This reads like “Disney” science: take some facts and spin them to be entertainment. I thought the same of this article where I thought the reporting was twisting facts to make a headline: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/lost-your...
I read a lot of astronomy journalism that I think is absolutely awful (one of the main reasons I made this account was to point out garbage articles/comments). I actually think that this is pretty good.
It mostly follows the paper (here's what looks like an earlier version of this paper that is easily available [1]), doesn't engage in too much hyperbole, isn't publicizing something widely outside of the consensus.
Disclaimer that I don't work on planetary formation/dynamics so am not an expert on this, but still, pretty impressed.
Here’s a 2019 preprint that concludes “We show that cigar-shaped models suffer from a fine-tuning problem and have only 16 per cent probability to produce light curve minima as deep as the ones present in `Oumuamua's light curve. Disc-shaped models, on the other hand, are very likely (at 91 per cent) to produce minima of the required depth.”
So it seems like there is still a lot of conjecture involved... Yet the National Geographic article misleads by showing an artists impression (pictures are truthy) while treating the elongated shape as fact on every line (the alternate disc model was also mentioned in original paper trying to deduct the shape, although the paper concluded it was less likely). Poor reporting IMHO.
I am not an astrophysicist, but this is the second Nat Geo article that I’ve read recently that has really failed my good reporting sniff test. Edit: failed to meet the high standards I expect from Nat Geo.
Did you read to the end? The article does actually make that point:
> But [Bannister] and Laughlin introduce a new wrinkle to the mystery: They’re skeptical that ‘Oumuamua is actually a cigar-shaped object, pointing to a paper published last summer that revisited the original observations of the object. The newer analysis concludes that ‘Oumuamua may actually have a pancake-like shape—a shape that Bannister likens to an overstuffed pita, similar to an object in the outer solar system called MU69, or Arrokoth.
I get your point that the article doesn't promote the significance of the disc-shape analysis enough however my takeaway from the article wasn't that it was claiming the origin of Oumuamua was solved but rather new research has identified potential scenarios where cigar-shaped objects could be naturally created (research which was spurred on by the discovery and mystery of Oumuamua).
If that was what the article intended to cover then it doesn't make sense to cover the disc-shaped analysis extensively throughout the article however for clarity the mention of Oumuamua probably should also have been demoted in at least the title. Sadly I think there's little chance of putting click-bait headlines back in the proverbial genie bottle.
That's how National Geographic has been run for decades. Wrap up fluff journalism in a mystique of authority and strangeness to distract from the overall shallow nature of the writing.
Facile views wrapped up in easily digestible photo journalism essays, then never reviewing the topic again.
It could have been a lot worse. When Fox came in, it could have turned into a propaganda machine for fake science. Given the possible alternative, I'm happy with "fluffy."
I realize an iPhone 6+ is an old phone. But, this is a simple page with some simple text and simple images that is working so hard to track me that it is completely unreadable even though they really want me to read it.
Amazing service! Also loading the page with noscript as I do gives me a quick loading single white page with a narrow column of text. No fancy stuff or funny business. Just the article.
Heh, just to test it, I submitted this comment page, the space savings are pretty amazing: (original size of 14.3 kB to 23.3 kB) [-63%]. Also, something seems weird in the calculation, my browser shows "24KB transfers, 36.5KB of resources"
Why not? All the dependencies are hosted by trimread.com so by doing the measurements once (and when they change) gzipped then adding that for their calculation would do the trick.
I've noticed many Japanese news site needlessly paginate their articles, so you have to click through 2-4 pages to read them. I would like a site like this that also could collapse articles onto one page.
Maybe it fits under fair use as critique. It's a critique showing the bloatedness of the original article. And it's only using 0.6% (0.006) of the original to make its point.
"Critique" isn't just a vague "something could be construed as critique if you squint hard enough", there needs to be an actual human critiquing something. I see no human here, nor any critiquing text. This would be more like meta-critique, which has no protection I've ever heard of.
Stretching the definition of "fair use" is a favorite internet past time. People have gotten pretty good at it. It isn't anywhere near as flexible as people seem to think, and I mean, like, by a couple orders of magnitude. This particular example isn't even close, honestly.
Yeah, I'm not a lawyer and don't understand 100% of 0.6% being an issue. Copyright holders get to eat their cake and keep it too. Journalists can record and publish phone calls verbatim (Swatch Grp. Mgmt. Servs. Ltd. v. Bloomberg L.P. 742 F.3d 17 (2d Cir. 2014)).
>Stretching the definition of "fair use" is a favorite internet past time.
It isn't really 100% of 0.6%... copyright isn't based on byte-count. You may or may not be able to get a straight answer about what it is based on out of the literature, but it's certainly much closer to the human experience rather than the raw byte count. In legal terms, it's basically 100% of 100% of the article being republished. (I'd say it's 100% of 100% if the header image had been included.) Nobody showed up to that page for the 4MB of other stuff, minus the aforementioned header image. Strengthening the case for infringement is that monetary damages are also being experienced, because what is mostly being stripped is the revenue generation portion of the performance of the work.
Basically, if you take the four criteria for something being fair use [1] in the US, which isn't the end-all, be-all of analysis but is a darned good start, this absolutely faceplants on all four. (And while it is technically up to the discretion of the judge, I'd say it's closer to an "AND" than an "OR" on the 4 criteria. You really, really don't want to be standing in front of a judge solid on only one out of four. This is to preclude the usual arguing about #1; even if I grant it, which I don't, it really isn't enough on its own.)
It doesn't face plant on all four (there are no ads in the distillation so it's informational, original work is reporting of speculated facts, it is 0.6% of the whole, and as news orgs are losing money, this lost less money for NG Media than had I visited the original with my ad blocker). There is a strong case for all four. But it seems closeish to Folsom v Marsh:
Indeed, as intent matters a lot. If the page didn't show the full article but rather just a snippet and then said "This page could have been X while it's actually X", then the intent is just to show the size difference.
But in this case, the intent is to show the full article without anything else, so most likely copyright infringement.
Usually copyright laws refer to a substantial part of a work, it maybe be 0.6% of the delivered web page, but it's 100% (presumably) of the article. The article counts separately as a work (and each image within an article could count as a separate work, there are conditions on that).
But, in any case if all the textual context was copied that's still substantial. Interpreting things in a purely numerical way like that would be clearly ridiculous.
Such gotchas don't work in law in general (in my very limited experience).
It does, technically speaking, and if it's the whole article I don't think fair use applies, BUT the website is protected by the DMCA so the onus is on Nat Geo to issue a takedown request. Second, legality aside, it's morally unjustifiable to have so much cruft and trackers on a webpage. I mean it's loading 1 MB of Javascript for what looks like a fairly straightforward, static website. Even if it's loaded async / after the main content, it's still an unreasonable amount for a website like this; if anything they should use a proper bundler so it only loads what is necessary.
(I've had great results for a site like this using Gatsby + Netlify)
> morally unjustifiable to have so much cruft and trackers on a webpage
I think the way to think about this is to compare it to magazines. While you can say that it's morally unjustifiable that magazines has ads and filler pages because it'll use more paper and we need to use less paper, the argument on the other side is that the business has to survive too so ads and trackers makes that more likely (from their perspective, I don't necessarily agree with that)
What if it doesn’t cache the page on the server, and the service is essentially a cloud-based user agent?
It can’t be legal to run a user-agent in your computer, and illegal to run a user agent in the cloud. The question becomes, what is the defining property of a user agent?
I don't know why you're downvoted, you're right. AIUI USA's Fair Use is usually negated by selling the result of that use when it amounts to a derivative work (but some commercial use can be Fair Use).
I think that the mention of DMCA [down thread] doesn't really work here, that's for sites with primarily legitimate use; if the site in question has a route for acquiring permissions, and has a system to check with users before they (the website service's commuters) download content - to check they have a license - then safe harbor provisions could apply.
Even torrent sites, I gather, tell you not to put up copyright content before giving the opportunity to do so.
All that aside, such sites are definitely copyright infringement in the UK (but I don't now how jurisdiction applies over the internet; I've yet to find good sources on that).
There was a discussion the other day about whether it's bad when HN gets derailed from TFA by incredibly minor details. I'm in favour of the tangents, which can often be more interesting than the primary topic - as is the case (for me) with your comment. Thanks for sharing :)
> The ʻokina has historically been represented in computer publications by the grave accent (`), the left single quotation mark (‘), or the apostrophe ('), especially when the correct typographical mark (ʻ) is not available.
We didn't know how to make shards in the presumed shape of `Oumuamua, naturally. There is now a plausible model of planets being ripped apart by tidal forces which can result in such shapes.
Seems highly unlikely these crazy 'from outside the solar system' ideas are likely.
This meme spreads well, but that to me means there is far more chance it is not true. The fact no one questions it also seems suspicious.
This left about 24 km/s faster than anything can go and remain inside of the Solar System. Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to get something going that fast?
A baseball going that fast has about 42 megajoules of kinetic energy. A semi on the interstate has about half a megajoule of kinetic energy. This thing was at least 100 meters long and all of it was going that fast.
For the record we do not have the technology to fire a rocket that fast. We only managed to get rockets to leave the Solar System by loading them up with gravity assists from planets. And even so they didn't get to that speed. If two asteroids have a head on collision, the pieces won't move that fast. (And it would have to be a heck of a collision to make a piece that big.)
If this came from inside of the Solar System, WTF accelerated it, how did it do so without breaking the object into smithereens, and why didn't we see evidence of the event that caused it?
By contrast this was going just about the average speed of interstellar objects in our neighborhood. (The Sun happens to be just passing through the ecliptic, and spends most of its time well above or below the Milky Way. Therefore to us, everything in our neighborhood is moving fast.) Any junk hanging around would have a trajectory that looks like this one. Now obviously space is pretty empty. Which is why it is so impressive that we actually spotted something from space.
Yes. It is highly unlikely that anything we see in the Solar System didn't come from here. But it is effectively impossible for anything starting in the outer reaches of the Solar System to get to this speed. And extremely likely that an interstellar object would go about this fast. Therefore it probably is an interstellar object.
The argument is actually really really simple. If it started from within the solar system, it would not (barring some three body interaction) have enough energy to escape. But, we know from observations that it does have enough kinetic energy to escape. There are two options,
1. It may have stolen some energy from another object (an accidental gravity assist), but we know that it didn't come close enough to anything big on its way though.
2. It came from outside the solar system and so entered with some velocity, and therefore will leave with roughly the same velocity it came in with.
We have well known mechanisms to eject objects from star systems so it isn't crazy to have things passing through. No-one questions it because high school level physics is enough to show why it is the only reasonable explanation.
But you're still focusing on the wrong thing. The idea of "a complicated gravity assist" getting something going this fast in the Solar System is laughable. The only thing in the Solar System heavy enough to do a gravity assist on the necessary scale is the Sun itself, and it started nowhere near the Sun.
For it to be real I'd expect billions of things passing through yearly, maybe daily. For something as large as Oumuamua I'd intuitively expect millions or billions of small rocks coming through.
"We find that such objects collide with the Sun once every 30 years, while about 2 pass within the orbit of Mercury each year."
But I worry about anything like this talking in human years, like "30 years". I'd expect every million years or millions a year when talking about the universe.
I understand as our technology grows, first we find yearly events and then improve. But the theoretical must make sense to me in non human timelines.
This reads like “Disney” science: take some facts and spin them to be entertainment. I thought the same of this article where I thought the reporting was twisting facts to make a headline: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/lost-your...