this morning NASA abandoned their mars rover Opportunity (aka Oppy) because it (she) got hit by a storm on Mars and it knocked her camera and wheels out and her last words to the team were “my battery is low and it is getting cold”. I know she’s a machine but I’m devastated. Oppy is the one who discovered water on Mars. RIP oppy ily space baby
they didn’t abandon her!! they tried eight months to reach her!!!! as their last farewell to her yesterday they played her “I’ll be seeing you” by Billie Holiday:
“I’ll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I’ll be looking at the moon
But I’ll be seeing you”
They love her so much and they tried so hard!!!
Oh man, It doesn’t end there.
This isn’t the first song NASA sent Opportunity. They had a playlist:
It’s on Spotify, it’s called “Opportunity, wake up!“
This is what’s great about NASA and it’s what’s great about people. These are world-class engineers. When they sent a rover to another planet they could have easily looked at it as just another scientific tool. But people don’t do that. We can and will get emotionally attached to the most inanimate of objects. We can and will anthropomorphize anything. And frankly Opportunity’s camera mast looks like a little face with eyes and everything, so why not?
So they started calling it her.
They nicknamed her Oppy.
They told her to take a selfie not long ago.
After 15 years of Oppy flipping the double bird to her original 90 day life expectancy, when a planet-spanning dust storm finally knocked her out and she stopped responding to the engineer’s wake-up messages, they started playing music for her.
And after 8 months and almost 1000 unanswered wake-up messages, when it was finally clear that Oppy was never going to wake up, the last thing these world-class NASA engineers did for their little rover on another planet
the thing about the “um excuse me if you’re as poor as you say you are why don’t you just sell all your most treasured possessions” thing that people love to trot out as some kind of “gotcha” is that they do not acknowledge how fucking soul-crushing it is to be in a situation that is already destroying your mental health and then be forced to sell one of the few things in your life that still bring you joy
and an additional layer of this that nobody ever likes to acknowledge is:
human beings genuinely need to have fun and enjoyable things in our lives so that we do not just fall so deep into depression we jump off the nearest bridge, but in the current world we live in, having fun costs money. every list i have seen of “fun things you can do for free!” still costs money, it just costs an amount of money that is inconsequentially small to the person writing the list but that could easily be what a poor person has to live on for an entire week
“sit in a coffeeshop and journal!” coffee, journals, and pens cost money
“go to events with your friends!” event tickets and bus fare/gas cost money
“cook a nice home-cooked meal!” ingredients cost money. if people could be doing this one they already would. do you think poor people eat ramen and peanut butter sandwiches every day for fun
“take up a hobby, like crochet or watercolor!” those supplies cost money. yes i know you can get a lot of craft supplies at the dollar tree. someone with thirty cents in their bank account cannot afford that
“go hiking!” gas money, hiking shoes, and clothes that won’t be covered in holes by the time you get off the trail all cost money. if your closest hiking trails are national parks you’ve also gotta pay to go into those
everything costs fucking money. when you are poor, often the only way you can do fun things is 1) because someone you know with more money than you offers to pay for it for you, or 2) by utilizing things you already have at home, which you cannot fucking do if you sell everything you own
so yeah tl;dr when i see someone asking for money for groceries/rent/bills/etc and i also know that person has like a wacom tablet or a playstation or whatever i do not judge them, i simply think “i am glad this person is able to get some joy still” because i hold the extremely controversial opinion that not wanting to kill yourself shouldn’t be a luxury that only rich people can afford
For decades, marine biologists assumed that all squids laid their eggs in clusters on the seafloor, where the eggs developed and hatched without any help from their parents. However, MBARI scientists discovered that some female deep-sea squid, like this Gonatus onyx, brood their eggs by carrying them between their arms until the young hatch and swim away. Gonatus females will have approximately 2,000 to 3,000 eggs in a sheath between their arms for as long as nine months. During this time they are unable to feed and must rely on stored fats from previous meals. This observation of the first known parental care behavior by squid was also an important discovery made possible by the use of MBARI’s remotely operated vehicles.
>Japan bombs Pearl Harbor which brings America into World War II
>The draft for WWII creates a labor shortage in the US
>Because of the labor shortage, companies start significantly raising wages.
>FDR is worried that if wages go up too fast it could create runaway inflation, so he signs an executive order creating the National War Labor Board, which standardized salaries during the war in order to stabilize prices.
>Companies wanted a way to compete for talent in a limited labor pool despite not being able to offer higher salaries, so they started offering benefits packages to attract workers, the cornerstone of which was health insurance
>After the war, companies didn’t want to give up their role in providing health insurance because it served them well in terms of both recruiting and retention (i.e. you’re less likely to quit your job if it means losing your health insurance)
>This model becomes increasingly common across the US to the point where private health insurance companies are paying for the majority of healthcare expenses in the US
>Because the majority of healthcare costs were being paid by insurance companies rather than the people receiving care, hospitals began massively inflating the sticker price of their services with the expectation that the insurance company would negotiate those numbers down (as private insurance companies are want to do)
>Insurance companies take advantage of the increase in sticker prices by increasing premiums and passing off more of their costs to the consumer while continuing to negotiate down the actual price paid to hospitals
>This cycle repeats until the average hospital bill is completely divorced from any of the actual costs of the service
>In 2024 the average cost of giving birth in America is over $18,000
Listen, fictional character wearing a lab coat, I appreciate you using your outfit design to communicate details about yourself, but if you don’t button that thing up, get side shields on those glasses, and put on some gloves, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to write you up for not following lab safety regulations
Sorry I have to write you up again. Yes, I will admit that your lab coat is stylish, looks great with your outfit, and gives people the impression that you’re intelligent and dedicated to the sciences. But because you wore that in the lab you can’t be wearing it here outside the lab. It could have traces of the potentially hazardous chemicals you were working with on it. That’s a large part of the reason you wear the lab coat in the first place, you know that right? What do you mean no?? think I need to have a word with your lab manager
“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”
