandi Romano have published the first known photographs of humpback whales mating, and they’re both boys. The paper is notable for the punishing number of times it includes the word “extruded,” and for how grimdark the observed encounter turned out to be: “The body condition and parasite load of Whale A… suggested that it was in poor health, likely had been declining for some time, and may have been dying…” Yikes. But, writes Sheena Goodyear for CBC radio:

So don’t assume that all humpback whales are gay necrophiliacs. Just most of them.

Also Today in Horrors of the Deep: Anna Hughes would like to draw your attention to the fact that “we age Greenland sharks by CARBON DATING THE PROTEIN IN THEIR EYES.” While it still exists, NOAA explained how that works, and also noted that Greenland sharks might live to be 500 years old and that we age other kinds of sharks by counting their rings. You know that idea came from a scientist. “How old is this shark? Let’s cut it in half and count the rings, lol. Actually, now that I say it out loud…” [knife-sharpening sounds]

Take An Infrastructure Break

Today in Cliterature: London’s Vagina Museum addressed the extremely scientist-coded question: “Can a clitoris be trained to read braille?” It’s worth reading the whole thread, whether with your north eyes or your south eyes, but the short answer is:

We Can Put A Man On The Moon, But We Can’t Even Put A Man On The Moon: SpaceX blew up another Starship yesterday, the second in a row lost to a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” which this time forced airline diversions to avoid debris raining down across south Florida and the Caribbean. Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have been stuck at the International Space Station since last summer, say they are “prepared to stay” and just really, really happy where they are right now, and not in any hurry to leave, at all. Like, at all. Apropos of nothing: “What Ketamine Does to the Human Brain.”

Meanwhile, On The Moon: Another Intuitive Machine has unintuitively landed on its side. Seems like it would be more intuitive to make them spherical at this point? But a few days earlier, Firefly became the first private company to successfully land on the moon, with its Blue Ghost lander. The mission is named “Ghost Riders In the Sky.” Scientists!

Today-I In A.I.: Liz Lopatto wrote that chatbots shouldn’t try to address ethical questions.

What kind of questions should A.I. be trying to answer? How about “what are the command line arguments required to do literally anything with ffmpeg?” This is from Drew Breunig, whose “Gods, Interns(/Toys), and Cogs” framework is a pretty useful way to clarify what we’re arguing about when we start arguing about “A.I.”

Political “Science:” Andrew B. Hall and Daniel M. Thompson issued an official whoopsie on their much-cited 2018 paper “Who Punishes Extremist Nominees? Candidate Ideology and Turning Out the Base in US Elections,” now stating that:

Someone alert the Democrats! Lol j/k they don’t care.

Not Science: Big Ship Stuck. Anya Kamenetz in New York Magazine: “Can a neo-Tantric sex group dedicated to exploring dark desires root out abuse?” Paging Ian Betteridge. Ian Betteridge please pick up the white courtesy phone.

And Finally: I’m very into whatever this is.

@jimswill

Writing about some clip that haunted me as a child on #maury | #writing #spokenword #poetry #olives #realitytv #writertok

Today’s Song: Hum, “The Scientists”

Hey, so, I know it feels like Tabs just returned from my long Appalachian Trail hiatus but it’s already time for me to go back and finish the hike. I leave mid next week to attempt the 865 remaining miles, so I think this is the last regular Tabs until June. I don’t want to disappear with just this brief note in the sign-off so I’ll send a more fulsome and informative announcement next week. If you have questions, please hit reply and ask them! It’ll help me know what to tell everyone. And if you haven’t yet, please do sign up over at Today on Trail, where I’ll resume writing for the next couple months. And thanks so much for reading here, or there, or wherever you find yourself reading me. 🌲🌲🏕️🌲

1  I want to point out that I thought up these two questions in the shower this morning in full confidence that I would find something to link them to, and indeed it was no problem. That’s the magic of scientists.