Elon Musk wastes astronomers' time, too
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 22
FINAL FRONTIER DEP'T.
In Space, There's No Such Thing as a Throwaway Gag
I WANTED TO stop hearing about Elon Musk for just a little while, but it didn't work. I'm warning about this up front, in case anyone was looking for relief from Musk. If you want to think about something else entirely, Max Read wrote a very absorbing newsletter about the musician Benson Boone, and how his music has attained a whole new form of cultural penetration and success by being "perfectly engineered to soundtrack short-form videos," generating "an entire Benson Boone-iverse of content out there" on Instagram and TikTok. And Chris Thompson at Defector wrote about a video of a plasma cannon, and how the devastating-looking eruption of energy from it "appears capable of doing no more damage to a flat-screen television than what Philadelphia sports fans typically do with their fists in the third quarters of games that the Eagles comfortably win." Down at the bottom, he included a video of the utter annihilation of a watermelon in another project by the plasma-cannon maker; in it, the plasma-cannon guy notes offhand that he salvaged the watermelon as damaged goods from the supermarket—reassuring the viewer, without belaboring the point, that food isn't being wantonly wasted here, which was a refreshingly prosocial thing to encounter at this particular moment.
When I'm looking for something outside the barrage of breaking news, without taking the extreme step of pulling my face out of the internet, I sometimes go to Google News and search for "discovered." I originally started doing this while working on our LOST & FOUND items, but now I also do it for its own sake, hoping to find out about events unfolding on a different, slower time scale.
Some of the results are just grim stories about the discovery of human remains, which is an unavoidable effect of browsing news. Others are sketchily repackaged leftovers or other blather from content mills. Still others are moderately interesting natural history news that have been pumped up and curiosity-gapped by SEO sharps; the Miami Herald website has a whole section of headlines like "Spiky ‘large’-eyed creature found hunting near windmills in India. It’s a new species" (namely, a new species of house gecko) and "‘Dragon’ creatures — with lots of legs — found in Vietnam mountains. See new species" (namely, a new species of millipede).
But there's also a nice, straightforward assortment of new findings, major and minor. A metal-detector enthusiast turned up a gold-plated miniature Roman lock in a field in Westphalia. Cypriot researchers scanned a Titian painting of Christ to reveal an abandoned portrait upside-down underneath it. A fossil hunter in Denmark found a mixture of crinoid fragments that turned out to be a lump of 66-million-year-old fossilized vomit, or "regurgitalite." And the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System telescope in Chile picked up a near-Earth asteroid that's somewhere between 40 and 100 meters wide, which scientists currently give a 1.2 percent chance of hitting us on December 22, 2032.
Then there was one other piece of asteroid news, which was really non-asteroid news. An amateur astronomer in Turkey, who already had two named asteroid discoveries to his credit, picked out something orbiting on a path that would carry it close to Earth. He reported his finding to the Minor Planet Center, which announced the finding of a new near-Earth object and officially numbered it 2018 CN41—and then retracted the designation shortly afterward, when its discoverer had lingering concerns about the shape of the orbit, consulted with other astronomers, and realized it was really the Falcon Heavy rocket stage with a Tesla Roadster attached to it that Elon Musk dumped into space in February 2018 as a marketing stunt. Tomorrow it will be seven full years that the thing has been flying around the sun, its nonmetallic bits and payload of props decaying under the constant radiation of space, a dumb self-indulgent impulse turned into an enduring piece of garbage that everyone else has to deal with.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, February 4, 2025
★★★ The wind had sharpened in the three hours or so between fetching the newspaper off the stoop in a t-shirt and heading out for real in a parka. The clouds were bold and bright. Malevolent air currents moved here and there on the A/C/E platforms at 42nd Street, colder than the aboveground air. Light ricocheted around Midtown; the yellow of a crane against the blue and white sky was doubled in the glass face of a building. Back uptown the sun just surged straight up Central Park West. Leaves gently fell and rose by the subway grates. Around the corner, the wind pounced, flipping the corners of notebook pages like a cat batting at a twist tie.
SIDE PIECES DEP'T.
THE EDITORS OF the Baseball Prospectus invited me to write the essay about the Baltimore Orioles for the 30th edition of their annual comprehensive guidebook, and then were nice enough to insert some actual sophisticated baseball analysis under my name. Me: "Believers and complainers alike had to admit that the front office had finally delivered a real team, no matter which emphasis one may have preferred to put on 'finally.'" Them: "Compare projection versus Pythagorean record over the last four seasons, and PECOTA's annual margin of error shrinks to six wins—almost entirely due to 2023."
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast.
Tom Scocca
Click on this box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
GOT SOMETHING YOU need to justify to yourself, or to the world at large? Other columnists are here to judge you, but The Sophist is here to tell you why you’re right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of sandwiches selected from A Book of Practical Recipes for the Housewife, published by Chicago Evening American, printed in 1923 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
Pimento Salad for Sandwiches
1/2 pound boiled ham
Small can pimento
1/4 pound walnut meats
Grind all together and mix with mayonnaise.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
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