Noodles (and sphaghetti) in Space

 AnnAlthouse has a link to an article about scientists discovering gravity waves, which is apparantly a big thing.

But what caught my attention is this part of the WaPost article (behind paywall) that ends with this comment:

[T]he newly announced waves are not one-shot wonders, and theorists are noodling the many potential explanations for why the cosmic sea ripples in such a fashion....

italics mine.

Noodling?

In Oklahoma, that word means the practice of digging into the mud with your bare hands to catch a catfish.

or does it refer to noodles? 

Or is it because the word noodle resembles the word google (the oo sound is similar in both words) and googling meaning to search on the internet for something

So I did google the word

That apparantly is a new word, because the Cambridge dictionary defines it as: 

to do or think about something without giving it full or serious attention:

wordnik adds these definitions:

Noun: The practice and sport of noodling (fishing for catfish using the bare hands).

 

Noun:Musical improvisation.

 This isn't the first time I ran into a food word used as a scientific description: In an earlier blogpost I did note the use of the word Spaghettification, which means a stretching an object into long noodles as it gets sucked into a black hole.

well, anyway, here is a video explaining why discovering gravity waves is so important. 

and one irony about this is that it was found partly thanks to the now destroyed Arecibo radiotelescope. 

Why destroyed? It collapsed in 2020 Because no one apparently was doing proper inspections of the supporting cables

The UKGuardian noted:

a socket holding the auxiliary cable that snapped failed in what experts believe could be a manufacturing error.

italics mine. Bought from the lowest bidder?

or was maintanance the problem? Steel corrosion is a problem in a damp environment where hurricanes happen all the time. 

The National Science Foundation, which owns the observatory that is managed by the University of Central Florida, said crews who evaluated the structure after the first incident determined that the remaining cables could handle the additional weight. But on 6 November another cable broke.

and after two of them snapped, they took their time to fix it, so the whole thing collapsed. DUH.

a Nature article from 2015 notes that the lack of funding was a major problem for the telescope even then. 

The article ends with a quote about seeking outside funding from private donations (instead of the NSF) and in view of what happened is ironic: 

Efforts to find an outside donor have been ongoing for some time, to no avail, Nolan says. Users can be expected to pay for telescope time, but “someone has to pay for the base operations — keeping the grass cut, keeping the big steel structure from falling out of the sky,” he says. “And that’s the part everyone’s finding too expensive.”

italics mine. 

or as the saying goes 

 For want of a nail socket the shoe cable was lost. For want of a shoe cable the horse telescope was lost. 

and the loss of an expensive telescope points to a larger problem:

Regular cable inspiection is an important  issue for bridges that are not being inspected and repaired.

According to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, there are 171.5 million crossings per day on over 45,000 structurally deficient U.S. bridges—a significant number of which have bridge cable corrosion issues.

italics mine.....some back story here and here.