"In any case, many of us feel suspicious of the color-and-shape manipulations of these images. They're nudging us too much..."

"... insisting that we feel awe. It's a little like the January 6th Committee's over-produced show that insists that we feel anger and outrage. And some people don't think hardcore pornography is sexy. What X thinks is so sexy is exactly what makes it not sexy at all to Y. Maybe something subtler, something more real. Something human."

I blogged on July 14, as I resisted the hoopla, and noticed a column in WaPo by Alexandra Petri titled "James Webb Space Telescope images ranked by how good they look to eat."

Now, I see this in the news: "A prominent scientist posted an image of a distant star he said was taken by the Webb telescope. It was actually a slice of chorizo" (CBS).

The scientist, Etienne Klein, put up his silly post on July 31st, 17 days after Petri's jovial scribblings.

Klein — who has more than 91,000 followers on Twitter — acknowledged that many users had not understood his joke which he said was simply aimed at encouraging us "to be wary of arguments from people in positions of authority as well as the spontaneous eloquence of certain images."

Yes. Exactly. That was my point too. 

However, at a time when battling fake news is of paramount importance for the scientific community, many Twitter users indicated they were unamused by Klein, director of research at France's Atomic Energy Commission and a radio show producer.

This gets my "Era of That's Not Funny" tag. Good lord. People will never learn skepticism. To want to be protected from  humor is to choose to be vulnerable to the truly nefarious liars of this world. 

On Wednesday, he said sorry to those who were misled. "I come to present my apologies to those who may have been shocked by my prank, which had nothing original about it," he said, describing the post as a "scientist's joke."

Oh! He apologized! At least, he nonapologized. Sorry if you're such an idiot that you looked at a slice of chorizo with awe and later suffered the horrible pain of embarrassment. And it wasn't even an original joke. 

It was, by the way, a joke in my favorite category of joke — "big and small." It's a photograph of something small that is perceived as something very large. There's "nothing original" there. 

Just something delicious:

Photo de Proxima du Centaure, l’étoile la plus proche du Soleil, située à 4,2 année-lumière de nous.
Elle a été prise par le JWST.
Ce niveau de détails… Un nouveau monde se dévoile jour après jour. pic.twitter.com/88UBbHDQ7Z

— Etienne KLEIN (@EtienneKlein) July 31, 2022