I don't normally share things that are just in ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunny_hugger's experience and not mine, but, good grief. Friend of ours was talking with her dismissively of Artemis II, for reasons that strike me as weak or irrelevant. I don't care for this sort of argument --- I wasn't on the sci.space newsgroup for decades without having heard every possible argument about how we don't Space enough or properly and everything we do do is wrong --- so I didn't use my position of modest pop expertise to intrude.
But then, goodness. Friend sent a Google AI summary of reasons why Artemis II is actually a bad project without scientific or engineering merit. And that's legitimately hurt both of our opinions of him. It's one thing to get your opinions from an expert, and to even copy your reasons for your opinions from that. But an AI summary can't be received wisdom since it's received from nothing.
Friend said if the summary was wrong then refute it, and she said ``why would I refute an argument you didn't even make?'' And discontinued the discussion which was pretty well dead in any case. In the shower the next day I realized a better answer, that he should ask the Google AI to summarize reasons the first summary was wrong.
Anyway I've been thinking up how boy, really getting to understand all those complaints about Sophists.
Now back to ZooAmerica and the thing we most hoped we would see ...
That's right, they've got coatis! Just like last time we visited, only this time I knew to be looking for them. No, I don't know why they're kept in the nocturnal animals section when coatis are famously the day-active procyonids.
Or at least, they have a coati; we could only prove the existence of this one. There may have been more out in spots we couldn't locate in the dark, or backstage in off-display enclosures.
No complaints about their explanatory panel, though.
So the coati that we could see appeared to be trying very hard to nap, with the result that all the photos are kind of them curling up on a tree nest too small for us to get a handle of how exactly it is set up.
But here's a broader view of the enclosure and people admiring the snoot. I don't know why sleeping on the intersection of two branches was better than the hammock except sometimes you kind of want to sleep on the uncomfortable thing, you know?
A lot of the coati's attempted naps seemed to be headstands. This is a moment after breaking that stand and looking down at whatever was curious there.
Did not know they were going to have the ending sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey here! You know it's almost extinct in the wild.
Why it's not the ending sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, it's just a black-footed ferret!
Back outside in the sun where pictures are worthwhile and here's a bobcat doing bobcat things, which is mostly sleeping.
And then oh, we saw this gorgeous enclosure with all the black vultures. Just incredibly interesting to see.
Here's a couple black vultures trying to impress each other, it looks like.
Bystander black vulture, meanwhile, can not believe she has to put up with guys like this in her species.
Trivia: At 55 hours, 38 minutes, 40 seconds the Apollo 8 crew became the first humans travelling somewhere that the pull of Earth's gravity was less than another body's. Source: Apollo by the Numbers: A Statistical Reference, Richard W Orloff. NASA SP-4029.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 88: Pappy the Beatnick!, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Legitimately not sure whether Noelle accidentally ran two stories together (in this era of the strip they don't get title panels) or whether Sagendorf forgot he was doing a ``Pappy Goes To Elementary School'' story and started doing ``Pappy Becomes a Beatnik'' by mistake. In short, it's kind of amazing Thimble Theater/Popeye has been a beloved comic strip for over a century despite getting a writer who knows how endings work only after Finland and Sweden applied to join NATO.
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Date: 2026-04-06 04:59 pm (UTC)Like, I have my own opinions about the issues with Artemis II but it's okay for people to be excited about it on its own merits, and using AI to "refute" anything is just the worst response when it comes to anything that's meant to involve critical thinking to begin with.
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Date: 2026-04-07 02:54 am (UTC)