Shiny.

As I understand, that’s a decent analogy.

They have been measured in situ only on Earth and Titan, although they are believed to exist on other planets like Mars.

4 Discussion and Conclusions The recent findings by Cardnell et al. [2016] highlighted the large conductivity differences in the Martian atmosphere depending on solar illumination. Our simulations show that dayside conditions do not allow SR to develop, while nightside conditions, presenting conductivities 2 orders of magnitude lower, do (Figure 1).

To summarize, we report numerical simulations of the SR to be expected at Mars, based on the latest modeling efforts of the Martian atmosphere-ionosphere chemical interactions and properties. The day-night asymmetry was never addressed before in SR studies at Mars, and our study highlights its importance for assessing the main SR parameters.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016GL071635

I wonder if this sort of data could help in the search for potentially inhabitable planets sometime in the future?

ChatGPT isn’t on the team.

Except that when someone pastes “ChatGPT thinks that {wall of AI-generated text}”

That person put ChatGPT on the team. And if there was no human input, the competition is free to use that and mock it word for word. Use fear, uncertainty, and doubt to convince your team that anyone can use that, including your competition, if it is published.

The U.S. Copyright Office’s January 2025 report on AI and copyrightability reaffirms the longstanding principle that copyright protection is reserved for works of human authorship. Outputs created entirely by generative artificial intelligence (AI), with no human creative input, are not eligible for copyright protection.

https://natlawreview.com/article/copyright-offices-latest-guidance-ai-and-copyrightability

She’s also an author

Her short stories have been published in anthologies and with Mike Resnick, she co-edited Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian, an anthology published in 2003.

On July 24, 2008, Ian released autobiography Society’s Child (published by Penguin Tarcher), which was positively received.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janis_Ian

The size of the event horizon of a black hole depends on the mass of the black hole. The greater the mass, the larger the radius of the event horizon.

One idea you may have heard is that black holes go about sucking things up with their gravity. Actually, it is only very close to a black hole that the strange effects we have been discussing come into play. The gravitational attraction far away from a black hole is the same as that of the star that collapsed to form it.

So, if you are a star or distant planet orbiting around a star that becomes a black hole, your orbit may not be significantly affected by the collapse of the star (although it may be affected by any mass loss that precedes the collapse). If, on the other hand, you venture close to the event horizon, it would be very hard for you to resist the “pull” of the warped spacetime near the black hole. You have to get really close to the black hole to experience any significant effect.

If another star or a spaceship were to pass one or two solar radii from a black hole, Newton’s laws would be adequate to describe what would happen to it. Only very near the event horizon of a black hole is the gravitation so strong that Newton’s laws break down.

https://wisconsin.pressbooks.pub/astronomy/chapter/chapter-24-section-24-5-black-holes/

solar radius is a unit of distance, commonly understood as 695,700 km and expressed as R⊙{\display style R_{\odot }}, used mostly to express the size of an astronomical objects relative to that of the Sun, or their distance from it.

695,700 kilometres (432,300 miles) is approximately 10 times the average radius of Jupiter; 109 times the 6378 km radius of the Earth at its equator; and 1/215 {\textstyle {1 \over 215}} or 0.0047 of an astronomical unit, the approximate average distance between Earth and the Sun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_radius

At about 0.01 au (two solar radii would be 0.0094), the sun as a black hole would not affect the Earth, nor Venus, nor Mercury.

Mercury is 0.4 astronomical units away from the Sun

https://science.nasa.gov/mercury/facts/

Based on that, we would stay put. A black hole does not emit light, including sunlight. Sunlight warms our planet (so it’s going to get mercilessly cold). Many plants would die and they would stop making oxygen. And while you can argue that we can’t live without heat from the sun, with 8 billion humans plus all the animals on the planet, I suspect we’ll run out of air before the cold kills us. But I could be wrong about asphyxiating before freezing to death.

See also https://science.nasa.gov/universe/what-happens-when-something-gets-too-close-to-a-black-hole/

Edit: as others on here have noted, our star isn’t big enough to become a black hole. The above assumes “But what if it did?”

The conditions are

• Blinded

• Charmed

• Deafened

• Exhaustion

• Frightened

• Grappled

• Incapacitated

• Invisible

• Paralyzed

• Petrified

• Poisoned

• Prone

• Restrained

• Stunned

• Unconscious

I guess underLYING would be prone? oh, wait. This isn’t about D&D…

Cliff Clavin approves.

The lawsuit states that Sellinger tried to tell the manager that he had a receipt proving that he had actually paid for the meals, but was asked to leave the buffet-style restaurant.

As he stood up to hand the manager his silverware, Sellinger was allegedly grabbed by the neck and slammed into a table by another employee.

On the side of the restaurant: Why didn’t the patron just show the receipt?

On the side of the patron: Why slam someone on a table? Even if the guy mooched a meal, that’s going to be a lawsuit.

A police spokesperson later confirmed to the newspaper that officers were called to the restaurant at around 6.08 p.m., with the incident being documented as a call for service. No report was filed, the spokesperson added.

Hmmm…

Book series? Try Michael Moorcock’s Elric series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elric_of_Melniboné

EFF has an article on this, too. They have links on how to limit ad tracking on iphone and android.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/targeted-advertising-gives-your-location-government-just-ask-cbp

https://www.apple.com/uk/macbook-neo

"Obese children grow faster, so they tend to be taller than their healthy-weight peers. "

There’s more than one.

1. The Sky.

2. The point where your fear becomes greater than your curiosity.

3. The speed of light, unless we’re talking about quantum entanglement.

and there’s probably more I haven’t thought of.

Oof. Streets with speed limits.

Shame they broke up. I think the male and female vocals on the track add to it.

And here’s the original article at Politico

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/26/ice-immigration-churches-lawsuits-00802076

It was released as a single in 1977, but the album it is on was released in 1976.

Per the article,

“Elon Musk is an aggressive and irresponsible salesman,” the plaintiff said. “Who has a long history of making dangerous design choices, and overpromising features of his products.”

The plaintiff now expects the American car brand “to properly design, test, market, inspect, repair, and recall the subject Cybertruck.”

As of February 2026, Elon Musk’s net worth is estimated to be around $852 billion according to Forbes.

Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform is the company’s next-generation architecture for AI data centers that includes an 88-core Vera CPU, Rubin GPU with 288 GB HBM4 memory, Rubin CPX GPU with 128 GB of GDDR7, NVLink 6.0 switch ASIC for scale-up rack-scale connectivity, BlueField-4 DPU with integrated SSD to store key-value cache, Spectrum-6 Photonics Ethernet, and Quantum-CX9 1.6 Tb/s Photonics InfiniBand NICs, as well as Spectrum-X Photonics Ethernet and Quantum-CX9 Photonics InfiniBand switching silicon for scale-out connectivity.

“Java (the duck)” …