Back in the Good Old Days of above-ground nuclear testing, a series of solid propellant smokey-trailed rockets would be launched just before detonation. They would leave vertical trails in the sky near the detonation. The video below explains just what they were for, as well as some of the physics of the detonation itself… the radiation front and the shock front. It’s interesting.
The James Webb Space Telescope recently took a shot of deep space, showing a multitude of galaxies lensed *spectacularly.* Full-rez version at the link.
https://esawebb.org/images/potm2303a/
That view is *littered* with lensing, especially on the right.
Both the phone and the typewriter arrived today. The phone, as can be seen, seems to fit just about perfectly, indicating that the Samsonite briefcase is the correct one (though a number of virtually trivial details are different). The phone has a cord that seems to be pretty permanently attached, but I am loathe to just lop it off. My goal is to keep all the vintage bits as intact as possible, so I’ll either disassemble the phone or go straight to making a silicone mold of it and casting it in fiberglass. I hope to remove only a few keys from the typewriter, assuming I can figure out how to remove them without damaging them, then mold/cast resin copies. Other than a cracked frame the typewriter seems intact and functional. And while there is about zero chance I’ll ever use a typewriter again… I cringe at the idea of wrecking such a nifty bit of functional analog mechanical genius.
The phone and the keys are the wrong color, so casting copies seems to be the correct way to go in any event. This would also open the door for a very limited run “kit” for those vanishingly few who want this. I plan on making the parts out of a combination of cast resin and fiberglass; hand laid up fiberglass cloth components would be strong, light and *hollow,* allowing those with a mind to to install electronics. A functioning keyboard and monitor would be spectacular, though a functional fiberglass phone seems maybe a bit dubious.
Note the obligatory feline photobomb.
The riverfront in Davenport, Iowa, has moved a little inboard.
The first artifact has arrived, a Samsonite briefcase. I am *largely* certain that this is the correct case; there are certainly a largish number of them readily available on Ebay. There are some minor differences between this one and the prop, most of the differences explainable as modifications: the key locks have been removed and replaced with featureless aluminum disks/cylinders; the tabs on the prop have concave ends rather than just squared-off ends. There is a small placard affixed to the middle of the briefcase… I can see “Honeywell,” then something that might be numbers, and then “EXECUTIVE.” The interior lining needs to be removed and the whole thing cleaned, the metal polished and the metal base that the handle is fixed to painted black.
And, of course, the current residents evicted. This took about five seconds; it is a box, after all.
I will wait a little bit before launching into a full preparation. The intercom/phone should be the next item to arrive, and if it fits in this case as it should, then I’ll be off to the races. If it doesn’t… well, I’ll need to rethink the case, I guess. Pretty confident, though.
Ever since the early sixties there have been ideas about “inspector” spacecraft that would check out other satellites. This would be done to see just what some foreign satellite actually was…r econ, communications, navigation, weapons platform. But actually doing it has not but done too often… at least, it hasn’t been *shown.* But here are the results of one commercial satellite – the Worldview-3 earth observer – looking at a Landsat from a range of about 100 kilometers. The imagery is remarkably clear.
You’ve probably seen artists’ renderings of #Landsat satellites in orbit… but how about an *actual image* of a satellite in orbit?
Thanks to Maxar, we now have images of Landsat 8 orbiting Earth from the WorldView-3 satellite.
Enjoy! 🛰️ pic.twitter.com/YFeQlHVV7t
— NASA Landsat Program (@NASA_Landsat) April 3, 2023
Buttons and Speedbump are completely comfortable with each other.
Hard to argue that this is anything but clear evidence that Mars was once a wet planet.
It’s the sort of terrain where, on Earth, I’d not be surprised to see a fossil shell or footprint. That’s doubtless too much to ask *here,* but the evidence of water just sitting there like that is pretty spectacular.
Feel free to try to imagine “other ways of knowing” providing this.
So Elon Musk posted some photos of a recent “code review” at Twitter. One photo in particular has some people upset… because the people who are there doing actual work seem to be… well, take a look:
— ᏴᎪᎠᎬᎡ. (@iOnlyBvz) November 19, 2022
If you read the Twitter comments, you’ll see that some people are upset that there aren’t enough women coders or black coders. Well… I don’t know how many were there before Musk took over, but the people who were fired were generally fired en masse; those who quit did so on their own; those who remained did so for reasons of their own. So it *appears* that “diverse” coders either weren’t there to begin with, or didn’t want to stay and work extra hard. Granted, some number of those remaining are foreigners on work visas… if they quit, they get sent back across the seas. So they are, arguably, stuck. Stuck in a country that all the harpies keep screaming is racist and horrible. So a chance for a free flight back to the homeland is something that they *should* be clamoring for, yes?
Included here are not only the closeups, but also a view from the public area showing just how brightly the exhaust lit the world.
