We will probably find out more this weekend when Musk is scheduled to give a more detailed briefing on the Super Heavy/Starship progress.To an extent, Starship’s reentry profile is actually quite similar to NASA’s now-retired Space Shuttle, which took approximately 30 minutes to go from its reentry burn to touchdown. Per the above infographic, it looks like Starship will take approximately 20 minutes from orbit to touchdown, owing to a dramatically different approach once it reaches slower speeds. Originally described by Musk in September 2018 and again in recent weeks, Starship will essentially stall itself until its forward velocity is nearly zero, after which the giant spacecraft will fall belly-down towards the Earth, using its wings and fins to maneuver like a skydiver. The Space Shuttle landed on a runway like a (cement-encased) glider.This unusual approach allows SpaceX to sidestep the need for huge wings, preventing Starship from wasting far more mass on aerodynamic surfaces it will rarely need. The Space Shuttle is famous for its massive, tile-covered delta wing and the leading-edge shielding that partially contributed to the Columbia disaster. However, it’s a little-known fact that the wing’s size and shape were almost entirely attributable to US Air Force demands for cross-range performance, meaning that the military wanted Shuttles to be able to travel 1000+ miles during reentry and flight. This dramatically constrained the Shuttle’s design and was never once used for its intended purpose.
The Relix article does not mention what may be Hunter's most beautiful lyric, to the song, Ripple. I cannot imagine a more fittingFor the Dead, Garcia and Hunter teamed up for many of the band’s most popular compositions, like “Uncle John’s Band,” “Touch of Grey,” “Casey Jones,” “Friend of the Devil, “Truckin’,” “Franklin’s Tower,” “Eyes of the World,” “Sugaree” and “Scarlet Begonias,” among many others. Hunter also worked with Bob Dylan on multiple songs from the late-’80s onward and more recently has collaborated with songwriters like Bruce Hornsby, Steve Kimock, Jim Lauderdale and David Nelson.Hunter received the Americana Music Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013, followed by an induction into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame (with Garcia) in 2015.
If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung,
Would you hear my voice come through the music?
Would you hold it near as it were your own?
It's a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken,
Perhaps they're better left unsung.
I don't know, don't really care
Let there be songs to fill the air.
Ripple in still water,
When there is no pebble tossed,
Nor wind to blow.
By shifting much of the actual number work onto techno-tools, Wolfe said, financial firms have widened the gap between decision-makers and the real-world impacts their work achieves.Regarding his colleagues who worked on The Big Short, Wolfe commented, “They really make clear that people at the top of financial institutions did not fully understand how instruments designed and used by people under them worked. They made billion-dollar bets without understanding what they were doing. They knew the upsides, but not the downsides.”Incidentally, the so-called “junk bond king” may have argued something similar, Deringer said; in a nutshell, Milken hinted at technological determinism, a concept that lives on at big firms today.“Apparently at one point he said that, actually, if you wanted to identify who were the real culprits for the new, freewheeling, sort of morally boundary-crossing forms of finance that developed in the ‘80s, the people to really look at were the inventors of VisiCalc,” Deringer said.
What bothers me more is the disregard for real science and physics. I will go to see the movie anyway, but I hate having to turn off the intellectual part of my mind when I sit down in the theatre. Why has it been 50 years and nobody has beaten 2001 at getting it right?As an astrophysicist and a film critic, I’ve been waiting my whole life for a big-budget adventure film that spans the whole solar system. There are some stunning sequences in Ad Astra, and many of the details about astronaut life and space travel are spot-on. But some of the themes and ideas that drive the plot are based on astronomical misconceptions.Ad Astra touts itself as having help from NASA, so presumably someone somewhere gave them some advice. Still, there are plenty of ways science advising can go wrong— miscommunication, script conflicts, misconceptions, and outright mistakes. In Ad Astra, those mistakes range from wrong ideas about space travel to inaccuracies about basic astronomy.
Obviously this has to be done with the permission of the performer so you won''t find it available at every concert. Currently, you can try it out on Elton John's farewell tour.In my testing, the power of Peex became immediately apparent once the first lines of “Bennie and the Jets” hit. With my earbuds out, the audio sounded just as I thought it would (even in the sparkling new Chase Center in San Francisco): A mushy wall of noise reverberating in my skull, lyrics comprehensible only because I already knew what they were. But when I popped in my Peex earbuds, the experience was immediately transformed. Even before I started fiddling with the equalizer settings, I found all the instruments were tighter and scrubbed of echo, and, critically, Sir Elton’s voice rang out above them all, accompanied by his crisp strikes of piano keys.Once you start fiddling with the equalizer settings it’s hard to stop. By “Tiny Dancer,” I had found the experience benefitted even further by pumping up vocals a few notches along with keyboards, while leaving the other instruments dialed back. As John has a whopping three percussionists on stage, comprising half the band, I quickly realized this powerful trio could be safely leveled down a touch.
- Physicists Finally Nail the Proton’s Size, and Hope Dies. The headline is hyperbolic but there's some seriously fundamental physics here.
- Here’s what happened in the impact crater the day it did in the dinos. Geologists got a core sample from the centre of the crater.
- How to spot a bot. A handy infographic to help you identify bots in your Twitter feed.
- The Big Business of Scavenging in Postindustrial America. There's big money in all that junk.
- Digital Hearing Aids Turn the Whole World Into a Giant MP3 File. If you need hearing aids, you probably can't hear the difference between an MP3 and full range audio anyway.
- AI for ophthalmology: Doing what doctors can’t. I must show this to my ophthalmologist the next time I see her.
- When You Electronically Sign Documents, Always Keep a Copy. If you're a freelancer, you should read this.
The mass turns out to be no more than 1.1 electron volts. Compare that to an electron, which has a mass of about 500,000 eV.An experiment nearly two decades in the making has finally unveiled its measurements of the mass of the universe’s most abundant matter particle: the neutrino.The neutrino could be the weirdest subatomic particle; though abundant, it requires some of the most sensitive detectors to observe. Scientists have been working for decades to figure out whether neutrinos have mass and if so, what that mass is. The Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment in Germany has now revealed its first result constraining the maximum limit of that mass. The work has implications for our understanding of the entire cosmos, since these particles formed shortly after the Big Bang and helped shape the way structure formed in the early universe.
While this is technically feasible, I question whether it makes economic sense. But it would be a heck of a trip, if a long one (at 1,600 km./hr. it would take almost 10 days).The researchers’ main result is to show that today’s strongest materials—carbon polymers like Zylon—could comfortably support a cable stretching from the moon to geosynchronous orbit. They go on to suggest that a proof-of-principle device made from a cable about the thickness of a pencil lead could be dangled from the moon at a cost measured in billions of dollars.That’s clearly ambitious but by no means excessive for modern space missions. “By extending a line, anchored on the moon, to deep within Earth’s gravity well, we can construct a stable, traversable cable allowing free movement from the vicinity of Earth to the Moon’s surface,” say Penoyre and Sandford.The savings would be huge. “It would reduce the fuel needed to reach the surface of the moon to a third of the current value,” they say.
Making these changes will mean that any events your email provider previously added to your calendar automatically by scanning your inbox for certain types of messages from common events — such as making hotel, dining, plane or train reservations, or paying recurring bills — may no longer be added for you. Spammy calendar invitations may still show up via email; in the event they do, make sure to mark the missives as spam.
It's quite brilliant featuring excellent characterization and world building coupled with a page turning plot. I am fairly certain that it will be a top contender for next year's Hugo and Nebula awards.Several years after a period of civil unrest and digital blackouts in the United States, a truth and reconciliation process has led to a major restructuring of the federal government, major tech companies, and the criminal justice system.In this still-rebuilding America, freelance journalist Aoife Tkachenko is just trying to make a living (and a name for herself outside of the shadow of her famously-martyred older brother) when she stumbles onto a document from the commission’s archives that many powerful people would rather keep buried. As she digs deeper into the story (all the while dispatching her findings to her newsletter subscribers), Aoife realizes that what she’s found could upend America’s tenuously held peace–and get her killed in the process.
The spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel, when used with default settings, is known to convert gene names to dates and floating-point numbers. A programmatic scan of leading genomics journals reveals that approximately one-fifth of papers with supplementary Excel gene lists contain erroneous gene name conversions.The problem of Excel software (Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA, USA) inadvertently converting gene symbols to dates and floating-point numbers was originally described in 2004 [1]. For example, gene symbols such as SEPT2 (Septin 2) and MARCH1 [Membrane-Associated Ring Finger (C3HC4) 1, E3 Ubiquitin Protein Ligase] are converted by default to ‘2-Sep’ and ‘1-Mar’, respectively. Furthermore, RIKEN identifiers were described to be automatically converted to floating point numbers (i.e. from accession ‘2310009E13’ to ‘2.31E+13’). Since that report, we have uncovered further instances where gene symbols were converted to dates in supplementary data of recently published papers (e.g. ‘SEPT2’ converted to ‘2006/09/02’). This suggests that gene name errors continue to be a problem in supplementary files accompanying articles. Inadvertent gene symbol conversion is problematic because these supplementary files are an important resource in the genomics community that are frequently reused. Our aim here is to raise awareness of the problem.
Readers in the US who think that this is not their problem might want to consider a scenario where Trump loses the 2020 election by a slim margin and declares the election illegitimate and refuses to cede the presidency.In other examples of the creeping dethronement of democracy far more extreme tactics have been deployed. Restriction of civil liberties, attacks on civil society organisations, capture of state and independent media organisations, and at its most extreme extra-legal ‘direct action’ have all been employed to further authoritarian rule.The UK is not there yet – although there are some worrying signs. An MP has been killed and others intimidated out of office. This has a corrosive long-term effect.The incremental nature of the new authoritarianism is both a strength, and a weakness. It means it is often harder to recognise when boundaries have been crossed and critical changes introduced.
I wish I'd known about this when I was working on my last WebWorks project. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why my CSS wasn't doing what I thought it should be doing.We call these mistake-preventing programs "linters." JavaScript has several good ones. ESLint, in particular, has been working wonders, showing us all just how helpful a good linter can be. But in the realm of CSS we have not been so fortunate. We've had very limited options: the Ruby-based, preprocessor-specific scss-lint and the older CSS Lint.But that was before the advent of PostCSS. Among other things, PostCSS provides the means to build more interoperable CSS tools. It can parse any CSS*-like* syntax into an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) for plugins to analyze and manipulate. And with custom parsers, PostCSS can handle even non-standard, technically "invalid" patterns (like //-comments).The conditions are ripe for a mighty new stylesheet linter — powered by PostCSS and inspired by the best features of scss-lint and ESLint.I've been working with a few collaborators on this project, and I'm writing now to introduce you to the tool we've developed: stylelint.
We’re constantly looking for ways to improve the way we write CSS: OOCSS, BEM, SMACSS, ITCSS, utility-first and more. But where other development communities seem to have progressed from just linters to tools like SonarQube and PHP Mess Detector, the CSS community still lacks tooling for deeper inspection than shallow lint rules. For that reason I have created Project Wallace, a suite of tools for inspecting and enforcing CSS quality.
At the core, Project Wallace is a group of tools that includes a command line interface, linter, analysis, and reporting.That probably would have been overkill for what I was doing but it would have been interesting to play around with nonetheless. And the web developer who helped me out with one of the projects I worked on certainly would have liked it.
Is Dickens an influence on you?Oh yeah. He's totally an influence, as a prose stylist and as someone who's—I mean, we think of Victorian novels as a kind of stodgy old-school way of writing, but he was all over the map in terms of nutty, random things that he would put into his books.The novels of Robert Heinlein. Are they still readable today, or are they simply of their time?Well, they're certainly of their time, but I find that, of all of the science fiction writers that I read when I was a kid, his stuff has stayed with me more than others. He had this knack for capturing little moments, little human interactions, and images that produced really vivid memories in my head that are still with me.
We updated our hyphen guidance this year to say no hyphen is needed in a compound modifier if the modifier is commonly recognized as one phrase, and if the meaning is clear and unambiguous without the hyphen.Personally, that rankles. I'll stick to using hyphens in modifiers for consistency and to avoid the possibility of confusion.
Shades of Johnny Mnemomic, eh? I don't think this will become widespread until drives and networking components become much, much smaller. For a more likely future, see the "smart dust" in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness on the Sky.Pegleg v2 is built on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, and as portable computers small enough to be inserted under your skin go, it’s relatively large. It’s 2.56 inches long, 1.18 inches wide, and 0.196 inches thick—about the size of a Hershey’s mini chocolate bar.To make Pegleg v2, Laufer and his team removed from the Raspberry Pi both Micro USB connectors (one for power, one for data), the Mini HDMI connector, and the camera connector. They then soldered on a second Wi-Fi chip to enable it to transfer data to another Pegleg and allow other devices to connect to it, as well as an induction coil to enable it to be powered by a wireless battery resting in a contiguous sports armband or pants pocket. They enabled Bluetooth for future functionality, inserted a 512GB microSD card for storage, and updated the firmware. Finally, they coated the hacked device in a biocompatible acrylic resin to prevent it from interacting with the recipient’s body and to diffuse the heat it emanates.
There is a large print mode in the beta features, along with an internet browser. Large print mode will change the entire UI and most of the text based features of the software experience and make the fonts larger. This is great for people who wear glasses, have vision disorders or just are getting a little bit older and the eyes aren’t what they used to be.That and the 7" screen might be enough for me to consider getting a Kobo Libra H2O.
This all seems perfectly natural to me. I'm not a fiction writer, nor have I ever joined a writers' group, but given my background, it's something that would be more natural to me than most writers.The pleasures of collaborative fiction writing can seem so bountiful that one might begin to wonder why anybody would choose to do it alone. The varied methods of working as a group—a mixture of talking it out in person (what the Wu Ming collective calls “free-form improv”) and writing in solitude between meetings—give people with different creative temperaments equal chances to contribute. Many of the co-authors said that brainstorming with their collaborators was a safe space in which no idea was too ridiculous and no suggestion would be disregarded. In place of the loneliness and perpetual self-doubt of the solitary writer, they had camaraderie and encouragement from others.Many of them described being spurred to write better after reading a co-author’s excellent scene. They all felt accountable for doing the work, turning up at meetings, not letting the others down. When the group gets writer’s block, they see it not as evidence of weakness and failure but as a sign that they’re on the wrong path as a group. They cultivate an attitude of “upward compromise,” accepting that they need to do something radical to get the creative juices flowing again—“make it crazier,” or delete everything, or use an “uncanny element, or a plot device that no one else would.”
It's divided into five secions covering: Grammar, Punctuation and Mechanics, Usage, Clarity, and Trends and Q&A. In its light tone, it reminds me of the wonderful Dreyer's English. The online interface is somewhat dated, but the content more than makes up for it.Since 2010 Peck's English Pointers, by Vancouver-based editor and writer Frances Peck, has educated and entertained language buffs with its lively articles and quizzes spanning grammar, punctuation, mechanics, usage and clarity.The updated second edition features 19 new articles along with 11 new practice quizzes. Like the existing articles, the new ones take a light-hearted yet rigorous look at some of the most perplexing errors, weaknesses and puzzles in written English. The new topics range from mainstream—subject-verb agreement, bullet points, gender-neutral writing and effective emails—to esoteric—subordination, braces, and the little-known comash and interrobang.With their up-to-date rules, amusing examples and practical advice, these fresh articles join current favourites on who and whom, which and that, hyphens and dashes, plain language, usage woes and grammar myths.
And then there's what happened with the Nobel award for literature last year, which will no doubt be in the news again in a few weeks when this year's award is scheduled to be announced.When I heard about Linda Fairstein’s problems with the Mystery Writers of America, I got into an semi-argument with a bookselling friend about what should happen to her. He stated, unequivocally, that her actions in her life should have nothing to do with her work as a writer.And, In a fair and a just world, that would happen. But, as we have seen repeatedly over the advent of the internet and social media outlets, there are people out there who would vehemently oppose the most harmless and innocuous you could come up with, including kittens. knitting and lawn bowling.I told my friend back then that while it was more than likely that Linda Fairstein probably did deserve the MWA honor, people, her peers, critics, and the public at large and the tidal forces of social interaction she helped foment were going to deny her because of her past actions and her adamant defense of them.
It's hard to imagine what modern computing would be like if Unix hadn't been developed. (Actually, I can imagine it quite well: I worked at IBM for a couple of years.) Sadly, we no longer have Bell Labs; the world might be a better place if we did.Cancellation of Multics meant the end of the only project that the programmers in the Computer science department had to work on—and it also meant the loss of the only computer in the Computer science department. After the GE 645 mainframe was taken apart and hauled off, the computer science department’s resources were reduced to little more than office supplies and a few terminals.As Ken Thompson, another programmer working on the project, wryly observed for the Unix Oral History project, “Our personal way of life was going to go much more spartan.”Luckily for computer enthusiasts, constraint can at times lead to immense creativity. And so the most influential operating system ever written was not funded by venture capitalists, and the people who wrote it didn’t become billionaires because of it. Unix came about because Bell Labs hired smart people and gave them the freedom to amuse themselves, trusting that their projects would be useful more often than not. Before Unix, researchers at Bell Labs had already invented the transistor and the laser, as well as any number of innovations in computer graphics, speech synthesis, and speech recognition.
