April 2021 Archives
Friday, April 30, 2021
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Mars Helicopter Ingenuity Completes Fourth Flight
Success 👏#MarsHelicopter completed its 4th flight, going farther & faster than ever before. It also took more photos as it flew over the Martian surface. We expect those images will come down in a later data downlink, but @NASAPersevere's Hazcam caught part of the flight. pic.twitter.com/Fx3UHu4jgv
— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 30, 2021
CONTINUITY: Chinese Space Station Begins Orbital Construction
THE HAPPENING WORLD: SpaceX Starship SN15 Medium Altitude Test
FAA approval for the flight has been given and the road closure is scheduled for 13:00 UTC. The weather is not promising, but that didn't stop them launching SN11 in dense fog.
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Weed Eater Wars!
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Ultrawhite Paint Transparent to Infrared
Here is the paper: “Ultrawhite BaSO4 Paints and Films for Remarkable Daytime Subambient Radiative Cooling”.
CONTEXT: How Do Analogue Hygrometers Work?
Thursday, April 29, 2021
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Stratolaunch Roc Test Flight
A live stream of the flight is available at https://t.co/AAZax8mpVp
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) April 29, 2021
Stratolaunch’s ROC is on the runway awaiting a report on conditions from the chase plane.
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Black Plasma
Sodium ions absorb light from a sodium vapour lamp, resulting in a black plasma flame. The trick only works with monochromatic sodium light.
CONTEXT: Apollo to Venus! The 1967 Bellcomm Manned Flyby Study
In 1967, NASA contractor Bellcomm, Inc., delivered a detailed study and mission plan for a manned flyby mission of Venus to be launched in November of 1973 using modified Apollo hardware and a single Saturn V booster. Here is the 177 page paper, “Manned Venus Flyby”, which I have read and found thoroughly fascinating. A fictional portrayal of this mission was the subject of Gerald Brennan's 2017 novel Island of Clouds.
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Another Sixty Starlink Satellites Delivered to Orbit
THE HAPPENING WORLD: China Launches First Module of Space Station
Chinese officials confirmed the successful launch of the first element of the country’s space station early Thursday, laying the keystone to a permanently-inhabited orbiting habitat that could welcome its first astronauts this summer.
— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) April 29, 2021
Full story: https://t.co/qXTjVABGap pic.twitter.com/YWemXsptE7
This is cool. A 3D/VR version of the completed Chinese Space Station in which you can wander around through Tianhe, the experiment modules, docking hub and Shenzhou. From China's human spaceflight agency. https://t.co/2jYcIt7Rf9 pic.twitter.com/KoQsYaH1ml
— Andrew Jones (@AJ_FI) April 29, 2021
CONTINUITY: Mars Helicopter Ingenuity Fourth Flight
Flight No. 4 is targeted for April 29. 🗓️#MarsHelicopter has met or surpassed all its tech demo goals. Now, we'll push performance. We'll up the time airborne to 117 seconds, increase max airspeed to 3.5 m/sec (8 mph), & more than double the total range. https://t.co/4s7ujMZZmz pic.twitter.com/DxgB7e04Ni
— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 29, 2021
Wednesday, April 28, 2021
THE HAPPENING WORLD: China to Launch First Module of Space Station
Not welcome to join the ISS, the Chinese are building their own permanent space station, starting with the Tianhe core module. https://t.co/fmiRReQL0b
— IEEE Spectrum (@IEEESpectrum) April 28, 2021
The launch is scheduled for 03:20 UTC on 2021-04-29.
Possible streams for viewing the launch:
— Andrew Jones (@AJ_FI) April 28, 2021
CCTV-13 (Zh): https://t.co/Dozo0wdvoi
CGTN (Eng): https://t.co/QkbekjznKA
Other: https://t.co/S944A4Y6at and more to come.
(Image: UNOOSA/CMSA) pic.twitter.com/7fCvV65xNI
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: “Slash Resistant” Portable “Safe”
CONTINUITY: Ray Cosmic
Yes, there actually was a science fiction author who used the pseudonym “Ray Cosmic”. pic.twitter.com/XS1Y8fBkVc
— John Walker (@Fourmilab) April 28, 2021
Tuesday, April 27, 2021
CONTEXT: Forbidden Colours: Can You See Bluish Yellow?
Here is more about forbidden (or impossible) colours, including crossed-eye fusion pairs which may allow you to perceive bluish yellow and reddish green. Some people appear able to see them, others can't—it worked for me.
What's “crossed-eye fusion”? Here's a guide for how to do it, from the Solar System Live help documents.
CONTINUITY: Vacuum Tube Computer, Part 11: Building a 4-bit Decoder for the Instruction Register
Continuing with the vacuum tube re-implementation of the Motorola MC14500 microcontroller, next on the agenda is the decoder which de-multiplexes the four bit instruction code into 16 lines which control the circuitry that executes the instruction. You can think of this as a vacuum tube 74LS154 [PDF].
THE HAPPENING WORLD: SpaceX Starship SN15 Static Fire and Reaction Control System Tests
If these tests are deemed successful, a test flight may occur later this week.
Monday, April 26, 2021
CONTEXT: Delta IV / NROL-82 Launch Replay
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Deep Fake Satellite Images
What may appear to be an image of Tacoma, US, it is, in fact, a simulated one. Welcome to the brand new world of deepfake satellite images. https://t.co/cF5sr7LQ0G pic.twitter.com/Uzfo5wkQls
— ʜᴇɴᴋ ᴠᴀɴ ᴇss (@henkvaness) April 25, 2021
CONTINUITY: Internet Archive—Preserving 78 RPM Recordings for Posterity
2/ There's a half-century of 78 rpm recordings (1898-1950s) at risk of being lost, never heard again in the digital era.
— Internet Archive (@internetarchive) April 25, 2021
Our goal is to save them all. 🎶
You can listen to 255,000 of these 78 rpm recordings in the George Blood Collection: https://t.co/paGsQ4lYih@great78project
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Delta IV Heavy / NROL-82 Launch
The 9.5-hour countdown is starting at Vandenberg Air Force Base, CA for #DeltaIVHeavy to launch #NROL82 at 1:46pmPDT (4:46pmEDT; 2046 UTC). This is ULA's 143rd mission, our 90th for U.S. national security and 31st for the NRO. Live status: https://t.co/ihfKmi4GM2#PartnersInSpace
— ULA (@ulalaunch) April 26, 2021
United Launch Alliance teams on California’s Central Coast are ready to send a classified US government spy satellite into orbit as soon as Monday — weather permitting — aboard one of the company’s four remaining Delta 4-Heavy rockets.
— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) April 26, 2021
📷: @ulalaunchhttps://t.co/L45VszfFTO pic.twitter.com/7sWeYhGwv2
CONTINUITY: Locating Interstellar Communication Nodes Using Gravitational Lensing
Paper day! Locating deep space nodes https://t.co/KDT9HMTuSh If an interstellar communication network exists, based on nodes in the gravitational lenses of stars - where would the solar system node be? A simple exercise in geometry: pic.twitter.com/h2r6bFuzif
— Michael Hippke (@hippke) April 21, 2021
CONTEXT: Mars Helicopter Ingenuity—Third Flight Video
Far Out 🚁
— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 25, 2021
For this third flight, the #MarsHelicopter traveled almost half the length of a football field and increased its airspeed to 4.5 mph (2 m/sec). Until now, Ingenuity had not flown at this speed, even while testing on Earth. https://t.co/TNCdXWcKWE pic.twitter.com/S65oIeQ4BC
Sunday, April 25, 2021
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Mars Helicopter Ingenuity Completes Third Flight
Ingenuity flight 3 - Apr 25 0531 UTC, to 5 m altitude and 50 m downrange. https://t.co/jy7ZGADUiN
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) April 25, 2021
There is, as yet, no video from this flight.
Update: here are still images from the third flight, taken both from the helicopter's on-board camera and the rover. The video at the end is from the second, up and down, flight. (2021-04-25 19:19 UTC)
CONTINUITY: What Happened to 100,000 Hour LED Bulbs?
What happened to the 100,000 hour LED bulbs?https://t.co/xp9oXlwcU9
— John Walker (@Fourmilab) April 25, 2021
For more information see the earlier SCANALYZER posts:
CONTEXT: The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy: The Phoebus Cartel and the Dawn of Planned Obsolescence
The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy: The Phoebus Cartel and the dawn of planned obsolescence.
— John Walker (@Fourmilab) April 25, 2021
The naïve authors in 2014 didn't foresee that cheap LED bulbs would be similarly “optimised” to suffer premature heat death while wasting energy at the same time.https://t.co/oJd0qNPAmD
Saturday, April 24, 2021
CONTEXT: Hubble's (Perfect) Backup Mirror
CONTINUITY: Lockheed U-2: 65 Years Old and Still Spying
CONTINUITY: Glasgow, Scotland—Subway Expansion, 1896–2021
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Deep Dive—SpaceX Starship: Why Do a Belly Flop, and Why So Close to the Ground?
Friday, April 23, 2021
CONTEXT: The Blasting of Blossom Rock
One wonders when the California nutballs who want to tear down dams to “heal nature” will demand this navigation hazard in San Francisco Bay be restored to its pristine, ship-eviscerating glory.
CONTINUITY: Installing Linux from 1993 (Slackware 1.01, Kernel 0.99pl12)
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: How Did the ‘Impossible’ Perfect Bridge Deal Happen?
Thursday, April 22, 2021
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Mars Helicopter Ingenuity Completes Second Flight
Raise the roof: In its second flight, Ingenuity has reached a higher altitude and performed some new maneuvers. https://t.co/3lqyyfImQV #MarsHelicopter pic.twitter.com/CsDlFSEEtw
— NASA Mars (@NASAMars) April 22, 2021
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Empire of Grifters: “Quadro Tracker”
The amazing “Quadro Tracker”—invented by a former used car salesman named Wade L. Quattlebaum—is like Doc Smith’s “object compass”, except with dead ants, it claimed to be able to detect lost golf balls, drugs, weapons, explosives, missing persons, and game animals. Around 1000 units were sold at prices ranging from US$400 to US$8000 each to gullible school districts, law enforcement agencies, and airports, including the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Quadro Corporation, who marketed it between 1993 and 1996 before being shut down by the FBI and its principals indicted for mail fraud, said it worked via “static electricity produced by the body inhaling and exhaling gases into and out of the lung cavity” to “charge the free-floating neutral electrons of the signature card with the major strength of the signal”.
At trial in January 1997, the three principals of the company were acquitted of mail fraud and conspiracy.
learning about the "Quadro Tracker", a bomb/drug/person-locating device a bunch of cops & school districts bought in the 90s that turned out to just be a box of dead ants pic.twitter.com/PBxOk23PTb
— Jack Grimes (@Jackapedia_) April 21, 2021
CONTEXT: Damage to Lunar Orbiting Spacecraft by Ejecta from Lunar Landings
From the talk I gave at the ASCE Earth & Space conference today. When you land on the Moon, your rocket exhaust is faster than lunar escape velocity and there is no atmosphere to slow down the dust you blow. We need to worry about damaging things in orbit.
— Dr. Phil Metzger (@DrPhiltill) April 21, 2021
Short thread... /1 pic.twitter.com/l4LsqB9nJa
CONTINUITY: Stable Planetary Orbits within the Event Horizon of a (Kerr-Newman) Black Hole?
Here is an interesting 2011 paper I'd not previously encountered: “Is there life inside black holes?” by Vyacheslav I. Dokuchaev of the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Abstract:Bound inside rotating or charged black holes, there are stable periodic planetary orbits, which neither come out nor terminate at the central singularity. Stable periodic orbits inside black holes exist even for photons. These bound orbits may be defined as orbits of the third kind, following the Chandrasekhar classification of particle orbits in the black hole gravitational field. The existence domain for the third kind orbits is rather spacious, and thus there is place for life inside supermassive black holes in the galactic nuclei. Interiors of the supermassive black holes may be inhabited by civilizations, being invisible from the outside. In principle, one can get information from the interiors of black holes by observing their white hole counterparts.
The author further calculates that within a supermassive black hole, such as exist in the centres of many galaxies, the tidal forces on a planet following such an orbit would not disrupt it or its inhabitants. “We hypothesize that civilizations of the third type (according to Kardashev scale) may live safely inside the supermassive BHs in the galactic nuclei being invisible from the outside.”
Perhaps we don't observe galactic-scale civilisations because once they approach that level of technology they decamp to new homes within supermassive black holes, where their access to energy is unlimited (by exploiting the Penrose process around the central singularity), they can observe the entire future of the external universe and the folly of civilisations still stuck there in an instant, and their activities are protected by the ultimate stealth of an event horizon.
Wednesday, April 21, 2021
CONTEXT: Cracking Enigma in 2021
Here is the source code used in the demonstration, including a complete implementation of Enigma in Java.
CONTINUITY: HP 9825 Repair Part 5: What Isn't Broken?
Or, “CPU board, we have a problem.”
CONTINUITY: 1908—Hero Dog Goes into Business for Himself
Thinking of the fake hero dog again pic.twitter.com/lzS5Wi9loR
— Nathan Oseroff-Spicer (@nathanoseroff) April 21, 2021
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Classical Music Medley Played by a Model Train
Here is more about Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany.
Tuesday, April 20, 2021
CONTEXT: Harvesting Energy from Wind Created by Motorway Traffic
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Lined Up to Land on a Taxiway: Air Canada Flight 759
“Where's this guy goin'? He's on the taxiway.”
Here is more about the incident. “Air Canada has stopped using flight number 759.”
Is “whoa” the most-misspelled four-letter word in the English language?
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Flying Spam: Now Do it on Mars
A scannable QR code advertisement created by drones above the skies of Shanghai.
— John Pathfinder Lester (@Pathfinder) April 17, 2021
Beautiful. pic.twitter.com/s3T4Fb9314
So, of course you're wondering, “What does it say?” Well, after taking out the skew, perspective projection, thresholding, inverting, scaling up, shifting and multiplying to expand dots to (kind of) squares, you get:
I duplicated your image and moved it around (2px right, 2px right-down, 2px down) with "multiply" blend to reduce the gaps between the dots, now it can also be read: pic.twitter.com/0vuqnekq4V
— Gábor Héja (@gheja_) April 18, 2021
This, in turn, decodes to the URL: https://game.bilibili.com/pcr/1anniversarytocode-h5/
I have no idea what following this link may do to your Social Credit score.
Monday, April 19, 2021
CONTINUITY: NASA Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Update
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Bitcoin Miners Increasingly Supported by Transaction Fees
As Bitcoin has matured, the compensation (“reward”) paid to miners for solving a hash and publishing a new block of transactions on the blockchain has steadily fallen following the rule in the original design. The reward Rn for publishing block number n is:
Rn = BTC 50 / 2⌊(n + 1) / 210000)⌋
Thus, the first blocks to be mined received a reward of BTC 50 each, while at the present time (around block number 679750), compensation has fallen to BTC 6.25 per block.
For Bitcoin to be sustainable, the community of miners must continue to find the undertaking profitable. If it becomes a losing proposition, they'll abandon the task and Bitcoin transactions will not be verified and confirmed on a timely basis by a large and diverse enough community of miners to ensure the integrity of transactions.
The idea was that, over time, as the volume of Bitcoin transactions grows, transaction fees paid by users of the currency, while remaining affordable to them, would grow so that miners would continue to find it profitable to clear transactions even as their revenue from coining new Bitcoin continues to fall (eventually to zero, after all Bitcoin has been mined, around the year 2140).
Today I performed an analysis to see what progress is being made toward that goal, and the results are encouraging. I analysed blocks mined in the 24 hour period between 2021-04-18 12:08 UTC (block 679691) and 2021-04-19 12:00 UTC (block 679783), a total of 93 blocks, with a mean time of 15.5 minutes per block (compared to the goal of 10 minutes per block, but note that this period began on a Sunday). The current reward paid to miners for a block was BTC 6.25 for all blocks. When a miner publishes a block, in addition to this standard reward, they collect the transaction fees associated with all transactions they include in the block—the transaction fee is set by users who submit transactions, and miners generally choose the transactions which, based upon their length in bytes and the fee offered, will generate the most revenue for them. Transaction fees for blocks during this period varied from a minimum of zero (two blocks, 679774 and 679779, contained no transactions and thus earned their miners no additional income) to a maximum of BTC 2.864 (block 679703), with a mean value of BTC 1.828.
Thus, for this 24 hour period, transaction fees accounted for 22.6% of the total reward of BTC 751.27 earned by miners, with BTC 581.25 due to the standard reward for mining a block. While transaction fees still account for less than a quarter of miners' revenue, if Bitcoin continues to become a mainstream mechanism for transferring funds and transaction volume grows apace, it seems plausible that transaction fees will eventually provide the majority of income to miners, which will motivate them to continue their essential services as difficulty increases and block rewards decline.
CONTINUITY: HP 9825 Repair Part 4: The Processor Reads and Executes ROM Code
Further probing with the logic analyser, correcting its interpretation of bus signals, board swapping with a working machine, and another mysterious release of magic smoke gets closer to the source of the problem(s).
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Ingenuity Helicopter Flies on Mars
Update: (2021-04-1912:05 UTC)
Here's a quick close-up / sharpened view of the first helicopter flight on MARS today by @NASAPersevere pic.twitter.com/NvSMQVxLJv
— Dr. James O'Donoghue (@physicsJ) April 19, 2021
Sunday, April 18, 2021
THE HAPPENING WORLD: First Flight of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter: Live from Mission Control
NASA's Webcast is scheduled to start on 2021-04-19 at 10:15 UTC.
CONTINUITY: The High Frontier Documentary Now Available to Stream
Thank you to everyone who joined us last night for the premiere!!!
— THE HIGH FRONTIER (@HighFrontierDoc) April 18, 2021
Didn't get to join us? It's now live on iTunes!!https://t.co/iNeQvafXhc
The High Frontier, a documentary about the life and work of Gerard K. O'Neill and his vision of the human future in space, is now available on popular streaming services such as iTunes and Google Play. Here is my review of Prof. O'Neill's 1976 book, The High Frontier.
CONTINUITY: The 1831 City Bank of New York Robbery
At the time, the vault of the bank was protected only by two warded locks: one on the front door of the bank and one on the vault. There was no night watchman. The locks were defeated by copied keys. The amount stolen was around US$52 million in today's funny money. Here is more about the heist.
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Pilling the Cat
Next comes the realist phase (“After all, from a purely geometrical point of view a cat is only a tube with a door at the top.”).
— Terry Pratchett, The Unalduterated Cat
When you give your cat a worming pill. pic.twitter.com/mEa7ABll2O
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) April 17, 2021
CONTEXT: NASA to Spend US$2,941,394,557 on SpaceX’s Lunar Starship
If I were inclined toward a cynical, Stygian, and conspiratorial outlook instead of my customary sunny and optimistic disposition, I might interpret this news as follows.
Look, NASA doesn't really want to land on the Moon. If they did, they'd have been working on, you know, landing on the Moon, instead of spending billions on a Lunar Tollbooth which will complicate any missions to the surface but spread that delectable taxpayer (and borrowed, and freshly-printed) money around to the congressional districts and states of the politicians who fund the agency. As Robert Zubrin has observed, “NASA used to spend money to fly missions. Now they fly missions to spend money.” If those pesky politicians should demand they actually land on the Moon, which might get the juices up among the hoi polloi and motivate demands for NASA to actually expand the human presence beyond Earth as opposed to flushing money down the toilet on the Space Launch System (SLS) and other grotesque extravagances, then why not choose the cheapest alternative, one with (under the NASA view of things) the highest technological risk and then, when it inevitably fails, say “We told you so. Now, can we return to our incremental plan for flags and footprints sometime around 2030, or 2040, or, well…when we're ready? And how about a budget bump in the next fiscal year?”
Further, in choosing the SpaceX Starship, they not only get the NASA camel's nose under the SpaceX frenetic incremental refinement development tent, they, by spending less than what they're wasting every year on SLS, its ground support equipment, and Orion (the “deep space exploration vehicle” without a toilet), get the whole NASA camel into the heart of Starship development, sending “hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance”, bury it in paperwork, cripple it by hordes of inspectors, sub-sub administrators for diversity, and all of the other reasons no human has ventured beyond low Earth orbit since 1972.
But this may all backfire on NASA, and that would be just wonderful. If there's one thing we've learned over the years, it's not to bet against SpaceX. (Eric Berger's wonderful book, Liftoff, which chronicles the start-up and hard-scrabble years developing and debugging the Falcon 1, is an excellent look into the driven SpaceX culture.) What if SpaceX takes the three billion, nods to the NASA minions, continues their frenetic development pace, and succeeds? A functioning Super Heavy, reusable tankers, and lunar Starship, all of which are required to deliver on the NASA contract, will render SLS, Orion, Gateway/GLOP/whatever they're calling it, impotent and obsolete, and be able to deliver tens of tonnes of cargo and dozens of paying passengers to the Moon on a monthly schedule, while NASA is still pursuing its plans to send four civil service space cadets on brief excursions “every year or two” at a billion or so a pop.
Well, at least when they get there, they'll be able to stay at Bigelow’s lunar hotel, which will have toilets, even in the economy rooms affordable on NASA per diem.
Saturday, April 17, 2021
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Flip Clocks: the Non-Digital “Digital” Clock
The way they get the hour to flip exactly when the seconds go from 59 to 00 while allowing sloppy manufacturing and assembly tolerances is very clever.
CONTEXT: Emulating Nixie Tubes (or Anything Else) with Programmable LCD Displays
Bet you've never see a nixie tube reboot before!
CONTINUITY: Chain Making Machine
CBM12 Chain Machine by OHA Group. pic.twitter.com/TzCmLhbYy4
— MachinePix (@MachinePix) April 16, 2021
Friday, April 16, 2021
THE HAPPENING WORLD: SpaceX: NASA Selects Starship for Human Lunar Landing System
NASA has selected Starship to land the first astronauts on the lunar surface since the Apollo program! We are humbled to help @NASAArtemis usher in a new era of human space exploration → https://t.co/Qcuop33Ryz pic.twitter.com/GN9Tcfqlfp
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 16, 2021
Update: here is the NASA Source Selection Statement [PDF]. (2021-04-16 22:15 UTC)
Update: this is the NASA video announcement of the SpaceX selection for the Artemis Human Landing System. (2021-04-16 23:55 UTC)
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: What Shall We Call the Hill?
Me: painstakingly selects names for every town, mountain, river, etc in my books using lots of research into meanings and associations
— Serra (@TattooedMuppet) April 16, 2021
The real world: pic.twitter.com/ibWf1zZNyL
CONTINUITY: HP 9825 Repair Part 3: Logic Analyser and a 43 Year Old Patent to the Rescue
After going about as far as possible with an oscilloscope (although back in the day we went way deeper into the woods with just a ’scope), it's time to hook up a logic analyser and see what the CPU and memory are doing. Aiding in the process is U.S. Patent 4,075,679 [PDF], granted in February, 1978 and assigned to Hewlett-Packard, whose 606 pages contain, inter alia, a complete commented source code listing of the ROM and extensive logic, circuit, and timing diagrams. How deep was the damage to this vintage machine when its power supply went all berserker?
CONTEXT: New Insights in the Search for Planet Nine
Here is the musical composition mentioned in the interview, Planet 9, op. 3, by Eduardo Marturet, in its premiere performance by the Miami Symphony Orchestra on 2021-03-14.
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Lots of Launches Coming Up
Upcoming orbital launches:
— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) April 15, 2021
• April 22: Falcon 9 / Crew Dragon
• April 25: Soyuz / OneWeb
• April 26: Delta 4-Heavy / NROL-82
• April 27: Vega / Pléiades Neo
• April 28: Falcon 9 / Starlink
• April 29: Long March 5B / Chinese space stationhttps://t.co/ufc1f2AZX5 pic.twitter.com/KuOR4Bzy6a
There hasn't been an Ariane 5 launch since August, 2020—eight months ago.
CONTINUITY: The Story of NASA's Space Tracking Ships
In the early days of missile testing and spaceflight, tracking ships allowed covering gaps where satellites in low Earth orbit were out of range of ground-based tracking and control stations. As satellite communication constellations such as NASA's TDRS (Tracking and Data Relay Satellite) matured, the need for such ships diminished and now most have been retired.
Many of NASA's early tracking ships were converted from World War II Liberty ships, many built at the Marinship yards in Sausalito, California. Years later, I named my computer hardware company, Marinchip Systems, after this enterprise and, a few years after that, Autodesk, Inc. had its headquarters at 2320 Marinship Way in Sausalito, on the site of the former shipyard.
Thursday, April 15, 2021
CONTINUITY: Rocket Lab’s CEO Peter Beck on Neutron, Electron Recovery, and Rocket Lab’s Future
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: The Wolfram Physics Project: One Year Update
The @wolframphysics Project is one year old today---and things are going spectacularly! Not only do we seem to firmly be on the right track for fundamental physics, but our formalism also has immediate other applications...https://t.co/HlmHw4dEkz pic.twitter.com/23JpAzbbRv
— Stephen Wolfram (@stephen_wolfram) April 14, 2021
The linked article, “The Wolfram Physics Project: A One-Year Update”, is a long read (13,179 words), but well worth the investment of time. What Stephen Wolfram and his collaborators are attempting is breathtaking in its ambition and, if successful, profound in its implications for our understanding of the fundamentals of physics and perhaps much more.
I've long suspected that our “fundamental theories” such as quantum mechanics and general relativity were effective theories describing emergent phenomena from a much simpler, very different, and in all likelihood discrete underlying substrate, just as the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid mechanics describe behaviour which is entirely the consequence of electromagnetic interactions between molecules at a lower level, which could never be discovered by elaborating models of the emergent phenomenon. The Wolfram Physics Project is exploring very simple models which, they have discovered, manifest emergent phenomena which seem to exhibit properties like relativity and quantum mechanics, providing encouragement they're on the right track.
A vast collection of on-line resources is available at the Wolfram Physics Project Web site, and the book, A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics, is now available in a Kindle edition which is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
In the article, I found the brief discussion of the possible applicability of multiway systems to economics fascinating.
A bit like in the natural selection case, the potential idea is to think about in effect modeling every individual event or “transaction” in an economy. The causal graph then gives some kind of generalized supply chain. But what is the effect of all those transactions? The important point is that there’s almost inevitably lots of computational irreducibility. Or, in other words, much like in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the transactions rapidly start to not be “unwindable” by a computationally bounded agent, but have robust overall “equilibrium” properties, that in the economic case might represent “meaningful value”—so that the robustness of the notion of monetary value might correspond to the robustness with which thermodynamic systems can be characterized as having certain amounts of heat.
This is similar to what I (reluctantly) called “Quantum Economics” in my 1988 paper, “The New Technological Corporation”.
We construct aggregates to approximate the behaviour of large numbers of discrete interactions. Sometimes they are useful, as in thermodynamics. Often they aren't, as with most macroeconometric measures. Wheeler suspects that all our laws of physics describe approximate behaviour of aggregates of observations; that the fundamental quantum event is all that really exists. Most of physics does not attempt to understand why these quantum events occur but simply describes the aggregate behaviour of large numbers of events. As we begin to understand the low-level mechanisms, we will get to the true physics beneath the aggregates. Similarly, in economics we try to predict behaviour of aggregates of individual transactions. Only the transactions are real; all the rest is the work of man. One may not be able to understand what drives the transactions by theorising based upon aggregates.
Parallels exist between markets and quantum mechanics. The electron has no position or momentum until you measure it. When you measure its position, you disturb it, forgoing accuracy in measuring the momentum. A share of General Motors has no price until a buyer and seller exchange it, a discrete event. This transaction/measurement affects the price of subsequent transactions. Prices are undefined until a transaction occurs, whether the purchase of a loaf of bread or the takeover of RCA by GE. Prices in a large liquid market can be predicted quite well since the effect of a single transaction is minuscule; prices in blockbuster transactions can barely be predicted at all. Similarly, you can predict interference fringes to many decimal places but which detector an individual electron will trigger in a dual slit interference experiment is unknowable in principle.
Just as Wolfram argues may be the case for physics, generations of economists have been struggling with effective theories based upon aggregates rather than getting down to the individual transactions, which is the bottom-level reality (what Wolfram calls the “machine code”) that their aggregates and abstractions will never discover.
CONTEXT: Brute-Forcing a 256 Bit Encryption Key
Brute-forcing a 256-bit key would require a minimum energy of 590000000000000000000 Suns during 1 year! pic.twitter.com/9UmnDkbcqb
— Fermat's Library (@fermatslibrary) April 14, 2021
But remember:
Wednesday, April 14, 2021
CONTINUITY: Blockchain as Global, Un-censorable, and Indestructible Library
Crypto is not just for finance bros. It's also for bookish nerds & boho library dwellers.
— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) April 14, 2021
If you are a librarian you can use the blockchain to ensure that great books are stored in censorship resistant technologies for posterity
Book:https://t.co/4F1WKyd1uG
The book(-let: it's just 104 pages) is Blockchain (Library Futures Series, Book 3).
In 1998, I proposed the “Data Immortality Foundation” to provide for perpetual storage and access to documents and data despite the vicissitudes of time, technology, and coercive governments. Perhaps blockchain technology (not Bitcoin, which would be hideously inefficient for the purpose and prohibitively expensive, but a purpose-built system based upon its fundamental technologies) could provide for a distributed, peer-to-peer, permanent, unalterable, and impossible-to-censor repository for documents and data of all kinds (images, video, sound recordings, raw data from scientific experiments, etc.). Once you have immutable addresses and documents, you can then build a layer on top of it with versioning, citation, and compensation for authors and publishers, and finally realise the dream of Project Xanadu without any central organisation or choke-point where censorship could be applied.
Such a system would, incidentally, make abusive copyrights impotent and obsolete.
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Blue Origin NS-15 New Shepard Suborbital Launch
Launch is scheduled for 15:15 UTC on 2021-04-14, and will be a rehearsal of a launch with customers on board. The Webcast will probably start around 15:00 UTC. These launches are often delayed from the start of the launch window, but rarely scrubbed.
CONTINUITY: American Reporters in the Battle of Berlin
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: N1-methylpseudouridine (m1Ψ) in COVID-19 Messenger RNA Vaccines
NEW #Outlook by Kellie Nance & @doc_jlmeier @NCIResearchCtr
— ACS Central Science (@ACSCentSci) April 13, 2021
summarizes the development & function of N1-methylpseudouridine, an RNA modification used to increase the safety and efficacy of messenger RNA vaccines targeting #COVID19: https://t.co/2j0KUwxxPs pic.twitter.com/o5NWccRw7W
The paper is “Modifications in an Emergency: The Role of N1-Methylpseudouridine in COVID-19 Vaccines”, also available as PDF.
Here is background on pseudouridine and its appearance in various forms of RNA. It has been found in all three domains of life.
Tuesday, April 13, 2021
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: How Many Ways Can Circles Overlap?
CONTINUITY: Jet Powered Trains—What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
CONTEXT: Mining Bitcoin on a Commodore 64
Mine Bitcoin with a #Commodore64 #C64 #retro #oldschool #vintagehttps://t.co/j2N0lslIMH
— LeRoy Miller (@kd8bxp) April 13, 2021
Hey, why not? In 1987, I got a neural network to run on one!
CONTINUITY: (Badly) Colouring the Past: Colourisation AIs vs. Reality
Colorization APIs are becoming widespread; AI-colorized historical photos are circulated without caveat. But is AI colorization providing an accurate image of the past? To find out, I digitally desaturated these color photos by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, taken between 1909 and 1915. pic.twitter.com/YzJO2b0aza
— Gwen C. Katz (@gwenckatz) April 12, 2021
And here are the original color photos. pic.twitter.com/SN3wcOclSt
— Gwen C. Katz (@gwenckatz) April 12, 2021
We can't let AIs that propagate our own biases define our image of the past. Colorization should be left to human experts who can use context to pick accurate colors. Look to primary sources, such as paintings, to see the real colors of the past. Because it wasn't all mud. pic.twitter.com/CiTp3TAZCE
— Gwen C. Katz (@gwenckatz) April 12, 2021
Here is the complete thread, with additional examples.
Monday, April 12, 2021
CONTEXT: Robin Hanson—Explaining Stylized UFO Facts: Panspermia Siblings, World Government, Moral Ideology, and Complexity Rot
In my last post I listed stylized facts that a theory of UFOs-as-aliens would need to explain. In this post I take my best shot at constructing a theory to explain them.
— Robin Hanson (@robinhanson) March 30, 2021
It isn't a pretty picture. https://t.co/467ywZ7TVR
Might millions of years of woke ideology, ever-increasing sclerotic regulation, and pervasive incompetence due to lack of competition explain the seemingly irrational behaviour of aliens responsible for the UFO phenomenon? Also see the earlier post, “UFO Stylized Social Facts”.
I continue to think they're dumber still: “Flying Saucers Explained”.
CONTEXT: Toilet Technology: U.S. vs. Europe
“That's OK…there may be blood.”
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: SpaceX’s “Wet” Fleet Gives Up on Catching Falling Fairings
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Asteroid 2021 GW4 Zips Through the Geosynchronous Orbit Belt
2021GW4 will also pass only 2000 km from the GPS III-01 sat and within 6000 km of AMC 18, ARSAT-2 and several of the Sirius XM satellites.
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) April 12, 2021
Here are the orbital elements of the asteroid and a plot of its orbit courtesy of the JPL Small-Body Database.
CONTINUITY: Sixty Years Ago Today—Yuri Gararin is First to Orbit the Earth
The film First Orbit, released in 2011 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the flight of Vostok 1, re-creates the mission with images from the International Space Station following Gagarin's flight path, with original mission audio and subtitles.
Here is a short film about the making of First Orbit.
Sunday, April 11, 2021
CONTINUITY: HP 9825 Repair Part 2: Is Our Rare 16-Bit Processor Fried?
In Part 1, the catastrophic failure of the power supply was analysed and repaired, but that didn't fix the computer, indicating damage elsewhere as a result. Now the investigation digs deeper into the circuitry, checking the clock generation and memory access signals from the processor. There's excellent background about Hewlett-Packard's pioneering 16-bit processor built from multiple chips on a hybrid substrate.
CONTEXT: The Pigeon Hole Principle: 7 Gorgeous Proofs
Are there two people on the continent of Australia with exactly the same number of hairs?
Saturday, April 10, 2021
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: The Great Olive Poisoning of 1919
CONTINUITY: The Unbeatable Game from the 1960s: Dr NIM
A plastic and marbles mechanical computer that plays Nim.
CONTEXT: Helmholtz Resonance: Moving Things with Sound
You can see an example of vortex separation and the formation of a Kármán vortex street in the WIND computational fluid dynamics model included in Fourmilab's Cellular Automata Laboratory.
Friday, April 9, 2021
CONTINUITY: Cold Spot, Planet Nine, and the Axis of Evil: Uncovering the Secrets of the Cosmic Microwave Background
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Close Encounter above Siberia
Close approach of two large space junk pieces, 0.5t DMSP 5D F3 and the 1.4t S3M upper stage expected at 1718 UTC, 790 km above the Siberian Arctic. h/t @EU_SST pic.twitter.com/VPGqIBatmR
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) April 9, 2021
⚠️Latest update: according to #EUSST the close approach between #space objects SL-8 R/B and OPS 6182 remains stable in geometry and in Scaled Probability of Collision. Miss distance would be ~21m and Scaled PoC over 20%. This should be the last estimate until TCA. pic.twitter.com/OY3PbYmTyU
— EUSST (@EU_SST) April 9, 2021
CONTINUITY: Comrades—Save the Mycelium!
"When picking mushrooms, save the mycelium!" Soviet environmental poster, 1965 pic.twitter.com/MmYakTKJem
— Soviet Visuals (@sovietvisuals) April 9, 2021
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Neuralink: Monkey Mind-Pong
Here is more about Neuralink's brain-machine interface, including Gertrude, the pig with the wired snout.
THE HAPPENING WORLD: M Equals Two: Soyuz Docks with the ISS
Contact and capture! #SoyuzMS18 crewed spacecraft docked successfully to the Russian segment of the International @Space_Station, making it in just two orbits around the Earth!
— РОСКОСМОС (@roscosmos) April 9, 2021
Welcome to the ISS, @novitskiy_iss, Pyotr and @Astro_Sabot! pic.twitter.com/XDqresKbmD
On September 12th, 1966, Gemini 11 rendezvoused and docked with its Agena target vehicle just 94 minutes after liftoff, demonstrating the direct ascent first orbit rendezvous which would used in lunar orbit by Apollo. Commander Pete Conrad exclaimed “M=1!” after accomplishing the first revolution docking, Fifty-five years later, Soyuz has gotten it down to two revolutions, docking with the International Space Station two orbits after launch.
Thursday, April 8, 2021
CONTEXT: More on Muons: Brian Keating and Dan Hooper of Fermilab Discuss the g−2 Experiment
Here are how two different kinds of theoretical calculations fit with the experimental results.
this is a good visual on Fermilab Muon g-w results, illustrating how R-ratio method of calculating expected results from standard model implies new physics.
— Nathan Taylor (@ntaylor963) April 8, 2021
But another technique, lattice QCD, shows results may be what standard model predicts.https://t.co/AM45IKAAvc pic.twitter.com/TfPEhPJ7iQ
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Dimethylmercury
This makes me shiver just looking at it. Ten grams of dimethyl mercury is enough to. . .well. . . https://t.co/CyE9ubkrdn
— Derek Lowe (@Dereklowe) April 7, 2021
Here is more about dimethylmercury. Absorption of as little as 0.1 millilitre can be fatal, and the liquid can permeate normal laboratory and surgical gloves within 15 seconds.
CONTINUITY: “Census Sixty”—The Univac 1105 at the U.S. Census Bureau
This cheesy propaganda film about the 1960 U.S. census has some nice footage (around nine minutes in) of the UNIVAC 1105 vacuum tube computer used in that census and the FOSDIC microfilm scanner which replaced punching Hollerith cards from the data collected by census takers. The Census Bureau, which was a pioneer in punched card tabulation of data, was later one of the first to replace cards with optical document scanning.
Wednesday, April 7, 2021
THE HAPPENING WORLD: It's Magnetic Moment of the Muon Day!
Fermilab reports precision measurements which strengthen the case for physics beyond the standard model (anomalous magnetic moment of the muon).
We’re thrilled to announce that the first results from Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment strengthen evidence of new physics! #gminus2https://t.co/tUx4ojzIps pic.twitter.com/t1ufui2Mwu
— Fermilab (@Fermilab) April 7, 2021
And on the same day, a computational quantum chromodynamics group reports that previous theoretical calculations were incorrect and that a recalculation from first principles is consistent with the experimental results.
Rather different takes on new muon g-2 measurement:
— Frank Wilczek (@FrankWilczek) April 7, 2021
4.2 deviation from Standard Model (SM) prediction: https://t.co/IGEnG5PQ8r
vindicates SM, after better QCD calculation (done pre-announcement): https://t.co/M3uqedxQoD
my take, for now: ?
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Farewell, Ms. Tree and Ms. Chief
Today marks the retirement of both “Ms. Tree & Ms. Chief”, the wacky fairing catching ships. @spacex will no longer try & catch the fairings, just fish them out with a new boat “Shelia Bordelon” To say goodbye, our “fairing recovery” stickers are half off! https://t.co/sGEPzV8z8x pic.twitter.com/5azMyvewKg
— Everyday Astronaut (@Erdayastronaut) April 7, 2021
Apparently SpaceX have given up on trying to catch payload fairings before splashdown and will routinely recover from the sea in the future. Having now re-flown a number of fairing halves after they splashed down, that seems a viable strategy for the future.
CONTINUITY: IBM System/360: Announced 57 Years Ago Today
IBM announced the groundbreaking System/360 family of mainframes 57 years ago today. The important, and unusual, innovation was a single architecture for all applications, from office to giant datacenter. The 360 cemented IBM's dominance of computing for decades. pic.twitter.com/IMa5RCAmag
— Ken Shirriff (@kenshirriff) April 7, 2021
CONTINUITY: Hewlett-Packard 9825T Repair Part 1: Power Supply
In January, 2021, Curious Marc's 1970s vintage Hewlett-Packard 9825 laboratory computer blew up when a single transistor in the power supply failed with a dead short from emitter to collector which placed 13 volts on the +5 power supply rail. This caused one integrated circuit on one of the boards to literally explode, with less apparent damage elsewhere the way to bet. The diagnosis and repair adventure begins with fixing the power supply.
CONTINUITY: Mysteries of the Gaps Between Prime Numbers
CONTEXT: User Interface
Yes I can but can you drive a Kenworth W900L? pic.twitter.com/brndhFs0yb
— LT Ironfox (@Lt_Ironfox) April 3, 2021
The Kenworth W900 series of trucks has been in continuous production since 1961.
THE HAPPENING WORLD: SpaceX Starlink Launch
SpaceX teams at Cape Canaveral are readying for the company’s 10th Falcon 9 rocket launch of the year Wednesday, another flight devoted to delivering satellites to orbit for the Starlink internet network.
— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) April 7, 2021
Full story: https://t.co/q7cRlKEhFz pic.twitter.com/urVM41Awid
Launch is scheduled for 16:34 UTC today, 2021-04-07.
Tuesday, April 6, 2021
CONTEXT: Age of Stupid—Academic Journals Are Omitting the Titles of Cited Papers
I get it, the titles are too long. Still, omitting them takes all the joy out of the references section. pic.twitter.com/IeNHqTA1I9
— Matjaž Leonardis (@MatjazLeonardis) April 6, 2021
This makes citations almost worthless unless you want to look up every one to see what it's about. The “saving paper” argument is absurd in an age where the vast majority of publication is electronic and actual printed journals go for exorbitant prices. You almost wonder if academics don't want you to check the cited papers.
CONTINUITY: Spacecraft Spin Stabilisation—from Explorer 1 to New Horizons
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Vacuum Tube Computer — Adding Skip to the Instruction Register
The skip logic simply forces an instruction of all ones into the instruction register when the SKIP signal is asserted. This is done with four OR gates with cathode follower buffered outputs to drive the instruction register flip flops. The OR gates are built from semiconductor diodes, which is fair enough since “diode OR” has been used in electronic computer logic circuitry from the very beginning: ENIAC used 7200 “crystal diodes” (or “crystal rectifiers”) as they were called at the time.
CONTINUITY: Mars Helicopter Ingenuity Flight Plans
If all goes well, Ingenuity will soon take the first aerial pictures of Mars using a 13 megapixel Sony cellphone camera. Mars-helicopter inventor Bob Balaram gives the full breakdown here: https://t.co/XTJhimgU5Z pic.twitter.com/qdrSbqezK5
— Corey S. Powell (@coreyspowell) April 5, 2021
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Photosynthesis from Infrared Emission by Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents
Green sulfur bacteria that can photosynthesize using only the infrared wavelengths emitted from a deep-sea hydrothermal
— ToughSF (@ToughSf) April 5, 2021
vent found at -2.39km: https://t.co/VJhojfwXJi
It bears repeating; we know less about the ocean floors than the surfaces of other planets. pic.twitter.com/rGkA2n5l7m
The paper is “An obligately photosynthetic bacterial anaerobefrom a deep-sea hydrothermal vent” [PDF]. Abstract:
The abundance of life on Earth is almost entirely due to biological photosynthesis, which depends on light energy. The source of light in natural habitats has heretofore been thought to be the sun, thus restricting photosynthesis to solar photic environments on the surface of the Earth. If photosynthesis could take place in geothermally illuminated environments, it would increase the diversity of photosynthetic habitats both on Earth and on other worlds that have been proposed to possibly harbor life. Green sulfur bacteria are anaerobes that require light for growth by the oxidation of sulfur compounds to reduce CO2 to organic carbon, and are capable of photosynthetic growth at extremely low light intensities. We describe the isolation and cultivation of a previously unknown green sulfur bacterial species from a deep-sea hydrothermal vent, where the only source of light is geothermal radiation that includes wavelengths absorbed by photosynthetic pigments of this organism.
Monday, April 5, 2021
CONTEXT: The Bitcoin Blockchain: A Secure, Worldwide, and Unjammable “Numbers Station”?
I'm probably the last to figure this out, but isn't the Bitcoin blockchain a perfectly anonymous and secure means to communicate with covert agents in the field? It's easy to embed anything in the blockchain (see https://t.co/iXdbwHTQjh) and it can't be jammed or traced.
— John Walker (@Fourmilab) April 5, 2021
Here is more about numbers stations. Of course, you'll want to encrypt any message you embed in a blockchain transaction with, for example, my JavaScrypt.
It appears everybody hasn't yet gotten the message. Here is a numbers station broadcasting in Russian, recorded earlier today (2021-04-05) in Finland.
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: The Rise and Fall of the CIA's A-12 Spy Plane
The A-12 design, of course, went on to spawn the much more successful SR-71, although neither was ever used for the mission for which they were designed: overflight reconnaissance of the Soviet Union and Red China.
CONTINUITY: SpaceX: Starship SN11 Explosion Due to “Relatively Small Methane Leak”
SpaceX founder Elon Musk said Monday that a “relatively small” methane leak caused the explosion of the company’s latest Starship test rocket last week on an experimental flight over South Texas (file photo).
— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) April 5, 2021
Full story: https://t.co/FrgBuYlZIv pic.twitter.com/fsosHcwNnL
Ascent phase, transition to horizontal & control during free fall were good.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2021
A (relatively) small CH4 leak led to fire on engine 2 & fried part of avionics, causing hard start attempting landing burn in CH4 turbopump.
This is getting fixed 6 ways to Sunday.
CONTEXT: The Darkest Clothing in the World
Invisible is the new black.
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Winning at Cornhole with a US$32,000 Industrial Robot
What is cornhole? Complete source code is available on GitHub,
Sunday, April 4, 2021
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: The Future of Heat Pumps Is Underground
I had not heard of heat pump clothes dryers—that sounds like a tremendous idea, also reversible heat pump/air conditioners for electric vehicles.
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Russian Floating Small Nuclear Reactors Now In Service
Russia has the world's first and only operational nuclear SMR. It is on a floating platform, the Akademik Lomonosov, and can deliver 70 MW of electricity for 3-5 years without refuelling.
— ToughSF (@ToughSf) April 4, 2021
A smaller, lighter 100MW version is being designed.https://t.co/K1cUUBu2HN pic.twitter.com/xlLZLLBdsJ
Rosatom is now offering floating nuclear power plants to other countries.
CONTINUITY: Finally! A Bluetooth-Connected Mug
Expensive, and you can't put it in the dishwasher!
CONTEXT: Estimating the Probability We Are Living in a Computer Simulation
An interesting paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, “Probability and consequences of living inside a computer simulation” provides a Drake equation-like framework for estimating the probability we are living in a simulation.https://t.co/V5UuOZ4LdB
— John Walker (@Fourmilab) April 4, 2021
Abstract:
It is shown that under reasonable assumptions a Drake-style equation can be obtained for the probability that our universe is the result of a deliberate simulation. Evaluating loose bounds for certain terms in the equation shows that the probability is unlikely to be as high as previously reported in the literature, especially in a scenario where the simulations are recursive. Furthermore, we investigate the possibility of eavesdropping from the outside of such a simulation and introduce a general attack that can circumvent attempts at using quantum cryptography inside the simulation, even if the quantum properties of the simulation are genuine.
The authors do note, however, that one potential solution to the Fermi paradox might be that we are in a simulation and the absence of aliens is due to the simulators using a variable level of complexity to reduce the computing power required. If the simulation is confined to Earth, there would be no reason to include intelligent aliens from other planets. Here is a PDF version of the paper.
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Mars Helicopter Ingenuity on the Surface, Getting Ready to Fly
#MarsHelicopter touchdown confirmed! Its 293 million mile (471 million km) journey aboard @NASAPersevere ended with the final drop of 4 inches (10 cm) from the rover's belly to the surface of Mars today. Next milestone? Survive the night. https://t.co/TNCdXWcKWE pic.twitter.com/XaBiSNebua
— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 4, 2021
Saturday, April 3, 2021
CONTINUITY: Lessons Learned from the Suez Canal Accident
CONTEXT: Eric Weinstein: A Revealing Conversation about Geometric Unity
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Prompting Artificial Intelligences: A New Kind of Programming?
I think some university (or other kind of institution) should get WAY out ahead of the curve by offering a course on "prompt programming" for GPT-3-likes & beyond. These prompts are, IMHO, a genuinely new kind of computer instruction, and truly an art all their own.
— Robin Sloan (@robinsloan) April 1, 2021
Here is more on GPT-3.
Friday, April 2, 2021
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: How (and Why) to Raise e to the Power of a Matrix
CONTEXT: The Book Even Theodore Dalrymple Couldn't Finish
“The book is so badly written that it would be almost invidious to choose to quote one passage rather than another.”https://t.co/pSZ1Seps2r
— Takimag.com (@takimag) April 2, 2021
Here is the book, The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene. A brief quote from the volume:
The negative value of the end of anthropocentrism is where the jubilance of the world begins. The everything else that comes at the end of these systems is primarily only really the end of the primacy of one isomorphic functioning mode of knowledge. Difference and proliferation which seethes beneath in a germinal state has the capacity to express when the anthropocentric mode is diminished to one of many ways, historical or majoritarian-hysterical.
The Kindle edition sells for US$ 26.95.
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Brian Keating: Searching for Lorentz Invariance Violation in the Cosmic Background Radiation
CONTEXT: Clouds on Mars after Sunset
Magnifiques nuages observés par le rover @MarsCuriosity hier sur #Mars, alors que le soleil était déjà couché. On distingue de fins cirrus et des ondes de gravité, formés au passage d'un relief.https://t.co/xpf7HyG27H pic.twitter.com/RKhNnkwYCz
— Thomas Appéré (@thomas_appere) April 1, 2021
CONTINUITY: Large Burroughs Alphanumeric Neon Display from the 1960s
Unlike a nixie tube, all of the 15 segments are in the same plane, so you don't get the 3-D effect as the characters change.
Thursday, April 1, 2021
CONTEXT: An Engine Block Shredder
I'd call it “The Persuader”.