Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket successfully launched from New Zealand and put 30 small satellites into orbit. Additionally, the first stage seems to have come down under parachutes for a splashdown in the ocean; it seems recovery operations are planned and/or underway. The eventual goal is to air snatch the booster with a helicopter; not as elegant as SpaceX’s hoverslam recovery, but, hey, better than anything Soyuz or Atlas or Delta does.
The view of the main chute from Electron's first stage as it returned to Earth. https://t.co/3YcSvrYIGi
Following engineering assessments concluding damage to Arecibo Observatory cannot be addressed without endangering the lives and safety of crew and staff, NSF plans to decommission the 305-meter telescope: https://t.co/En0S7OOhY4pic.twitter.com/bB70XNud0v
It’s 57 years old. Which is probably a good long run for a radio telescope, but it’s still sad to see it go.
That said, this here *could* be an opportunity, not just another in 2020’s seemingly unending stream of fails and disasters. Build another radio telescope. A bigger, better, more modern one. Of course, you need to find just the right place for such a thing. A place with consistent weather, proper dish-like geography, minimal radio noise. Now I wonder where we could find a place like that:
“Wonder Woman 1984” was supposed to be released *months* ago. But that was before China sprang a pandemic on the world and utterly borked the whole concept of going into a confined space with a whole lot of strangers for a few hours. The few attempts that have been made to release a movie into theaters in the last few months have been pretty disastrous, and there’s no obvious end in sight. so what’s a major movie studio supposed to do when they’ve already thrown hundreds of millions of dollars at a movie that that might not be able to properly release to movie theaters for perhaps another year? Well, they could just sit on the movie for that extra year and hope beyond the grasp of reason that movie theaters will actually still be a profitable thing in the future, rather than just empty shells sold off to condo developers. Or they could do what Warner Brothers/DC is doing and just say “Ta hell wit it” and release it onto a streaming service. In this case, HBO Max on December 20. They’re also releasing it in theaters on the same day, but I have a suspicion that box office returns are gonna be pretty damn meager.
So, what’s everyone think? Moviegoing now a thing of the past? Streaming the way of the future?
Bonus round: pretty much everyone either hates or has forgotten “Justice League” That there movie was a mess. But Warner/DC are releasing the “Snyder cut” in 2021, again on HBO Max. My understanding is that this will be a fundamentally different movie:
Warner only used something like 15% of what Snyder shot (director Zack Snyder had to leave the production due to a family tragedy; the movie was taken over by Joss Whedon who decided to do something completely different with it)
Something like 75% of the Snyder cut is stuff he shot but which was cut from the original release. And around 5% of it will be all new stuff shot specifically for the Snyder cut.
The Snyder cut is supposed to be four one-hour episodes, so a whole lot more of a movie.
So it *could* end up being a wholly different movie. Of course, some of that “stuff shot but not used” could simply be Take 14 of a shot, when Whedon used Take 15. Or it could be from a completely different script. I have doubts that this will truly fix Justice League. The Marvel movies worked as well as they did, for as long as they did, because they set up most of the important characters before dumping them into a single bloated ensemble flick. Warner brothers, though, said “forget that character development nonsense, let’s get straight to the lame CGI eyecandy.” So… we’ll see, I suppose.
The Snyder cut will likely come out after the inauguration, so it’s not a sure thing that it will actually come out at all. The ChiComs might just march straight into Taiwan and pop off a few tactical nukes over CONUS to make sure we sit down and shut up.
Assuming the observable universe is 93 billion light years across, 5.4×1061 Planck lengths would stretch from side to side. Why is this important? Because a Planck length, or 1.6 x 10–35 meters, is the smallest size there is. It’s essentially the “pixel” of reality. You can’t zoom down below it. So something with a scale factor of 101091 can fit a *lot* of universes 5.4×1061 pixels wide in it. In fact, on the order of 101030 universes could fit side-by-side within that full animation, if you assume that at the deepest part of the zoom factor, one pixel on screen equals one Planck unit.
And you think it’s a long way down the road to the chemists.
But what is it? Here is a video that explains it pretty clearly:
What, honestly… did you have anything better to be doing just now?
Aside: I often wonder about the guys who discover things like this. Mandelbrot, Kepler, Galileo, Einstein and the like… doing their thing, puzzling over the math, finding something unexpected and beautiful that seems to delve into the very heart of reality. I’m not religious, but I gotta think that the discovery of something like this must seem like a glimpse into the mind of God to someone who is. I can still remember the day I found a book on orbital mechanics that explained the math succinctly and clearly, and I sat down and for the first time scratched out some basic math about the orbital periods of planets. My tiny little young mind was well and truly blown by the simple ability to predict where a planet would be an arbitrary time in the future. That seems as nothing compared to Mandelbrot’s discovery.
Cells taken from a human are “lab grown” into a slab of meat. Is it cannibalism to consume that meat? How about if the cells are *yours* and the “lab” is a kitchen appliance in your own home?
Yick.
That said… if it becomes that easy to grow a slab of humansteak, then it should be that easy to grow a slab of, say, buffalo or tuna or bald eagle Siberian tiger or white rhino or any endangered critter that may in fact be tasty. In the end it *might* end up being easier to grow hamburgers at home in a machine than to grow cows; al you’d need are starter cells and the growth nutrients, which can probably be mass produced by the kiloton. And then at long last humanities great dream of the extinction of cow kind can come to pass… because if humans weren’t ranching them, cows and sheep would have long since gone the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon.
But, yeah,t here’s always gonna be some weirdo who grows himself to gnaw upon.
It seems that of Britains current crop of nuclear powerplants, six will go offline by 2030, and the last by 2035. the new Small Modular Reactors are to cost about £2 billion a pop and produce 440 megawatts of electricity. The consortium led by RR says they can build the first facility in ten years and produce two a year after that.
Unsurprisingly, Greenpeace is opposed. Because of course they are.
