“It belched out a buttload of dust in our direction” seems to be the explanation. If so… no supernova for you.
The star has begun regaining its prior brightness. An examination of its surface shows no cooling, only dimming, which is best explained by some of the light being simply physically blocked.
I was pointed towards THIS LISTING of the “Apollo 11” documentary, available on a 4K disk:
My first reaction was “Huzzah!” followed by “About time!” followed by “Huh? Wait a minute…”
Compatibility Alert
This disk may not play on most DVD/Blu-Ray players sold in the US due to region encoding incompatibility. This item may require a region specific or multi-region DVD/Blu-Ray player and compatible TV.
It even ships from overseas… Britain, apparently.
Frak.
Anyone know if:
1) there are plans for a US release?
2) this UK release works adequately on US 4K players?
Or, in fact, *any* virus. This guy – who I’m shocked to not see the press (yet) declaring a MAGA-hat wearing Trump supporter – was apparently upset that an Asian-looking guy was standing near him on a subway, so he got belligerent, threatened violence, and sprayed the guy with Febreeze. Apparently some people got it into their noggins that since this virus comes from China, Asian people in New York are somehow to be particularly feared… by which logic the other guy here should be assumed to be a carrier of Ebola.
Nothing here makes sense outside of “somebody’s kind of a ᛞᛁᛈᛋᚺᛁᛏ”.
Second point: How did *anyone* ever think this was going to go well? What’s the end goal here? So many refugees have been dumped onto this island that the options for the future all seem pretty bleak. I think the best of all possibilities would be a flotilla of transport ships, load them all up and transport them to Syria and dump them off en masse. An army of a few hundred thousand refugees (taken not only from “Lesvos” but Paris and Malvo and Rotherham and Arizona) could probably make a pretty good dent in the Assad regime.
Each gear has a reduction ration of ten to one. There are one hundred gears. That means for the last gear to turn once, the first gear must turn 10100 times…a googol times. The guy who built it says that the device will require more energy than the entire universe has to complete a single rotation. I don’t know what the power consumption of the device is, but given that “there are between 1078 to 1082 atoms in the known, observable universe” this means that the device will have to turn the first gear a minimum of 1018 times per atom in the universe. The video seems to show that it takes about 4 seconds per rotation of the first gear. Pretty sure that no matter how efficient the motor, how well lubed the bearings, spinning that first gear 1018 times is going to require a lot more energy than you’d get by converting an atom of even uranium into pure energy.
Not a terribly useful or practical device. Cool, though.
I have watched Star Wars and Star Trek, beloved American science fiction franchises from my childhood (and in Trek’s case, before), become fouled craptacular garbage thanks to awful writing, bad intentions and unfortunate business decisions. I’ve never been much of a fan of Dr. Who; it was always just too goofy for me. Too British, perhaps. But a whole lot of other people have loved Dr. Who as much as I loved Star Trek… and boy howdy are they cheesed off at how the current crop of hacks writing and producing the show have turned it into garbage.
Not being much of a fan of the show I’m not too up on the canon. But even so I know there are a few things that are important: “Who” is not the Doctors actual name. You’re never supposed to find out what it is. And his history before the show is *supposed* to be a permanent mystery. The people he comes from, the Time Lords, are supposed to be terribly powerful, almost godlike beings.
Not anymore, it seems. Not only has the BBC seen fit to explain the backstory of the Doctor (now no longer a Time Lord), it has turned the Time Lords into merely a science experiment, and jammed in a whole lot of identity politics in the process. Ooof. And as a result, ratings have fallen through the floor:
Sunday’s episode of Doctor Who, “The Timeless Children,” saw 3.78 million viewers tune in, but what is especially troublesome for the BBC is the fact that the shows preceding Doctor Who and following both had a higher amount of viewers all in the same range.
Prior to Doctor Who saw Countryfile with 4.44 million viewers, and following Doctor Who saw Antiques Roadshow with 4.41 million.
Antiques Roadshow drew in more viewers in Britain than the season finale of Doctor Who. Which fits given the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes:
I gotta wonder. The BBC, as with Disney (Star Wars) and JJ/CBS (Star Trek): have they ever considered just, you know… not sucking?