The Mars/Venus thing, metaphor though it is, reminds me that the heavens are an ancient reference point for science. Aristotle looked to the emptiness overhead to verify his aether. Newton confirmed his law of inverse squares through the motion of Mars. Even Einstein wasn’t truly Einstein until the sun and moon said so, in a 1919 eclipse that confirmed the theory of General Relativity. Even though we’re working on nothing so grand as all that here, I have to say I hope that paper’s snarky strikeout typeface is premature, at least for the things we like and talk about and the ways we spend our
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