Television apocalypses tend to come with a bang—zombies, dragons, Revelations. With Years and Years, writer Russell T Davies is instead working down amid the whimpers. Except for one nuclear bomb, courtesy of President Trump in the last days of his second term, most of the show grapples with the day-to-day indignities of civilizational collapse. War in Eastern Europe sends Ukrainian refugees streaming into England, and a Lyons brother falls in love with one. A sister comes home from a life of globe-trotting political activism after having been exposed to the fallout from that nuke. That teenage daughter with the IRL filter-mask gets into a spot of trouble with an illicit Russian cybermodification surgery. When the eldest brother and his wife go downtown one morning to find out why their online bank account has been 404-not-found all night, they realize that the crowd they’ve been walking past is actually the line at the door of the bank branch. The economy is collapsing, the run on the bank started without them, and this is what the end will look like. That, maybe, is the best logline I could lob from my armchair at Years and Years: “This is what it’ll look like.”
If that sounds prosaic, I haven’t done it justice. Davies has unlocked a science fiction superpower here. At its core, the genre is a tool for building thought-experiment machines. Literary sci-fi has typically been better at building worlds-that-may-be and the texture and meaning of life there. For sure, television pulls it off too, sometimes. Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, and Star Trek at its best all used speculation to ask questions not about the future but about the present. As my colleague Clive Thompson wrote years ago: “Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.” That’s the game Years and Years is playing. But it doesn’t have the one-off, toe-dipping dilettantism of an anthology show or the faintly chilly perspective of the already perfect United Federation of Planets. Here’s a better logline, then: This is what it’ll feel like.The show isn't perfect; I thought the resolution was a bit too pat for one thing, but it's still very good and one of the best SF TV shows I've seen in a long time. I'm amazed I haven't heard more about it.
This is scary, and reinforces the need for a better detection network.A team at the SONEAR Observatory in Brazil first noticed the asteroid on Wednesday, and it appeared in another American team’s data later that day, before flying by hours later. The asteroid itself was between 53 and 130 meters in diameter (187 and 426 feet), or as several astronomers have referred to it, “a city killer.” It was not a city killer, of course—it didn’t hit a city, and probably would not have hit a city had it hit the Earth. Still, how do you miss something like that?Well, these asteroids are incredibly faint, and a few hundred feet might sound large if it pummels the Earth, but that’s incredibly small on astronomical scales. Even if these rocks eventually get close enough that we can actually detect them, survey telescopes must be looking at the right place in the sky when the blips pass by.The United States Congress has been pushing NASA to detect and track threatening asteroids. In 1998, the Congress told NASA to find the near-Earth asteroids larger than a kilometer in size within 10 years, and in 2005, expanded that goal to to 90 percent of asteroids that come close to the Earth at least 140 meters in size. The world’s asteroid-finding infrastructure isn’t able to complete even the 140-meter goal, according to a National Academies report released earlier this year. As of yet, scientists only know of about 30% of the estimated 25,000 asteroids that fulfill the congressional mandate. There isn’t adequate infrastructure yet.2019 OK would have been below that limit.
Today in pulp I look back at the simple idea that launched a thousand fanzines: Letraset! Launched in 1959 by Dai Davies and Fred Mackenzie it heralded a graphic design revolution that brought funky fonts to the masses...
Today in pulp I look back at the simple idea that launched a thousand fanzines: Letraset! Launched in 1959 by Dai Davies and Fred Mackenzie it heralded a graphic design revolution that brought funky fonts to the masses...
Letraset started life as a wet transfer system: you placed the letter into water, carefully slid off the transfer and tried to apply it to the paper without creasing it. Whilst fiddly it was still quicker than hand-painting your letters.
In 1961 Letraset adopted the dry transfer process: letters screenprinted onto a polythene sheet were sprayed over with adhesive. You placed the sheet over the paper and used a pencil to rub over the letter, which detached from the carrier sheet and stuck to the paper.By the time I got into technical writing, dekstop publishing was already in its infancy. However, there was still a place for Letraset, as I found when I had to use it to produce headings and titles for my first manual. I never did use it for fanzine (I published a science fiction fanzine in the early 1990s.) as by that time I was able to use Ventura Publisher on a PC and laser print my pages.
I can only hope that saner heads will eventually prevail and an outcome like that mentioned in the article will happen. However, given who the Conservatives just chose as PM, I'm not making any travel plans.The outcome of the game eventually resolved itself in a new referendum. By this stage the game had moved into the near future of early autumn 2019. The cross-party negotiations had failed to reach a breakthrough acceptable to both leaderships. Softer members of the Tory Brexit Delivery Group then split away from the party leadership, crossing the floor to support a new referendum. Interestingly, this came as a surprise to the game designer, Barbrook, who had anticipated a stalemate and a further extension of Article 50 at the end of October 2019.If this suggests the game had a Remain bias, other moments in the scenario serve to refute this. At an earlier moment in the game a majority emerged in Parliament in spite of opposition from Labour and the Remain parties, for the kind of technological solution to the Irish border question favoured by the ERG as an alternative to the troubled ‘Irish backstop’. Assuming the dummy-player function, the EU then intervened via the umpire into the Parliamentary scenario to rule out an agreement without the backstop. With Parliament then voting against leaving without a deal, the political factions were confronted with the same problem they have at the current time.The crux of this decision is ultimately a narrow one: few options are still available to parties, making the outcome relatively straightforward to model. Leave on the deal May has negotiated with the EU, which is unpopular with Brexit voters and with Labour Remain voters who would like a second referendum. Or negotiate changes to the UK-future relationship document (the Withdrawal Agreement will not be reopened by the EU) to make the Brexit deal softer, making it more palatable for the Labour Party but even less acceptable to Brexit voters and Brexiters in the Tory party. As the changes are not legally binding on a future Tory prime minister even a Labour Party leadership wishing to ‘deliver Brexit’ has little incentive to support such a deal. This leaves only two further choices. Hold new elections in the hope they might produce a balance in the Parliament more conducive to striking a deal. Or, move towards a new referendum, which includes the opportunity to remain in the EU.
I can think of one specific example that isn't mentioned in the article. Alberta's oil sands should really be called tar sands, a more accurate description of what they are. But the term I prefer is carbon bomb, because of the effect that fully utilizing them would have on the planet.As a society, we have not made the status quo strange and the negative aspects of fossil fuel dominance visible in our language and labels: dirty, gas-powered cars; polluting, coal-fired electricity; unsustainable, oil-dependent agriculture. And we need to.In their book Ending the Fossil Fuel Era, Thomas Princen, Jack Manno and Pamela Martin explore U.S. philosopher Richard Rorty’s provocative idea that major social change is in part dependent on “speaking differently” to the problem of climate change. Making the fossil fuel world strange and negative in our thoughts, speech and labels is part of pursuing the transformation that we need to stave off the worst implications of climate change.Feminist and critical race scholars taught us this lesson in other realms. Language matters because it helps us to construct our reality. Adjectives or the lack thereof can signal the dominant and non-dominant entities.
I copied the font to my Kindle and I like it. Note that the book must support custom fonts, and not all do, in which case the Kindle will revert to your previous default font.People read and interact with text on screens more and more each day. What happens on screen ends up being more important than what comes out of the printer. With the accelerating popularity of electronic books, type designers are working hard to seek out the ideal designs for reading on screen.Motivated by my love for the pixel I designed Bitter. A “contemporary” slab serif typeface for text, it is specially designed for comfortably reading on any computer or device. The robust design started from the austerity of the pixel grid, based on rational rather than emotional principles. It combines the large x-heights and legibility of the humanistic tradition with subtle characteristics in the characters that inject a certain rhythm to flowing texts.Bitter has little variation in stroke weight and the Regular is thicker than a normal ‘Regular’ style for print design. This generates an intense color in paragraphs, accentuated by the serifs that are as thick as strokes with square terminals.
Modern dictionaries are descriptive: their purpose isn’t to tell people how words should be used, but rather to record how words actually are used by members of the relevant language community (or more exactly, in most cases, by ‘educated’ users of the standard written language). What’s in the Oxford Dictionary entry for ‘woman’ does not represent, as Giovanardi puts it, ‘what Oxford University Press thinks of women’. The dictionary is essentially a record of what the lexicographers have found out by analysing a large (nowadays, extremely large—we’re talking billions of words) corpus of authentic English texts, produced by many different writers over time.I’m not trying to suggest that dictionaries compiled in this way are beyond criticism: they’re not, and that’s another point I’ll come back to. But a distinction needs to be made between the producers’ own biases and biases which are present in the source material they use as evidence. A lot of the sexism Giovanardi complains about is in the second category: it’s the result of recording patterns of usage that have evolved, and still persist, in a historically male-dominated and sexist culture.For instance, one reason why the Oxford entry for ‘man’ is longer than the one for ‘woman’ is that men have been (and still are) treated as the human default. Men are both people and male people; women are only women. The historical reality of sexism also makes itself felt in the presence of so many degrading and dehumanizing terms on lists of synonyms for ‘woman’. These reflect the social fact that women have been sexually objectified in ways that men have not; they have also been treated, in life as well as language, as men’s appendages or possessions. It’s not even two centuries since that was their status in English law.
So you can now add the EmDrive to the long list of too-good-to-be-true scientific ideas: The Dean Drive, cold fusion, and the OPERA experiment that found faster-than-light neutrinos.Tajmar’s results are exactly what you’d expect for the systematic error explanation: with a properly shielded apparatus, with no additional electromagnetic fields induced by the wires, there is no observed thrust at any power. They conclude that these induced fields by the electrical wires, visibly present in the other setups, are the likely culprit for the observed, unexplained thrust:"Our results show that the magnetic interaction from not sufficiently shielded cables or thrusters are a major factor that needs to be taken into account for proper µN thrust measurements for these type of devices.To the best of our knowledge, then, rockets will still require propellant. The EmDrive isn’t a reactionless drive at all, and all the laws of physics should still work. In short, we fooled ourselves."
I spent some time in 2014 traveling in China. I was with a group of architects and researchers on a trip to observe the supply chain backwards—the route that consumer goods take from China to Europe and America, but we were doing in reverse.We were on this huge Maersk container ship. It's got like 10,000 containers on it, crew of about 20, and we were out in the middle of the South China Sea. I was talking to the captain, and as he talked, he was interrupted by this beeping sound, and he walks over to a computer and types something and then calls the engine room and tells them to slow the ship down. He comes back and starts to talk to me again. And I said, what happened there? He said, “I got an email from Maersk in Copenhagen telling me to slow the ship down.” And I asked, “Why?” He said, “I don't know.”He said it probably means that there are delays at Ningbo port, so there’s no point using up fuel to get there on time. The supply chain algorithms decided it would be a waste of money.That really shaped the book. We’re stuck in this huge network that we don’t understand. Even the people who seem to have responsibility over it don’t understand how it works. The senior captain of a container ship doesn’t understand why he’s slowing the ship down. He doesn’t know what’s in any of those containers. And this whole system that is telling him where to go, telling him how fast to go, is the same system telling the crane drivers which containers to load onto the ship and telling the truck drivers in the container ports we have to move the containers within the port.There’s this huge planet-spanning networked system that’s controlling all this—controlling how our cities run, making sure that food and consumer goods and medicines and all these things that we want and more importantly need get to us. It’s a vast, largely now automated system that no individual understands, and more to the point, no individual can understand. We’ve handed so much control over this over to algorithmic systems—and over to the internet, in effect. I started thinking, so if this system disappeared, what happens? We don’t know how to replace it.
It's an interesting article and worth reading, especially if you work with large, complex systems.HBO’s wonderful miniseries Chernobyl—about, well, the 1986 Chernobyl Disaster—just wrapped this week, and as someone who debugs and operates computer systems for a living, and reads books about Chernobyl in his spare time, I thought I’d take the opportunity to point out some of the lessons that Chernobyl has to teach us about software engineering.I don’t work at a nuclear power plant. The stakes when production goes down and tensions rise seem much lower, but as an industry, we experience issues similar to some of the ones that happened in the control room and its aftermath quite frequently. And some software bugs can be lethal—whether it’s in an avionics system or a car’s throttle control or a tiny piece of monitoring software installed on a Unix computer that just happens to be used in a power substation.Obviously I’m going to spoil everything that happens in Chernobyl, much like the Wikipedia article on the real Chernobyl disaster would.
I will give Toronto's TTC some credit. Over the last few years, they've improved their signage and added automatic stop announcements to transit vehicles. Metrolinx has been doing similar things on the GO system, although the arrival/departure screens in their stations are mounted too high to read comfortably. But nobody here is doing what Barcelona has done.When you are blind or partially sighted, everyday tasks can present a challenge, not least of all finding your way around the city. Things such as locating the ticket machine in a railway station or knowing if your bus has just pulled into the bus stop can be tricky or even impossible to do without help. But since 2018, brightly colored tags have been popping up in Barcelona, and more recently in other Spanish cities to simplify navigation for people who are blind and partially sighted.Paired with a mobile phone, they are part of a system known as NaviLens developed by the Mobile Vision Research Lab at the University of Alicante and the technology company, Neosistec. Designed to be used alongside traditional sight aides such as canes and guidedogs, NaviLens aims to help visually impaired people feel more independent when moving around the city.
Hopefully, some time in the future we'll find out.like details. Little things tell me everything about people, their society, their hopes and fears, the sky above them, the rock beneath them.When I began writing Luna, I knew I would be building a world from scratch, but also one that adhered to the constraints of the physical realities of the moon. The Moon may have been Heinlein’s Harsh Mistress but we’ve learned a lot about Lady Luna since and she’s got leaner and meaner. A lot meaner. I wanted those facts to shape the world and lives of my characters, from low gravity to moon dust, which is seriously nasty stuff. I suppose it’s a “hard science fiction” book—though that’s an expression I hate. Hard science technically shapes the lives, loves, jealousies and ambitions of every one of my moon’s one point seven million citizens.That’s where the Martinis come in. Booze, sex and getting off your head. These are fundamentals to the human species; nail them and you have a way into a world. What do you drink on the Moon? To me, that was an important question, and answering it opened up windows on every aspect of my created world.Wine? It would be criminal to dedicate large percentages of rare carbon and water to grow a crop that doesn’t really have any other purpose than to produce booze.
I’m not sure. If it were to take longer to convince NASA and the authorities that we can do it versus just doing it, then we might just do it. It may literally be easier to just land Starship on the moon than try to convince NASA that we can.Obviously this is a decision that’s out of my hands. But the sheer amount of effort required to convince a large number of skeptical engineers at NASA that we can do it is very high. And not unreasonably so, ’cause they’re like, “Uh, come on. How could this possibly work?” The skepticism…you know, they’d have good reasons for it. But the for sure way to end the skepticism is just do it.
It is rare for technical writer to have input into code (other than possibly having to work on or with code comments), but writers sometimes have to work on architectural and requirements documents, and naming there can be important to avoid confusion.You should avoid leaving false clues that obscure the meaning of code.Avoid misleading words where their meaning varies from the intended meaning. For example, do not refer to a grouping of products as a productList, unless it actually is an object of the type List. This can lead to false conclusions. A better name would be products.
The most primary questions that remain in our understanding of the Universe, the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and the missing 95% of matter in the Universe, could have a related explanation, scientists at Oxford have suggested. A new model has united the two phenomena into a single object; a fluid containing ‘negative mass’ that would accelerate towards you if pushed away. The new theory may also confirm another prediction made by Einstein a century ago.I like this. It's simpler than current theories and so far Einstein seems to be right every time a conflicting theory comes out. If it's verified by observation, it'll be a major advance.
More significant: inclusivity. Heinlein was prone to carefully coded, deniable gestures of inclusivity—a character who was clearly Jewish, say, in a novel where the word “Jew” never appears. Careless readers could overlook their presence entirely. Norton, on the other hand, wrote books like Galactic Derelict and The Sioux Spaceman where the leads were explicitly not white. In the case of The Sioux Spaceman, white people were entirely absent, thanks to their enthusiasm for nuclear warfare.Norton was also more inclusive when it came to class. Heinlein for the most part preferred to focus on middle-class boys who would grow into sensible middle-class men. Norton preferred to write about outcasts and the desperately poor. A Heinlein character might become a community leader or a promising officer. Norton protagonists like Troy Horan (Catseye) and Nik Kolherne (Night of Masks) do well to graduate from hunted criminals to marginal respectability. This may be due in part to Norton’s choice of settings: hers tended to be bleak. Sometimes there is no middle class—just the elite and the oppressed.
jGRASP is a lightweight development environment, created specifically to provide automatic generation of software visualizations to improve the comprehensibility of software. jGRASP is implemented in Java, and runs on all platforms with a Java Virtual Machine (Java version 1.5 or higher). jGRASP produces Control Structure Diagrams (CSDs) for Java, C, C++, Objective-C, Python, Ada, and VHDL; Complexity Profile Graphs (CPGs) for Java and Ada; UML class diagrams for Java; and has dynamic object viewers and a viewer canvas that work in conjunction with an integrated debugger and workbench for Java. The viewers include a data structure identifier mechanism which recognizes objects that represent traditional data structures such as stacks, queues, linked lists, binary trees, and hash tables, and then displays them in an intuitive textbook-like presentation view.The viewers look like they would be especially useful in debugging code.
I registered for last year's conference, even though I wasn't using DITA, and still found some of the sessions worthwhile. Recordings will be available online, so you don't have to sit there watching webcasts for three days.From October 9–11, 2019, we are going to host the third Adobe DITA World Online Conference. We will offer a comprehensive program with the world's leading Technical Communication, Marketing, DITA©, Content Management and Translation Experts experts about DITA, Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe’s DITA CCMS (XML Documentation for Adobe Experience Manager) and many additional solutions in the content ecosystem.The program will offer a wide range of topics, from high-level strategic approaches to very practical sessions and customer presentations. We will show how Adobe is helping to connect the dots between Technical Communication and Marketing Communication and how our customers and partners are using them to create amazing experiences for their customers.
This is an important article on one of the more pressing subjects of our time. No society can survive when a substantial portion of its population denies reality.“Vaccines are safe and effective,” write researchers Philipp Schmid and Cornelia Betsch in a paper published in Nature Human Behavior this week. “Humans cause global warming. Evolution theory explains the diversity and change of life.” But large numbers of people do not believe that these statements are true, with devastating effects: progress toward addressing the climate crisis is stultifyingly slow, and the US is seeing its largest measles outbreak since 2000.Getting accurate information across in the face of this science denialism is something of a minefield, as there is evidence that attempts to correct misinformation may backfire, further entrenching the beliefs of science deniers instead. In their paper, Schmid and Betsch present some good news and some bad: rebutting misinformation reduces the ensuing level of science denialism, but not enough to completely counter the effect of the original exposure to misinformation.
My pet peeve is trying to find an item in a large store like Home Depot or Walmart. The information about every item in the store is stored in their computer system, including location on the shelf. Why do stores not have an app that lets you search for an item and get the location, at least down to the aisle, or better the shelf, that it's located on?Access Explorer, a small, young company, faces an uphill battle. Other indoor navigation apps are available. Google is a major player: Venues can upload maps to Google Indoor Maps, which is part of Google Maps, and install Bluetooth beacons or upgraded Wi-Fi access points that let phones triangulate data and help users navigate the venue. Here’s an example. Earlier this year, Google released an app called WifiRttScan that allows venues and developers to experiment with indoor positioning using those upgraded Wi-Fi access points. Apple Maps, meanwhile, has added indoor information for a long list of airports and hotels.But the indoor navigation apps from Google and Apple weren’t necessarily built with visually disabled people in mind. They don’t have voice-enabled interfaces that regularly announce which direction the user is facing and describe the whereabouts of nearby points of interest (think ongoing signage as opposed to just-in-time turning directions). "There needs to be a user experience that is tailored specifically to a user who is blind; a map without a way to access the information is of limited use," Gaztambide points out. Indoor Explorer has been "built from the ground up for accessibility,” meaning the interface is all about sound rather than sight.
Meanwhile, McDermott is set to take Akhnaten to the Met in New York in November – and then, he believes, he will finally be ready to tackle Einstein on the Beach. There’s also the big dream: that Glass’s three “portrait operas” (Satyagraha, Akhnaten, Einstein) can be presented for the first time somewhere as a Ring-style marathon. “These operas are terrifying because you go, ‘There’s this scene. What actually happens? Anything?’ And then you do things you could never normally do.”I saw Einstein on the Beach when it was performed in Toronto a few years ago; it was a transcendent experience, and I would consider travelling anywhere in the world to see the portrait operas trilogy performed together.
Babylon 5 is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. If you have not seen it, do yourself a favour and check it out.Babylon 5 remains emotionally evocative in all the places it has become perhaps thematically irrelevant: in the jagged edges of the sets, the stumbling waltz of its plot threads, the lush indulgence of its dialogue, the patchwork aspects held together by glue and determination, as imperfect and brimming with colourful quirks as its most beloved characters. My favourite scenes in the show are the little things: Ivanova’s illegal coffee-plant, Londo and Vir singing Centauri opera together in the station’s hallways, Marcus regailing a beleaguered Doctor Franklin with his nerdy headcanons about which characters in Le Morte d’Arthur he thinks the B5 crew are most like, Delenn and Sheridan telling each other quiet, ordinary anecdotes about their very different childhoods. Babylon 5 is a story that is truly greater than the sum of its parts. Modern plot-driven shows tend to do one thing, and do it very well. Babylon 5 does a little bit of everything: mostly okay, sometimes horribly, and occasionally with an earnest beauty that is almost transcendent.I think the value of Babylon 5, and indeed its entire thesis statement, is best summed by Ambassador Delenn’s sage invocation of Carl Sagan. She says:“I will tell you a great secret… the molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this station , and the nebula outside, that burn inside the stars themselves. We are starstuff. We are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out.”
If you're interested in big data and how companies track your data, you should read this.Spotify doesn’t actually use a single revolutionary recommendation model. Instead, they mix together some of the best strategies used by other services to create their own uniquely powerful discovery engine.To create Discover Weekly, there are three main types of recommendation models that Spotify employs:
- Collaborative Filtering models (i.e. the ones that Last.fm originally used), which analyze both your behavior and others’ behaviors.
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) models, which analyze text.
- Audio models, which analyze the raw audio tracks themselves.
If you're a baseball fan, you'll find it a fascinating article.In the new construction, form no longer necessarily followed function, as the ballparks received artistic flourishes as a testament to the craftsmen who made them as well as permanence they were supposed to embody. The exterior walls at Shibe Park had terra cotta balls and bats as decoration. Ebbets Field’s rotunda included a chandelier of baseball-shaped lights. And Yankee Stadium’s unprecedented third deck was capped with copper friezes, in what’s become probably the most iconic representation of sports architecture. Simply put, these new ballparks were aspirational.“The concrete-and-steel stadiums not only represented a safety measure, but a leap of faith on how popular baseball would become,” says MLB historian John Thorn. “In effect, it was like Field of Dreams. They built in the hopes it would come. They built ballparks of great seating capacity and seeming posterity.”
According to images, the Apple Operation Manual is nothing like the manuals of modern consumer electronics. The pamphlet contains what looks like the circuitry schematics of the Apple-1 along with paragraphs that teach users how to get the computer to work.
Read more at MobileSyrup.com: An Apple-1’s original manual is up for bidding for more than $12,000If you have to ask what an original Apple 1 computer is worth, you can't afford it.
Skender’s 100,000-square-foot factory on the Southwest Side, which began production in late May, contains four bays with hulking gantry cranes overhead, as well as welding jig tables that are dozens of feet long. But don’t look to be wowed by sci-fi feats of robotic automation—there’s not a robot in sight (yet). Instead, the technology is aimed at seamless coordination.
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At Skender, this repetition begins once an order is placed, and staff begin identifying the relevant components and writing assembly-line schedules. When materials arrive, numbered and bundled with an instruction set, they’re laid out on massive welding frames that allow line workers to affix clamps that secure steel elements. It’s not super-high-tech, but it means that welds can be accurate to 1/1000 of an inch. (“If I’m out on the dirt at a site, I’m talking about 1/16 of an inch at best,” said Scopano.)To me, this kind of production makes a lot of sense, both in terms of expense (which will probably decrease over time), and the ability to control quality. (I am boggled a how shoddy some of the local building construction appears to be).
It's a long article that delves into both the history of John Wayne and the movies he became famous for and role of art and artists in our politically fractious times.A man and his wife name their son John Wayne. At the baby shower the wife’s best friend pulls her aside: “Maybe it’s not my place to say it, but I just can’t believe you’d name your boy after a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe.” “Oh Deb,” the wife says, patting her friend on the shoulder, “you should know us better than that. We’d never name him after that John Wayne. We’re naming him after John Wayne Gacy.”The joke, of course, is that Wayne is so out of favor in certain pockets of contemporary culture—particularly those vocal online—that a child-molesting, child-murdering clown could somehow be less problematic than the iconic Western actor.In February of this year, an onslaught of twitter users declared Wayne “cancelled” when they discovered what many of us already knew: that the actor had a pretty extensive record of heinous views and shameful deeds. The tumult began with a tweet by a screenwriter named Matt Williams on the evening of February 17th: “Jesus fuck, John Wayne was a straight up piece of shit.” Williams accompanied those words with screenshots of Wayne’s infamous 1971 Playboy interview. The tweet went viral.
At this point, it's not clear if there is any practical use for the phenomenon, but science is like that. Give it time, and someone will think of something.First, let's take a step back. Over the last few decades, physicists have discovered that it is possible to twist the wavefront of a light beam, giving it angular momentum. This looks a bit like a spiral staircase, with the beam wrapping around an empty middle. When such a beam is targeted at something, you see a bright donut. These beams are said to have orbital angular momentum (OAM), a property not dependent on polarization (which instead is about the geometry of the electromagnetic oscillations.)As reported in the latest issue of the journal Science, researchers have discovered that it's possible for an OAM light beam to exhibit "self-torque". As the beam moves forward, its twist goes from wider to narrower, a bit like a screw. If such a beam is projected onto a flat surface, it would appear in the shape of a croissant or crescent.
Liu’s stories typically emerge from a speculative idea that has the potential to generate a vivid, evocative fable—more often than not, one about mankind’s ability to bring about its own demise. “The Three-Body Problem” takes its title from an analytical problem in orbital mechanics which has to do with the unpredictable motion of three bodies under mutual gravitational pull. Reading an article about the problem, Liu thought, What if the three bodies were three suns? How would intelligent life on a planet in such a solar system develop? From there, a structure gradually took shape that almost resembles a planetary system, with characters orbiting the central conceit like moons. For better or worse, the characters exist to support the framework of the story rather than to live as individuals on the page.
Liu’s imagination is dauntingly capacious, his narratives conceived on a scale that feels, at times, almost hallucinogenic. The time line of the trilogy spans 18,906,450 years, encompassing ancient Egypt, the Qin dynasty, the Byzantine Empire, the Cultural Revolution, the present, and a time eighteen million years in the future. One scene is told from the perspective of an ant. The first book is set on Earth, though some of its scenes take place in virtual reality; by the end of the third book, the scope of the action is interstellar and annihilation unfolds across several dimensions. The London Review of Books has called the trilogy “one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written.”
Much of the books’ resonance, however, comes from the fact that they also offer a faithful portrait of China’s stringently hierarchical bureaucracy, that labyrinthine product of Communism. August Cole, a co-author of “Ghost Fleet,” a techno-thriller about a war between the U.S. and China, told me that, for him, Liu’s work was crucial to understanding contemporary China, “because it synthesizes multiple angles of looking at the country, from the anthropological to the political to the social.” Although physics furnishes the novels’ premises, it is politics that drives the plots. At every turn, the characters are forced to make brutal calculations in which moral absolutism is pitted against the greater good. In their pursuit of survival, men and women employ Machiavellian game theory and adopt a bleak consequentialism. In Liu’s fictional universe, idealism is fatal and kindness an exorbitant luxury. As one general says in the trilogy, “In a time of war, we can’t afford to be too scrupulous.” Indeed, it is usually when people do not play by the rules of Realpolitik that the most lives are lost.I read The Three Body Problem and enjoyed it; though it wasn't my favourite novel of the year, I have no issues with it winning the Hugo Award, and I recommend it to anyone who likes somewhat old fashioned but mind expanding science fiction.
- The World's Appetite Is Threatening the Mississippi River. More farming means more pollution. The article is a good example of how to use infographics.
- The Top Secret Cold War Project That Pulled Climate Science From the Ice. What started as a cover story became more important than the secret project.
- 16 Free Ways to Download Any Video Off the Internet. Sometimes it's better to watch a local copy.
- Rare image of US Air Force's secretive space plane in orbit. It's pretty hard to hide something in orbit. Paint it black, maybe?
- The Open Office Trap. I hate open offices.
I do hope the OMB gets its way and forces NASA to amend its plan to use commercial launchers and vehicles and drop the Gateway, which is essential just a sop to the big aerospace companies.During a visit to Johnson Space Center last Friday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine explained that, unlike the Apollo hardware, Orion and SLS need some help to get a crew to the lunar surface and that this is the role the Lunar Gateway will play. "We can get to low lunar orbit, but there’s not enough delta-V to leave low-lunar orbit," Bridenstine said. "So we can go, but you can’t come home. This is why we need to get more delta-V. Think of a small space station in orbit around the Moon where we can aggregate landing capability by the year 2024."However, the White House Office of Management and Budget, which is typically loathe to initiate large new space programs, has pushed back against the Gateway. The budgeting office argues that a Gateway is not technically needed to stage a landing mission from lunar orbit. Depending on their designs, some lunar landers could be pre-placed in an orbit for rendezvous even without the Gateway."OMB is definitely trying to kill Gateway," a senior spaceflight source told Ars. "OMB looks at what the vice president said about getting to the Moon by 2024 and says you could do it cheaper if you didn’t have Gateway, and probably faster. They are fighting tooth and nail to nix the Gateway."
I have not heard about this before reading the article linked here and it's made me quite interested in reading Atkinson's book.A serious anomaly occurred as the crew careened toward a landing on Earth, according to Nancy Atkinson, a science journalist and author who details formerly classified information about the event in her new book, " Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions.""Through my interviews and research for the book, I uncovered a serious anomaly that occurred during Apollo 11's return to Earth," Atkinson — whose book comes out July 2 — told Business Insider in an email. "The event was discovered only after the crew had returned safely to Earth."The problem happened just before Apollo 11 returned to Earth, causing a discarded space module to nearly crash into the crew's capsule.What's more, Atkinson's sources suggest, the same issue also threatened the crews of three other Apollo missions.
For anyone with an interest in space history, this is a must read article.The first launch failure of the N1 rocket in February 1969 dealt a heavy blow to the Soviet space program, already hopelessly behind the US in the Moon Race. While engineers at Sergei Korolev's TsKBEM design bureau were picking up pieces, their Kremlin bosses watched the US to add to its triumphant flight of Apollo-8 around the Moon in the previous December yet another successful test of the Saturn-5 rocket during the Apollo-9 mission. Two months later, Apollo-10 hovered just a few miles from the lunar surface, setting the stage for the actual landing in the summer. Not surprisingly, new calls for changing the course came to the Kremlin.Like in Khrushchev's reign at the turn of the 1960s, Vladimir Chelomei, the head of the rival TsKBM design bureau, reemerged on the scene with an "alternative" launcher to the troubled N1. Obviously, this time, there was no point in talking about beating Americans to the Moon, but instead, the Soviet response would be a manned mission to Mars! To this end, Chelomei proposed to upgrade his mighty but non-existing UR-700 rocket into an even bigger UR-900. (685)However neither technical failures nor political pressure at home and abroad could deter Soviet engineers from pressing on with the N1 project. By that point, they had no illusions about winning the Moon Race, but the N1 still remained the centerpiece of the Soviet space program.
New features in EditTools 9 include:
Time Tracker not only lets you keep track of the time you are spending on a project, but it also keeps data about your projects and calculates your Effective Hourly Rate (EHR) and Average Pages per Hour (APH) for the specific project, all projects worked on in the current year, and all projects over your career.For more information, see the EditTools web site.
The Rolling Stones have a system for planning what songs they’re going to play at every show. On concert days, the band usually soundchecks in the afternoon. Then Mick Jagger gets to work with keyboardist Chuck Leavell on making the set list. They take a few things into account: They look at what songs they played the last time they were in the area to make sure they don’t repeat themselves, and Jagger thinks about his voice and what he’s comfortable singing. Sometimes, the band makes song suggestions: “He’ll be quite honest,” says guitarist Ronnie Wood. “He’ll say, ‘Actually, no, that won’t work here,’ or ‘We played it here too many times.’ Or he may just go, ‘Yeah, we’ll give it a run,’ so you never quite know what to expect, but you always get a reason why we won’t perform something.”
For more details on what happened and its implications, see last weeks Security Now podcast at about 1 hour 10 minutes into the podcast.BGP isn't the only historic internet system with trust issues. Another fundamental protocol, known as the Domain Name System, has dealt with similar issues. If BGP is the internet's navigational system, DNS is its address book. DNS hijacking has become a major security issue around the world, and the Department of Homeland Security even issued an emergency directive in January aimed at defending DNS accounts.As with DNS, though, concerns about BGP date back decades. In 1998, for example, a group of hackers from the L0pht collective famously testified before Congress that they could take down the internet in 30 minutes by attacking BGP. Ten years later, Kim Zetter assessed the state of BGP insecurity in WIRED, writing, "Government and industry officials have known about the problem for more than a decade and yet have made little progress in addressing it, despite the national security implications."
