June 2021 Archives

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

CONTINUITY: Stellar Proper Motion

Aligning two images, taken sixty-five years apart, on distant galaxy Messier 51, shows the motion of foreground “fixed stars” in the Milky Way galaxy. The observed motion of stars due to their actual orbits around the galaxy's centre of mass, is called “proper motion”, as opposed to other apparent motions caused by the Earth's rotation, orbit around the Sun (parallax), and aberration due to the finite speed of light. Here is a discussion of proper motion from the Your Sky help pages.

We frequently speak of “the fixed stars” as the one constant in a a sky where everything else is forever changing. But even the “fixed stars” move, albeit slowly compared to a human life span. When you look at the sky, it's easy to think of it, as the ancients did, as a great bowl resting on the horizon. What's difficult to fully grasp is the immense depth of the sky. With your unaided eye, you can see objects as close as a couple of light seconds (the Moon) or as far away as a couple million light years (the great galaxy in Andromeda, M31). All the stars you see in the sky are members of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Each moves in its own orbit around the galaxy: the Sun takes about 225 million years to complete each circuit. Compared to anything in everyday human experience, the stars are zipping right along: the rate of motion relative to the Sun and Earth is given in kilometers per second, with values for some stars over 100.

It is the immense distance of the stars which keeps their motion from being apparent over short intervals of time. Even motion of 50 kilometers per second which, over a year causes a star to move more than one and a half thousand million kilometers—farther than Saturn is from the Sun, isn't going to be particularly apparent when you're looking at it from a couple of hundred light years away. (A light year is almost 10 million million) kilometers. Seen from a distance of two hundred light years away, or two thousand million million kilometers, motion of a billion and a half kilometers changes the observed position of a star only 0.15 arc seconds (and that's assuming all the motion is at orthogonal to the line of sight; to the extent the motion is toward or away from the Earth, the apparent motion will be less). Even moving at 50 kilometers per second at a right angle to our line of sight, more than 12,000 years will pass before the star's position in our sky changes by the diameter of the full Moon. The apparent motion of most stars seen from Earth is a small fraction of that in this example.

Still, even minuscule motion mounts over millennia. The constellations didn't look the same to our distant ancestors in the Stone Age; one wonders what figures they traced in that ancient sky, and what legends they invented to explain it all. The motion that brought the “fixed stars” to where we see them today continues apace. Who can imagine what our descendants will have learned and done five hundred centuries from now? And yet even though that distant future is unknowable and unimaginable to us, we can chart the sky they will see when they gaze upward from this home planet of our species.

Astronomers call this slow-motion shuffling of the stars proper motion, not in the sense that other forms of motion (the daily, seasonal, and precessional changes we see in the sky) are in any way “improper”, but using “proper” to signify that unlike those other apparent motions which simply reflect our vantage point on the moving Earth, proper motion results from the stars' own motion in space. Proper motion is “real motion”; all the other, more dramatic, “motion” of the stars is only “apparent motion”, due to the rotation of the Earth, motion of the Earth in its orbit, and a host of other, more subtle, effects (for example, aberration due to the finite speed of light).

Remember that proper motion is still “apparent” in the sense that we measure it based on how quickly the star moves in our sky. A star with a large proper motion is not necessarily moving unusually swiftly in space; in most cases it simply seems to move quickly because it's nearby and hence the baseline of the observation is short. The star with the greatest known proper motion is a dim star called Barnard's Star: it's only 5.91 light years away and moving unusually rapidly as well, so we see it move 10.3 arc seconds per year. At this rate it takes only 180 years to move the diameter of the full Moon as seen from Earth. Most stars with large proper motion are undistinguished nearby faint red stars. Nature adores the mediocre, and the vast majority of stars are dim red dwarves—the stellar equivalent of 25 watt bulbs.

Posted at 13:07

THE HAPPENING WORLD: See Spot Dance

Meanwhile…

The next trillion dollar company will be a robotics firm that creates products that don’t look like they can kill you 6 times before you hit the ground.

— Bored Elon Musk (@BoredElonMusk) June 29, 2021

Posted at 12:59

CONTINUITY: Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein

Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein (C/2014 UN₂₇₁) was first imaged in October 2014 by the Dark Energy Survey with a four metre telescope in Chile, but not identified as a comet until 2021-06-22 when a coma was first observed around the object at a distance of 20.18 astronomical units (the mean distance of the Earth from the Sun). Based upon its brightness and estimates of its albedo (reflectivity), this appears to be a huge object—between 100 and 200 kilometres in diameter. By comparison, the nucleus of Comet Hale-Bopp (C/1995 O1) was estimated to be 40 to 80 km in diameter. Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is comparable in size or larger than estimates of the Chicxulub impactor which caused a mass extinction on Earth around 66 million years ago.

This object will never get closer to the Sun than 10.95 astronomical units: around the distance of Saturn, and consequently will never develop a large tail or be visible from Earth with the unaided eye. But this discovery, which probably wouldn't have been made without the recently-developed and specialised (for an entirely different purpose) instruments of the Dark Energy Survey, highlights that the risk to Earth from comets, which can drop into the inner solar system from afar at any time, may be greater than that posed by the far more more numerous asteroids, whose orbits can be tracked and, if a threat is discovered, diverted long in advance. Suppose this comet were on course to impact the Earth. What could be done to prevent an extinction-level event? With our present technology, nothing.

Posted at 12:23

CONTEXT: Starlink—Elon Musk Discusses its Status, Plans, and Ambitions

In a keynote interview at the Mobile World Congress 2021 in Barcelona, Musk provides a candid and in-depth view of Starlink, how it fits into a telecommunication infrastructure with fibre optic links and 5G mobile, plans for global roll-out of the service and near-term upgrades to the satellite infrastructure and customer terminals, and financial status of the project. In closing, he present his view for how all of his ventures: Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and Neuralink fit together to build the future he envisions.

Posted at 11:51

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Virgin Orbit “Tubular Bells: Part One” Launch

The live stream of the air launched orbital flight is scheduled to start at 12:30 UTC on 2021-06-30, half an hour before the takeoff of the 747 carrier plane “Cosmic Girl”. The actual launch time of the rocket from the 747 is not specified. Here are details of the mission and the payloads it will launch.

Posted at 11:40

Tuesday, June 29, 2021

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Intel to Integrate High-Bandwidth Memory in Xeon “Sapphire Rapids” Processor Package

As noted, heat dissipation by the memory will reduce raw processor speed, but access to much faster bulk memory will more than compensate for this in some applications.

Posted at 12:56

CONTINUITY: Soyuz Electro-Mechanical Space Clock—Part 3: Building a Driver

Here are Part 1 and Part 2.

Posted at 11:37

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: International Space Station—New Solar Arrays Imaged from the Ground

A lot of turbulence today, but I imaged the IROSA solar arrays installed on the P6 truss by T. Pesquet and S. Kimbrough on June 16, 20 and 25.
The comparison with the June 10 image (solar eclipse) clearly shows that the new arrays partially obstruct the gap between the old ones. pic.twitter.com/rQP7mov7KX

— Thierry Legault (@ThierryLegault) June 26, 2021

Posted at 11:11

THE HAPPENING WORLD: SpaceX Transporter-2 Launch

Launch is scheduled for 18:56 UTC on 2021-06-29 from Cape Canaveral. This is a dedicated rideshare launch which will carry 88 satellites for numerous customers. Launch will be into a near-polar Sun-synchronous orbit, only the third polar launch from Florida since 1969. The first stage is planned to return to Cape Canaveral, the first recovery on land of 2021. Here are details of the mission and payloads.

Posted at 10:54

Monday, June 28, 2021

CONTEXT: The Trapped Knight

Posted at 16:10

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: The Secret Life of the Lift (Elevator)

Although it's said that hydraulic lifts do not require a safety catch mechanism (at least in Britain at the time this vintage film was made), Fourmilab's three story lift does, in fact, have one. Twice, over the years, it has malfunctioned and immobilised the lift between floors, requiring a service call to reset and re-calibrate.

Posted at 15:42

CONTEXT: SETI Institute's Seth Shostak: “It Isn't Aliens”

Here is my review of Seth Shostak's book, Confessions of an Alien Hunter.

Posted at 14:44

CONTINUITY: Exploding the Solid Steel Box

In a previous post, the intrepid team detonated high explosives inside a robust steel box to see what would happen. The results were varied, but the box survived. Well, they wouldn't be Finns if they didn't finish something, so now the question is, how much explosives can the box withstand? A new anvil tossing record is set.

Posted at 14:06

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Modern Problems

"my laundry machine uses gigabytes of traffic every day" is another one of those fun things we can say now that we live in The Future™ pic.twitter.com/yiYSPKqoke

— Zach Holman (@holman) April 9, 2021

Posted at 12:07

Sunday, June 27, 2021

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Mysteries of Microwave Plasma

Posted at 16:56

CONTEXT: Single Photon Double Slit Experiment for Real

Posted at 14:37

CONTINUITY: Scott Manley—Ten Years of Kerbal Space Program

Scott includes some clips from the first public release of the game; how far it's come!

Posted at 11:36

Saturday, June 26, 2021

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Two Space Stations Transit the Sun

Two images of the #Sun showing giant prominences along the Sun's edge on June 6 (top) & June 18 from Beijing, China. They also show transit of International Space Station (bottom) & China's new Tiangong Space Station (top panel) in silhouette. #Image: Wang Letian (Eyes at Night) pic.twitter.com/F8RadTipMp

— 360 on History (@360onHistory) June 26, 2021

This was the Astronomy Picture of the Day for 2021-06-26, where additional information about the image is available.

Posted at 15:36

CONTINUITY: The Origin of QWERTY

Posted at 14:21

CONTEXT: Detonating High Explosives in a Solid Steel Box

Think of it as a solid rocket motor with the worst thrust to weight ratio you've ever seen. As a bonus, it's used as an anvil tosser, although mine has better range and accuracy.

Posted at 12:28

CONTEXT: Robin Hanson—A Scientifically Plausible Explanation of UFOs as Extraterrestrial Spacecraft

UFOs may not be aliens, but the idea isn't at all crazy. Here's a plausible scientific story in which it can all make sense. Both them being here now, even though the universe looks dead, & their letting us see glimpses but staying away & refusing to talk.https://t.co/gZIO1f6D3F

— Robin Hanson (@robinhanson) June 25, 2021

I continue to consider my crackpot explanation in “Flying Saucers Explained” as plausible, and falsifiable as the sole explanation should another be satisfactorily confirmed.

Posted at 11:12

THE HAPPENING WORLD: See Spot Spelunk

Posted at 10:38

Friday, June 25, 2021

CONTEXT: U.S. Director of National Intelligence UFO/UAP Report

Document: “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence https://t.co/TZ2TPv1bMh [PDF, 9 pages]

— John Walker (@Fourmilab) June 25, 2021

Posted at 21:29

CONTEXT: Fools and Their Money—“Wenew” Selling “Iconic Moments” in Plastic

Beeple and the founder of Pitchfork are launching an NFT site where you can buy moments in time https://t.co/czc6SlLIpH pic.twitter.com/mGLQoaJ4OT

— The Verge (@verge) June 24, 2021

Walker's Law is “Absent evidence to the contrary, assume everything is a scam.” Sometimes, however, the thing itself presents its own evidence of its status, as Cicero put it, res ipsa loquitur. Here we have Wenew, founded by somebody calling himself “Beeple”, who is best known for selling a non-fungible token (NFT) for US$ 69.3 million in a Christie's auction.

Wenew co-founder Michael Figge said, “A lot of things in the NFT world feel like a cash grab right now, and we wanted to put storytelling first.” Res ipsa loquitur.

Posted at 12:24

CONTINUITY: Kerbal Space Program: Ten Year Anniversary, Version 1.12 Released

On June 24th, 2021, version 1.12 of Kerbal Space Program was released. This is a free update for all current customers, and will be downloaded and installed automatically if the game was purchased via Steam. This will be the final major update; at least one incremental update, 1.12.1, will be forthcoming. Here is the announcement and complete change log.

This marks the tenth anniversary of the initial release of Kerbal Space Program. Developers will now move to the Kerbal Space Program 2 project which, it is hoped, will be released some time in the twenty-first century. (See second-system syndrome.)

Here is a video summary of new features in version 1.12 by Matt Lowne.

“The Kerbal Effect” is a video produced by the developers to celebrate the tenth anniversary.

Posted at 11:35

THE HAPPENING WORLD: International Space Station: Third EVA to Upgrade Solar Arrays

Posted at 11:28

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Programmable Chemical Synthesis

The full title of this talk is “The First Programmable Turing Complete Chemical Constructor (Chemputer)”. I'm not sure one can really define Turing completeness for a system like this, but it is nonetheless an impressive achievement. There's an interesting discussion of “cloud chemistry”, where you can send synthesis procedures to remote labs and get the result back in the mail—imagine the possibilities.

Posted at 11:13

Thursday, June 24, 2021

THE HAPPENING WORLD: SpaceX's Rideshare Business

Here is where you can book your satellite launch online.

Posted at 14:19

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Lifetime of Objects in Earth Orbit

I've been asked lots of questions recently about the decay of orbital debris. So, here's a handy infographic to slake your curiosity. pic.twitter.com/y7vk5tgRls

— Tory Bruno (@torybruno) June 23, 2021

Posted at 12:46

CONTEXT: The Square of Every Prime Number > 3 Is a Multiple of 24 plus 1

Posted at 12:20

CONTINUITY: Restoring the Digibarn Xerox Alto

Having set the project aside three years ago as likely hopeless, a once-forlorn Xerox Alto, which appears to be more a collection of failed parts than a system that actually ran, and was kept in a location where animals used it as a nest, is restored to life with the aid of assiduous labour and an abundant supply of replacement TTL chips.

Posted at 11:18

Wednesday, June 23, 2021

CONTEXT: A Cheap, Tacky, Yet Clever Small Fluorescent Light

Look, no starter! I have one of these: I used it as a night light so I didn't have to turn on the overhead lights in the communications room at Fourmilab when going in at night to “turn it off and on again” or some such. I never imagined what is, or isn't, inside. They use the low impedance of the arc struck in the tube to (mostly) turn off the heaters. The main power switch is also a piece of…work.

Posted at 12:29

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Silicon Wizard—An Interview with Jim Keller

In his long career, Jim Keller has worked (so far) at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Apple, AMD, Intel, Broadcom, Sibyte, Tesla, and is currently Chief Technical Officer at Tenstorrent, a start-up designing processors optimised for artificial intelligence applications. He is known his work on the DEC VAX 8800 and Alpha processors, the Apple A4 and A5 mobile processors, and Zen series at AMD, and the Tesla Autopilot. In this interview he discusses his career, the state of computer architecture and semiconductor technology, and forecasts future trends.

Posted at 11:43

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Iran—Fourth Consecutive Orbital Launch Failure

US sources have confirmed that Iran had an orbital launch failure on Jun 12. https://t.co/lwPtK8FnXl - probably a Simorgh vehicle in its 4th orbital failure in a row.

— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) June 23, 2021

Posted at 11:03

CONTINUITY: 1939 World's Fair: General Motors “Futurama” Exhibit

In predicting the world of 1960, there's a lot they got right. I'm not so sure about the “…vast circular airport [is] close to the city, with a giant dirigible hangar. So that it can be turned easily to meet any wind direction, it is resting in a pool of liquid.”

Posted at 10:30

Tuesday, June 22, 2021

CONTEXT: UFOs—Harvard's Dr Avi Loeb on Identifying the Unidentified

Dr Loeb's book, Extraterrestrial, discusses the evidence supporting the hypothesis that interstellar object 1I/‘Oumuamua may be a discarded light sail from an alien-built spacecraft. Here he argues that UFOs are a phenomenon which can, and should, be investigated by science, not dismissed because one of the many possible explanations (alien spacecraft) is unpalatable to “experts”.

Posted at 13:36

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Mars Helicopter Ingenuity Completes Eighth Flight

Another successful flight for Ingenuity! The#MarsHelicopter completed its 8th flight on Monday. It flew for 77.4 seconds and traveled 160 meters to a new landing spot about 133.5 meters from @NASAPersevere, capturing its own shadow in this image. pic.twitter.com/cDY3etLjTf

— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) June 22, 2021

Posted at 12:51

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: From 1956—Ray Bradbury on Groucho Marx's “You Bet Your Life”

Posted at 12:30

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Perfect Euler Brick

Here's a surprisingly unsolved problem in math:
Proof of the existence of the perfect Euler brick - a rectangular parallelepiped with integer-length edges, integer-length face diagonals, and an integer-length body diagonal. pic.twitter.com/sznMxGdQQX

— Fermat's Library (@fermatslibrary) June 21, 2021

Here is more about Euler bricks.

Posted at 11:39

Monday, June 21, 2021

CONTEXT: Stacking the Core Stage of the Space Launch System for Artemis I

All of this hardware cost U.S. taxpayers something between one and two billion dollars, exclusive of its development cost through 2020, north of US$ 20 billion in 2020 funny money. Around ten minutes after launch, it will all be crumpled wreckage sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean because, hey, “We can always just tax, borrow, and print some more!”.

Where this fits in with Mission Equity is unclear. Perhaps they will paint a rainbow flag on the side of the booster. I'm sure that couldn't cost more than a few tens of millions.

Posted at 13:46

CONTINUITY: Expansion of the Crab Nebula (M1) Over 69 Years

The Crab Nebula (Messier 1) in Taurus is the remnant of SN 1054, a supernova which exploded on July 4th (!), 1054, and was observed and recorded by Chinese astronomers. Almost a millennium later, its expansion remains visible in photos taken over time. This video compares images of the Crab Nebula taken in 1951 and 2020 which clearly show the expansion. Here is a one-decade time lapse, in colour, assembled from images taken between 2008 and 2017, showing finer details of the expansion.

Posted at 12:23

CONTEXT: A Mirror That Only Reflects If You Smile

Posted at 11:31

Sunday, June 20, 2021

CONTINUITY: Ada Augusta Lovelace's Bernoulli Numbers—The First Computer Program

This video uses Fourmilab's edition of the Countess of Lovelace's “Sketch of the Analytical Engine” from our Analytical Engine Web resources. Not discussed is the arm-waving in implied by the statement “Here follows a repetition of Operations thirteen to twenty-three.” in the Bernoulli number computation chart. How Babbage intended looping to work in the Analytical Engine was ill-defined, and the Bernoulli number computation makes glaringly evident the need for an index register or indirect addressing to access columns in the Store. This is discussed in my document “Is the Emulator Authentic?”.

Posted at 13:13

THE HAPPENING WORLD: International Space Station: Second EVA to Upgrade Solar Arrays

Update: New solar panel successfully deployed. (2021-06-21 00:00 UTC)

View of the fully deployed IROSA. pic.twitter.com/13YYpEOcCu

— Pete 🚀 🛰 (@Space_Pete) June 20, 2021

Posted at 12:03

CONTEXT: Near-Zero Thermal Coefficient of Expansion

A record of thermal stability: Scandium-Tungsten-Aluminium Oxide exhibits zero expansion between 4K and 1400K:https://t.co/tTTXPfd1eb pic.twitter.com/zvhG7h57Ya

— ToughSF (@ToughSf) June 19, 2021

Posted at 11:42

Saturday, June 19, 2021

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Adam Frank: Searching for Alien Technosignatures

Posted at 15:45

CONTEXT: A Year with Spot

Sell, Spot, sell!

Posted at 11:58

CONTINUITY: What Became of Apollos 2 and 3?

Posted at 11:50

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Active Ball Joint Mechanism

この間話題になった山形大の球面歯車（関節）、動画見つけたので編集した。
出典 https://t.co/TBY8CEJBXQ pic.twitter.com/BwDDy7vd8U

— NITTA, katsuyoshi（新田 勝貴） (@read_me) June 17, 2021

Here is the full paper, “ABENICS: Active Ball Joint Mechanism With Three-DoF Based on Spherical Gear Meshings” [PDF].

Posted at 10:37

Friday, June 18, 2021

CONTINUITY: SpaceX Starship Orbital Launch Tower Stacking Continues

The 6th Starcatcher tower section made its way to the launch site this morning.... with the @NASASpaceflight team on all the angles.

Check out how the SPMT levels itself as it comes around the banked corner... keeping the tower section COM under control. Very cool tech. pic.twitter.com/JDCH60LSeO

— Kerbal Space Academy (@KSpaceAcademy) June 18, 2021

The new Launch Tower Section has made it into the Launch Site! pic.twitter.com/6VNFfE198M

— Brady Kenniston (@TheFavoritist) June 18, 2021

Posted at 20:00

THE HAPPENING WORLD: NASA Announces “Mission Equity”

We’re launching Mission Equity, a comprehensive effort to assess how to expand access to our programs and examine potential barriers and challenges that exist for historically underrepresented and underserved communities. Find out how to give feedback: https://t.co/IJ2wk7qh0z pic.twitter.com/i6wD85Zc1e

— NASA (@NASA) June 16, 2021

From the press release, “NASA Launches Mission Equity, Seeks Public Input to Broaden Access”:

Underserved and underrepresented communities include: Black, Latino, and Indigenous and Native American persons, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other persons of color; members of religious minorities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons; persons with disabilities; persons who live in rural areas; and persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality.

Through the RFI process, NASA hopes to initiate vibrant, meaningful, and ongoing dialogues that will help the agency build and improve current agency policies, practices, and programs. The deadline for public comments to this RFI is Monday, July 12, but we encourage submission of comments as soon as possible to enable early analysis and follow-up discussions.

U.S. taxpayers, who are being coerced to pay for this, should contribute their “vibrant [and] meaningful” comments as prescribed in the Federal Register. “[E]nhancing equity, including advancing environmental justice” awaits your input!

Posted at 15:26

CONTINUITY: The Unsensational Story of Nazi Flying Saucers

Posted at 14:37

CONTEXT: An Island in a Lake on an Island in a Lake on an Island

Fun fact: Vulcan Point is the world’s largest island within a lake (Crater Lake) that is situated on an island (Taal Volcano Island) located in a lake (Lake Taal) within an island (Luzon) [read more: https://t.co/24M2j5K7hT] pic.twitter.com/JfnKEkb87j

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) June 18, 2021

Posted at 13:37

CONTEXT: A Dialogue About UFOs with Eric Weinstein and Michael Shermer

Unscrewing the inscrutable and effing the ineffable in the Age of Stupid.

Posted at 13:16

CONTINUITY: Roman D20

Roman rock-crystal icosahedron (20-sided dice) used in fortune-telling. Each face has a Latin letter on it and a corresponding Roman numeral. Such polyhedral dice were thrown to obtain a number, which was then matched with pre-prepared oracle answers in a divination handbook. pic.twitter.com/rKInqlFoO4

— Gareth Harney (@OptimoPrincipi) June 17, 2021

Fourmilab's Decide program can compute arbitrary expressions in dice notation.

Posted at 11:31

Thursday, June 17, 2021

CONTEXT: It's Raining Frogs!

Posted at 12:58

CONTINUITY: Those Clever E. coli—A Thirty-Three Year Evolution Experiment

Posted at 12:18

THE HAPPENING WORLD: SpaceX GPS III Space Vehicle 05 Launch

Launch is scheduled for 16:09 UTC on 2021-06-17, with a 15 minute launch window. A backup opportunity is available on 2021-06-18 starting at 16:05 UTC. This will be the first U.S. “national security” launch to use a previously-flown Falcon 9 first stage. The Webcast will start around fifteen minutes before launch time.

Posted at 11:49

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Hurricane Lanterns—Why Do They Look That Way?

Posted at 11:16

Wednesday, June 16, 2021

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Chinese/Russian International Lunar Research Station

This video was presented today at the Global Space Exploration Conference 2021 in St Petersburg, Russia.

Posted at 13:05

CONTINUITY: Finally—Carbonated Vodka!

Posted at 12:03

THE HAPPENING WORLD: EVA to Install New Solar Panels on the International Space Station

Working with solar panels is tricky because you can't turn them off. As long as they're in sunlight, they're generating power. Critical operations must be done while in the Earth's shadow and completed before emerging into sunlight.

Posted at 11:29

CONTEXT: Rendering the Black Hole Images in Interstellar

The Black Hole from Interstellar was made possible by 40,000 lines of C++ code by the implementation of Einstein's equations, rendered on a 32,000-core render farm at about 20 core-hours per frame & the final clip was 800 Terabytes https://t.co/VQEsBEz6mL https://t.co/UDtEl0SyCK pic.twitter.com/j6IHOVxtr1

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) June 15, 2021

Posted at 11:07

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: IBM System/360 Model 50 Front Panel—A Tour

Posted at 10:28

Tuesday, June 15, 2021

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Tenstorrent—Interview with Principals of an Artificial Intelligence Hardware Startup

Here is information about Tenstorrent and their “Grayskull” artificial intelligence training and inference optimised processor.

Posted at 11:55

CONTEXT: The Hidden Die Trick

Posted at 11:30

THE HAPPENING WORLD: National Reconnaissance Office Minotaur L-111 Launch

The launch was scheduled for 11:00 UTC on 2021-06-15, but is presently in a hold waiting for thunderstorms to pass over the launch site. See Spaceflight Now for updates on launch status.

Posted at 10:22

Monday, June 14, 2021

CONTEXT: Detecting Polarised Light with the Unaided Eye: Haidinger's Brush

Here is more about Haidinger's brush. Can you see it?

Posted at 14:28

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: How Photographic Film Works, and Why It's Making a Comeback

Posted at 13:48

CONTINUITY: HP 9825 Repair Part 9—Fixing the Memory Expansion Board

With the Hewlett-Packard 9825 laboratory computer booting in “classic” mode, it's time to move on to the memory expansion board, nicknamed “Skoal”, which is one of the supreme sledgehammers ever created to cope with an address space limit. The custom H-P microprocessor used in the computer had 16 address lines, limiting it to a 64 Kb address space, around half of which was occupied by the system firmware. But the customers demanded more! What to do? The designers were not permitted to change the original firmware, which had to remain identical for compatibility with existing software. That ruled out commonly-used schemes such as bank switching (as I used on the Marinchip 9900). So, the Skoal board ascended to a new summit of hackery by overlaying the original address space with additional RAM, then implementing nine rules to decide whether an instruction in the original ROM intended to access RAM or ROM. Eight of the rules handled the most common cases, but for those they didn't catch, there was a ROM with a bit for every instruction address in the original ROM that indicated whether it was accessing the original RAM. These settings were derived from analysis of the code with a logic analyser and the source listing. This is a level of kludge which deserved a Lifetime Achievement Golden Hammer Award, were I still giving them.

Posted at 13:11

Sunday, June 13, 2021

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: City of Shadows

City of Shadows ✌️😁 https://t.co/HwFKEMchL6 #javascript #generative #loop #tinycode

for(w=c.width&=j=10368;j;x.fillRect(j%w,--j>>7,1-Z/w*T+q,T=1))for(a=1-j%w/64,b=j/7e3-1,q=Y=Z=b/5,X=t*30;++Z<w&(6-S(Z<29?0:(X>>3)**2^Z>>3)**8*50>Y||T|(q=S(X&Y&Z,a=b=-1,T=Z/w)*2/Z+1/Z));Y+=b)X-=a pic.twitter.com/ppySqrEoKx

— Frank Force (@KilledByAPixel) June 13, 2021

Dwitter.net is a site which challenges programmers to create animated images with a pre-defined canvas and 140 characters of JavaScript. Several predefined functions are provided to shorten code, as shown in the page for this example.

Posted at 13:12

CONTEXT: A Particle Accelerator Circling the Moon

Here is the paper, “A very high energy hadron collider on the Moon”.

There's a tedious communist rant at the end by the taxpayer-supported guest.

Posted at 12:38

CONTINUITY: Blowing a 5000 Ampere Fuse

Posted at 11:03

CONTEXT: There Is No Yellow in This Image

Illusory yellow is perceived. pic.twitter.com/8jgjQglo0v

— Akiyoshi Kitaoka (@AkiyoshiKitaoka) June 12, 2021

Posted at 10:45

Saturday, June 12, 2021

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Fools and Their Money—Blue Origin New Shepard Seat Auctioned for US$28 Million

To put this in perspective, US$ 28 million for an eleven minute carnival ride with about three minutes of weightlessness is about half the current estimated price of a Soyuz orbital tourist flight lasting around a week and including a visit to the International Space Station.

I have cued the video to start at the actual auction. If you'd like to see the fifteen minute preliminary, scroll back to the beginning.

Posted at 18:58

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Driving a Giant Soviet Vacuum Fluorescent Display

An earlier video encountered the drive problems which are remedied by the design presented here.

Posted at 13:30

CONTEXT: Boom Supersonic—Return of the Supersonic Airliner?

Posted at 12:19

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Terrain Incursion

12 June 1999. Paris Air Show, the Russian Air Force Sukhoi Su-30MKI demonstrator '01' crashed at Le Bourget Airport. After completing a downward spiralling maneuver the tail contacted the ground. Sukhoi test pilot Vyacheslav Averynov ejected with navigator Vladimir Shendrikh. pic.twitter.com/3dum0COBQd

— Ron Eisele (@ron_eisele) June 11, 2021

Posted at 11:46

CONTEXT: Exponential Growth and Intuition

Posted at 10:49

Friday, June 11, 2021

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Planning and Executing a Magnificent Eclipse Photo

The plan The shot pic.twitter.com/aIvQ9K5KxZ

— Julian Diamond (@juliancd38) June 10, 2021

Posted at 13:17

CONTINUITY: Negative Potential Output from a Transistor Connected to Ground and +12 V?

An Explanation of a Classic Semiconductor Riddle https://t.co/aU3rKjxjGH

— hackaday (@hackaday) June 10, 2021

Posted at 12:20

Thursday, June 10, 2021

CONTINUITY: A Quick Look at Unreal Engine 5 Early Access

Here is more information on Unreal Engine 5 from the developer, including links where you can download your own copy, which is free for non-commercial use. The high profile features, Nanite and Lumen, are currently only supported on high-end gaming consoles and legacy Windows systems.

Posted at 12:50

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Artificial Intelligence Surpasses Humans in Chip Layout

Chip layout on the left designed by a human; on the right, by an AI system—and it performs better https://t.co/r6QjWfbinb Welcome to the goopy, asymmetrical AI future 🤨 pic.twitter.com/O4S5lf5wMy

— Robin Sloan (@robinsloan) June 9, 2021

The resulting designs have a chaotic, almost organic, appearance compared to the regimented rectangular layouts most human designers produce. The paper is “Chip Placement with Deep Reinforcement Learning”.

Posted at 11:29

THE HAPPENING WORLD: There's a Little Bite Out of the Sun Today

There's a little bite out of the Sun today…. Partial solar eclipse photographed from Fourmilab near maximum eclipse (~14.8%) at 10:17 UTC on 2021-06-10. Nikon D600, 28-300 mm zoom at 300 mm, f/6.3, 1/1000 sec., Orion full-aperture solar filter. pic.twitter.com/LulYKbkOjX

— John Walker (@Fourmilab) June 10, 2021

Posted at 10:40

Wednesday, June 9, 2021

CONTINUITY: From 1914—A Self-Playing Violin

Posted at 13:41

THE HAPPENING WORLD: NASA'a Juno Orbiter Images a Crater Chain on Jupiter's Moon Ganymede

The new @NASAJuno image of Ganymede includes a view of Enki Catena, a 161-km-long chain of craters formed when an incoming comet broke apart and struck the moon's surface in succession, a la Shoemaker-Levy 9. Previously imaged in 1997 by Galileo! https://t.co/LxXF8BICAA pic.twitter.com/Xo1WYASbUM

— Jason Major (@JPMajor) June 8, 2021

Posted at 12:25

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Two New Venus Missions—What Are the Science Goals?

Posted at 11:50

CONTEXT: Does the S Combinator Support Universal Computation? A US$20,000 Challenge

In the continuing story of PCE and the frontier of computation universality ... on the centenary of combinators (12/7/20) I suggested S alone might support universality. Now we're offering a $20k prize to find out if it's true...https://t.co/CBJMyHQPyG pic.twitter.com/IWAWIZwWIJ

— Stephen Wolfram (@stephen_wolfram) June 8, 2021

Related, scheduled for publication on 2021-06-17:

About to publish: "Combinators: A Centennial View "... the result of my burst of scientific & historical research on a subject I've very long been curious about ... and that's turning out to have some quite unexpected implications https://t.co/ZfYlnrferC pic.twitter.com/D00MfbhyGS

— Stephen Wolfram (@stephen_wolfram) June 8, 2021

Posted at 10:58

Tuesday, June 8, 2021

CONTINUITY: KarTrak—The Birth of Barcode

Here is more about KarTrak.

Posted at 11:38

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Wolfram Physics Project: One-Year Video Status Report

I have written earlier here about Stephen Wolfram's breathtakingly ambitious and, if successful, profoundly important project to discover a fundamental theory of physics which underlies what he (and I) suspect to be the effective theories (such as quantum mechanics and general relativity) we have found to describe phenomena which emerge from this much simpler substrate. Here is a four hour deep dive into the goals of the project and progress so far, most of which simply consists of Stephen Wolfram talking into the camera. This is an excellent introduction to the concepts of the project and work to date.

Posted at 10:31

THE HAPPENING WORLD: “On-Die ECC” in DDR5 Memory Modules—That Phrase Doesn’t Mean What You May Think It Does

Posted at 09:56

Monday, June 7, 2021

CONTEXT: Controlling a Plant with the Mind

Posted at 13:18

CONTINUITY: Pushing a One-Ton Trailer with Homemade Solid Rocket Motors

Detailed instructions are given for making professional-type polybutadiene composite propellant grains, and performance is measured and compared among composites (with and without catalyst) and simple sugar-based motors.

Posted at 11:41

CONTEXT: Proton Sabre—Hydrodynamic Tunnelling in Particle Accelerator Beam Dumps

High energy particle beams can penetrate much deeper into a target than you would expect, through 'hydrodynamic tunnelling', with implications for shielding at @CERN.
A PhD project demonstrates this in copper:https://t.co/DItBbdXI8B pic.twitter.com/bbRQ1SDV36

— ToughSF (@ToughSf) June 6, 2021

You'll have to click through TLS warnings to get to the abstract linked above. The full text of the dissertation [PDF] is available.

Posted at 11:14

Sunday, June 6, 2021

CONTEXT: Jupiter (and Moons, Barely) Photographed in Broad Daylight

I am so totally stoked!!! I managed to get an image of Jupiter in the daytime!! You can even see a moon (Possibly Ganymede)!! I have always wanted to do this!! Whoot whoot!! pic.twitter.com/sj9efjbrqC

— Lucky Budd (@lucky_budd) June 3, 2021

Venus is much easier to observe visually and photograph in daylight, yet few people have done so. Here is my guide to “Viewing Venus in Broad Daylight” from 1999.

Posted at 18:50

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: In-circuit Testing an Individual 7 Nanometre Transistor on a Taiwan Semiconductor Chip

The nanoprobing technology used in this video was described here on 2021-05-25 in “Probing a Single 7 Nanometre Transistor”.

Posted at 12:08

THE HAPPENING WORLD: SpaceX SiriusXM 8 Launch

I have cued the video to start five minutes before launch. Pause and scroll back if you wish to start earlier.

Posted at 11:04

Saturday, June 5, 2021

CONTEXT: Ben-Hurley-Davidson

Posted at 18:33

CONTINUITY: SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy Orbital Test Animation

Posted at 18:24

CONTEXT: Seth Shostak—Alien Hunter

Here is my review of Dr Shostak's book, Confessions of an Alien Hunter.

Posted at 12:55

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Two Papers “Proved” This Surface Couldn’t Exist—Then It Was Constructed

Here is background on the Barth sextic, and a deeper dive by John Baez. A 1997 proof showed that no sextic can have more than the 65 double points of Barth's construction.

Posted at 11:02

Friday, June 4, 2021

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Evidence for Active Volcanoes on Mars?

Posted at 15:56

CONTINUITY: Why Do Crowned Pulleys Work? The Second Law of Thermodynamics!

Posted at 14:22

THE HAPPENING WORLD: NASA: “We're Going Back to Venus”, the DAVINCI+ and VERITAS Missions

From the 1982 Soviet Venera 14 lander, here are images and sounds from the surface of Venus.

Posted at 11:25

CONTEXT: Mick West: A Sceptical Look at the U.S. Navy UFO Videos

Posted at 10:48

Thursday, June 3, 2021

CONTINUITY: Bitcoin to the Moon!

A group of developers, https://t.co/WJQEkXy2am, just completed the first #Bitcoin transaction to reach the surface of the moon. 🌙

Sent via a radio frequency, they retransmitted in morse code, a #Bitcoin transaction. The data hit the lunar surface and refracted back to earth! 📻 pic.twitter.com/z7rQ8iATFn

— Documenting Bitcoin 📄 (@DocumentingBTC) June 3, 2021

A Bitcoin transaction was transmitted via Earth-Moon-Earth bounce by radio amateurs, encoded in Morse code. (The tweet should have said “reflected”, not “refracted”.) Here's my tool for encoding arbitrary binary data as five-letter code groups which are easily transmitted in code or by voice.

Posted at 17:12

THE HAPPENING WORLD: SpaceX Cargo Dragon CRS-22 Launch to the International Space Station

We're only 3 hours away from @SpaceX CRS-22 mission on a BRAND-NEW booster and a BRAND-NEW capsule!!! Learn more about what interesting bits of science Cargo Dragon 2 will take to the ISS in our article by @mankaitown! https://t.co/9qFBOj1fOJ

— Everyday Astronaut (@Erdayastronaut) June 3, 2021

The launch is scheduled for 17:29 UTC on 2021-06-03. Here is the SpaceX webcast.

Posted at 16:40

CONTEXT: Let's Turn a Tupolev Tu-160 Bomber into a Supersonic Business Jet!

Posted at 14:46

CONTINUITY: Can You Drink with a Hydrophobic Straw?

Posted at 11:36

Wednesday, June 2, 2021

CONTEXT: Clouds of Ammonium Chloride

Another remarkable property of NH₄Cl is that when dissolved in water, it absorbs energy in dissociating, dramatically cooling the solution.

Posted at 14:27

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Tracking Ransomware Payments with the Blockchain and Wolfram Language

Cyber-sleuth Dariia Porechna explains how to use #Blockchain knowledge, a bit of forensic accounting and Wolfram Language tools to trace where the 75+ #Bitcoin went after hacking the largest US fuel pipeline...https://t.co/x6xOynfC68 pic.twitter.com/QYWasaLJ4C

— Wolfram (@WolframResearch) June 1, 2021

Posted at 12:51

CONTEXT: Shoebills—They're Dinosaurs…with Automatic Weapons

pic.twitter.com/GkHaxbWfMK

— neck or nothing (@tomwtn) June 1, 2021

Here is more about Shoebills (Balaeniceps rex, or “B. rex”). They are very large, with some specimens as tall as 152 cm with a wingspan of 260 cm.

Posted at 12:00

CONTINUITY: Origin of the Redstone Missile Program

This U.S. Army film from the 1950s, originally produced for the Big Picture television series, predates the use of the Redstone as a satellite launcher and for suborbital flights in Project Mercury. It is, in part, a recruiting film to persuade engineers to come to Huntsville.

Posted at 10:50

Tuesday, June 1, 2021

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Mars Helicopter Ingenuity—Mission Accomplished, New Adventures Ahead

Posted at 13:48

CONTEXT: Rolls Royce Crecy—Pushing Aircraft Piston Engines to the Limit

Here is more on the Crecy engine.

Posted at 12:16

CONTINUITY: Vacuum Tube Computer Part 13: Building a NAND Gate to Control the Input Enable Register

Posted at 11:45