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.
In 1983 “Science Digest” ran an article that 13-year-old me lost his tiny little mind over. Illustrated by Rick Sternbach, designer of, among other Star Trek vehicles and artifacts, the USS Voyager, it described a series of possible means of interstellar travel. While the physics and engineering of some of them have proven dodgy in the years since (the Bussard ramjet has serious problems with the proposed magnetic fiend, the Enzmann starship has turned out to not be as well thought out as many had assumed, etc.), it remains a tantalizing glimpse of what might be. The article has been scanned in full color and made available to APR Patrons/subscribers at the above-$10 level.
If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.
The AI apocalypse has just been made inevitable:
How is a woman of no intelligence going to save us from artificial intelligence? The only possibility i can think of is that once a suspected threatening AGI is produced, the CIA/FBI/NSA/USSF/NASA will plop Harris down in front of it and have her begin to babble her incoherent nonsense in the hopes that the machine will do like Landru or Nomad and burst into flames, it’s processors driven past the the point of incandescence trying to make sense of her gibberish.
Adam Savage has a bunch of old (decades) silicone molds sitting doing nothing. Silicone, sadly, degrades not just from use, but over time; a mold that is years old will almost certainly fall into ruin if you try to cast a part using it. So, if you have an old mold that you want to get parts out of, what to do? Well, if you are well connected you get someone to CAT scan the mold, create an STL model of the mold, convert the hollow space within into a solid model, then 3D print. Easy! Anybody can do it! But here’s the thing: each scan the CAT scanner makes takes 30 seconds… and each mold could take 1500 scans to complete. So… twelve and a half solid hours on a CAT scanner.
Huh.
Potato starch was used to create bricks from simulated Martian soil. 55 kilos of dehydrated taters resulted in about 200 bricks. Many thousands would be needed to make something the size of a house, so that’s a lot of po-tay-toes. Boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a Martian brick production facility.
But that wasn’t the weird part of the report: blood and urine were also studied as binding agents for the bricks. Bleah.
I *really* want to give this a shot. Anyone got a WW1 vintage Luger you’re not doing anything with you want to give me?
Asking for a friend.
Technology for the wrong cause pic.twitter.com/VrzQlhSszR
— Clement Ben IFS (@ben_ifs) March 26, 2023
Scholars seeking a job in Ohio State University’s College of Engineering must pledge their allegiance to diversity, equity and inclusion as part of the process.
University officials ask applicants to provide a statement that describes their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, along with “specific examples such as teaching and/or mentoring students from underrepresented backgrounds, outreach activities to underrepresented groups, or conducting research that address social inequities,” according to a copy of the application rubric recently tweeted by John Sailer with the National Association of Scholars.
One suggestion I have: use the current terminology against them. What, exactly, is an “underrepresented” group? That’s nicely vague. One could simply assume that it means “minority.” Okey doke. Well, what is one of the “progressives” most favoritist descriptions these days? “The Global Majority.”
“Global majority” is a collective term for ethnic groups which constitute approximately 85 percent of the global population. It has been used as an alternative to terms which are seen as racialized like “ethnic minority” and “person of color” (POC), or more regional terms like “visible minority” in Canada and “Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic” (BAME) in the United Kingdom.
OK. Cool. Then that means “The Global Minority” is anyone not described by that 85%. You know… white people. So… say “why yes, I’m committed to mentoring minorities.” By doing so, and keeping it vague, it means you’re committed to mentoring EVERY TYPE OF HUMAN IMAGINABLE. Because by one definition or another, everyone is a minority.
Also:
High scores are given to candidates who have a “sophisticated understanding of differences stemming from ethnic, socioeconomic, racial, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and cultural backgrounds and the obstacles people from these backgrounds face in higher education.”
This can also go pretty much any way you want it to. “Yes, I fully understand the importance of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs. (Because I understand how they cause a general reduction in competence and quality.) I understand how all these different factors can play into the difficulties people face. (Because I’ve seen how Asians and The Global Minority are shut out of educational opportunities due to quotas.)” And so on.
There is a way to game any system, no matter how devious and malicious. However, better still would be to toss out this nonsense. *Especially* in stem fields of education and endeavor, where competence and merit are the only metrics by which someone should advance. otherwise buildings burn, bridges collapse, planes crash and people die. But in the mean time, people have to decide to either stand up to the bullies and risk it all, or undermine the bastards.
Clinical cases of Candida auris, an emerging fungus considered an urgent threat, nearly doubled in 2021, according to new data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. … rising from 53 in 2016 to 330 in 2018 and then skyrocketing from 476 in 2019 to 1,471 in 2021.
It’s resistant to drugs and disinfectants; a lot of people can be carriers and not know it. It usually causes harm to people with compromised immune systems, is difficult to eradicate either in people or facilities once it sets up shop. It was first discovered in 2009 in Japan, being found for the first time in the US in 2013. Somewhere between 30% and 60% of the people who develop Candida auris bloodstream infections die, but they also had other conditions.