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From Ukraine to deep space
April-June 2022 in humanity's exploration of space. Stand by for rocky passengers, glitches, amazing images, a very French rocket name, Earthly politics, and lots of asteroids.
On the Earth In the Himalayas, a liquid mirror telescope came online. France joined the Artemis accords for sustainable space exploration. BRICS nations announced a new space agreement: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
On the Earth In the Himalayas, a liquid mirror telescope came online. France joined the Artemis accords for sustainable space exploration. BRICS nations announced a new space agreement: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
Measure me! Improve your qubit manufacturing!
From the people who brought you "A Dark Room." The Qubit Game is a little game where you protect linnocent-looking qubits from villainous heat blobs. Along the way you measure and store information, dread cosmic rays, and learn about quantum coherence, entanglement, helium coolant, and laser cooling. Then things ratchet up.
Listen. Listen. Listen.
A new Cronenberg film will soon be upon us. (content warning for, well, David Cronenberg; NSFW) A teaser trailer for Crimes of the Future* has appeared. So has another one.
Rockets, photos, the sun, a space station, and a very distant star
Late March 2022 in humanity's exploration of space. The past couple of weeks saw a lot of activity in the solar system, especially with launches and images.
Who asked, "Why don't they remake *bad* movies?"
I remember reading a major film critic complaining about Hollywood remakes of fine films, then asking a good question. "Why doesn't Hollywood remake *bad* movies instead?"
It's not really the brown girls from Jersey City who save the world.
The Ms. Marvel tv series trailer just appeared. The series will stream on Disney+ starting June 6, 2022.
The demon vixen is presumably once again on the loose
“I feel like I’ve seen something that shouldn’t be seen" Since 2022 is the year that keeps on giving, in Japan, the Sessho-seki rock (殺生石) has split apart, and a fox demon may be on the loose.
In Thouscot you reach Dogsbridge by crossing the Bridge to Millside
Generate an imaginary medieval town from scratch. A webtoy which does what it says on the tin. You can adjust parameters and reshape the results.
The option of dropping a 500-ton structure on India and China
Updates from February 2022 in space. The human effort to explore space continued this month, intersecting the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Black Holes Are Strange Little Robots, by Xaviera P. Gomez
Title ideas for my science fiction novel. Something more mysterious or something less obvious. Lewis Hackett (Twitter) uses several applications to help him create new paperback covers of 1970s science fiction.
Now, at last, the wealth seeking is printed on the tin.
Before software ate the world, finance already had. Ian Bogost (previously) reflects on blockchain and NFTs. (SLAtlantic)
to strengthen its space presence in an all-round manner
The past fortnight in space. Updates from humanity's exploration of the solar system.
On Earth's surface: using data from three satellites, scientists published a visualization of an unusually violent star. A "hard start" delayed an ABL Space Systems rocket test launch. An uncrewed SpaceX Dragon module safely splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico.
On Earth's surface: using data from three satellites, scientists published a visualization of an unusually violent star. A "hard start" delayed an ABL Space Systems rocket test launch. An uncrewed SpaceX Dragon module safely splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico.
A repossessing academic memories novel?
There's a recent short novel taking place in the near future, where authorities can repossess people's memories for failure to pay their student loans, and I'll be damned if I can recall either title or author.
finding the world to be no safer than it was last year at this time
At doom’s doorstep: It is 100 seconds to midnight The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (about) updates their Doomsday Clock.
Looking for a funny quote mocking Calvin Coolidge
I'm trying to source a remembered slam on American president Calvin Coolidge and am striking out.
To paraphrase from memory: in honor of George Washington's achievements, we erected a shining monument straight up into the sky. For president Coolidge and his lack of achievements, we should instead dig a hole down into the Earth so deep there needs to be guard rails to keep people from falling in.
How many university textbooks are open?
Is anyone tracking how many educational materials are in open formats, a/k/a OER?
From L2 to the Moon and points elsewhere
The last two weeks of 2021 in space. Starting with the Earth area: Zhai Zhigang and Ye Guangfu, two taikonauts of the Shenzhou-13 mission on board the Tianhe space station, completed a second EVA lasting six hours.
How will academia deal with the Omicron COVID wave?...
Tracking college and university plans for Omicron How will academia deal with the Omicron COVID wave? Several of us set up an open Google Sheet to track institutional plans, especially decisions to cancel or move classes online this January.
if human: kill()
Slaughterbots 2. The Future of Life Institute follows up on their 2017 video about autonomous killer drones.
(previously)
New space walks
A space exploration update for November 2021. In Earth orbit news, one crew returned from the International Space Station, while a new crew rode a SpaceX flight to board the ISS. The ISS altered its orbit by a mile to avoid incoming debris from an old Chinese launch. Members of the Shenzhou 13 team aboard China's Tiangong space station conducted a spacewalk to build out the station; colonel Wang Yaping became China's first female spacewalker.
14 visions of folk horror
"There are witch-hunting narratives, and pagan community narratives—there are all kinds of them!” Kier-La Janisse (Wikipedia, IMDB), director of Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, describes her 24-hour, international folk horror film festival to the Onion's A.V. Club.
Coining xenophobia.
"Only by remembering xenophobia’s first instantiation do we bring these broader battles into focus." Uncovering the origins of a word: stenography, kooky linguistic debates, Romanian ultra-nationalism, the Boxer rebellion, and the stranger-as-enemy relationship. (SLARB)
The Nobel Peace Prize goes to Maria Ressa and Dmitry Andreyevich Muratov
"for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace." The award celebrated Ressa and Muratov's years of work in the Philippines and Russia, respectively.
That village near Gomorrah got too hot for Lot
The city’s destruction was associated with some unknown high-temperature event. An interdisciplinary research team claims that the ancient city of Tall el-Hammam (present-day Jordan) was destroyed by a meteor, or comet which detonated in mid-air.
Looking for a visualization of highspeed railroad deployment by nation
About a year ago I found an excellent visualization, then failed to save it and can't find the blessed thing.
It was an animated graph of how different nations deployed new highspeed railroad capacity. As a graph, the vertical axis was for various nations (China, Japan, Germany, etc) and the horizontal represented mileage (or total kilometers).
Herrera wasn’t a saint. But he may have been something better than that.
"Costa Rica shows what an alternative looks like." Atul Gawande explores the benefits of Costa Rica's "braid[ed] together" health care and public health systems. (SLNYorker)
Not the year of the MOOC but the week of cashing out
Three leading ed tech companies, three major moves for money. To start with, major online program manager (OPM) 2U purchased much of online class provider edX for $800 million. As part of the deal Harvard and MIT will launch a new and so far unnamed education nonprofit.
Novels as a kind of literary seismograph
"Clashes of arms, he wrote, were usually preceded by wars of – and sometimes on – words, and therefore words could also be used to prevent them." From 2018 to 2020 the German government worked with a group of literacy scholars to anticipate geopolitical futures.
Indicators of Broadband Need.
The Biden administration publishes a new map of American broadband access. It's a change from the FCC's map, in that it offers more data, more tools - and doesn't rely on ISP self-reporting.
“She positioned herself as Cherokee"
A Genealogy of a Lie. Sarah Viren investigates another academic who has claimed an identity that they should not have. (SLNYT; Archive.org snapshot)
This is the world’s most riskiest project.
Damming the Great Bend. The Chinese government is apparently committed to building what may be the world's most difficult dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo river. It would be a megastructure in the Himalayas, closely involved with the Indian border, in the world's deepest canyon, would control a major source of water for India and Bangladesh, and in a seismically dangerous area.
"Bugs, Mr. Rico. Zillions of em!"
Visualizing a cicada’s life A Washington Post multimedia visualization traces one Magicicada from birth to demise, using a variant on the Snowfall web storytelling/scrollytelling model. Be sure to turn the sound on. (Content warning: bugs!) (SLWP) (previously)
a faint plasma "hum" scientists compared to gentle rain
Another week in humanity's exploration of the solar system. Starting from the sun: the NASA and ESA Solar Orbiter hurtled around the far side of the star from the Earth and tracked a coronal mass ejection.
“Whoa, it splashed!"
Another US military UFO video clip surfaces. In 2019 sailors recorded an unidentified object flying around the littoral combat ship USS Omaha before vanishing into the sea.
“Formally, this is it. The case is closed.”
It wasn't a yeti attack. A Yekaterinburg prosecutor held a press conference to announce his solution (previously) to the Dyatlov Pass mystery. It was not well received.(SLNewYorker)
Bodok, mmmm, bodok
We now have menu engineers. How some restaurants design menu weight, fonts, item positioning, boxes, pictures, and language to encourage you to buy more food. (SLBBC)
The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.
This week in humanity's exploration of the solar system. Let's start at the center. The Parker Solar Probe set two new records as the fastest object ever made by humanity (330,000 miles per hour, 532,000 km/h) and the closest any spacecraft has gotten to the sun (6.5 million miles, 10.4 million km). Back on Earth, scholars published research into Venusian data Parker caught when it last hurtled past that planet (previously).
Keeping a civilization from disappearing up its own brainstem.
The dawn of a superstimulating Entertainment. Biologist Erik Hoel considers the purpose of dreaming, the function of fiction, and some futures of entertained minds. (SLBaffler)
For now, among the sick and dying, there is a vestige of democracy.
Arundhati Roy reflects on India's COVID-19 catastrophe. About one year after her description of the pandemic as a portal. CW for suffering, death, disease. (SLGuardian)
Ingenious
"We can say human beings have flown a rotorcraft on another planet." On April 19th the Ingenuity copter, part of the Perseverance rover mission, took off from the Martian surface, hovered, took a photo of its shadow, then safely landed. It is the first time a human-built craft has flown on another world.
From mental health to minecraft and WTF, plus two more islands.
"This website shows a map of reddit. Each dot is a subreddit." A web page presents a map (Github) of part of the internet. There is, appropriately, a subreddit.
Finding public domain art from world museums
A new visual search web service. Museo searches images hosted by a group of museums from two nations so far, including "the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rijksmuseum, the Harvard Art Museums, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the New York Public Library Digital Collection."
it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns
'Only one of those things has a future, and it’s the one with the Netflix deal." Patrick Freyne on Meghan, Harry, and Oprah. (SLIrishTimes)
"Has everyone become oblivious of who supports athletics??"
You cannot get away. The University of Texas-Austin has played "The Eyes of Texas" after its football games for years. Recently activists, students, and student-athletes have called for stopping the practice, citing its origin as a Lost Cause riff on a Robert E. Lee quote and its being played in minstrel shows. In response some donors have urged it being taken more seriously, especially by student-athletes, and have threatened to cease donating.
Make sure what you and your family are living through is not forgotten
Writing the COVID experience. The Pandemic Journaling Project hosts people recording their thoughts as they live through the COVID-19 era.
James E. Gunn, 1923-2021
Hugo-award-winning science fiction writer, anthologist, and scholar dies in Kansas. Gunn wrote short stories and novels, including The Listeners (1972) and The Immortals (1962) (turned into a tv series, 1970-1).
this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences
Three expeditions from three nations are scheduled to land on Mars this month. First, the United Arab Emirates Space Agency's Hope probe (مسبار الأمل) is due to enter Martian orbit tomorrow.
Next, the China National Space Administration's Tianwen-1 (simplified Chinese: 天问; traditional Chinese: 天問) is scheduled to orbit the red plan on the next day after Hope.
Then NASA's Perseverance mission should reach orbit on February 18th.
There is a legend which comes from...
Click for a made-up bit of folklore. This page generates two-sentence lore on demand. One sentence describes its origin while the next summarizes the story. For example, "There is a legend which comes from the book The Ghosts of Shildon & Stanley by Cleveland Kendall. In 1841, the Devil himself died of 'rising of the lights', contracted from a witch named Mother Liliana."
An organized rogue editor network!
One way to hack a scientific journal. A group of researchers convinced a scientific journal to organize a special issue about the “Role of Nanotechnology and Internet of Things in Healthcare.” The content turned out to be bad and the organizers disappeared.
No one would have believed, in the last month of 2020
An interesting signal from space. Astronomers working at the Parkes Observatory detected a narrow radio emission (982 MHz) coming from the direction of the Proxima Centauri system.
Lycoperdons, the tiny deadly puffballs, are on the march again
An AI riffs on 2020. Janelle Shane (previously; Twitter) fed GPT-3 headlines from this annus horribilis to see what kind of 2020ish titles it would generate.