space travel
- Artemis II is home safe! And showed off a little by going farther from Earth than any of the Apollo missions. It was cislunar (orbit around both Earth and Moon) so that there was no chance of getting stuck in Lunar orbit due to possible failure of the spacecraft’s thrusters. No, their only problem was with the bathroom plumbing. I flashed on the scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which Dr. Heywood Floyd is shown reading the instructions for a zero-G toilet.
- I saw this too: Many big-name news outlets reporting on Artemis talking about “the dark side of the Moon.” There is a side we don’t see from Earth, but it gets as much light as the side we do see. This makes me glad I didn’t go into news journalism. (Yes, I considered it…50 years ago.)
- In the transition from Old English to Middle English, the language lost a fair number of pronouns, especially pronouns referring to two people only, not one, not more than two. Interesting story about how this came about over time, but we really don’t know why.
- New “smart” TV sets are very good at reporting on the habits of their users. Here’s a reasonable article on how to minimize that. Our big-screen flat TV is now 15 years old and isn’t especially smart. We’re probably going to keep it until it croaks.
- I don’t do social media as much as I used to—the novelty’s long since worn off—but there’s new research about how cutting down on social media time can help mental health in a variety of ways. I’ve got another Contra entry in the cooker about “slow dopamine” and how I experienced it, which is another factor in the social media takeover we see in modern life.
- Here’s an interesting piece about the history of SF, beginning with Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories and stopping at…the New Wave? Well, it’s supposedly about how the SF genre was born and raised. The New Wave faded away in the 1970s, though there are still some holdouts. Indie SF is now changing the shape of the game, and the author doesn’t mention the long, slow death-throes of print publishing.
- I miss Radio Shack, sure, but earlier today I was assembling a kit that uses two CR2032 coin cells, and one of the battery holders was defective. I shrugged, took a deep breath, and then ordered a bag of six from Amazon. They’ll be here tomorrow afternoon. The kit is cool and celebrates an anniversary that I’ll describe here in an upcoming Contra entry.
- Twitter has gone absolutely off its rocker since Parkland, and now it’s just haters hating anyone who disagrees with them. (No, that’s not new; it’s just never been this bad.) I stumbled across a site called Kialo, which is a kind of digital debate club, in which issues are proposed and then discussed in a sane and (hurray!) non-emotional manner. I myself certainly don’t need another time-sink, but I wanted to bring it to the attention of anyone who enjoys (increasingly rare) reasoned debate.
- Another interesting approach to political social media is Ricochet, a center-right bloggish system with paid membership required to comment. (You can read it without joining.) No Russian bots, or in fact bots of any kind, and a startling courtesy prevails in the comments. Its Editor in Chief is Jon Gabriel, who used to work for us at Coriolis twenty years ago. Not expensive, and the quality of the posts is remarkable.
- FreePascal actually has an exponentiation operator: ** That was what FORTRAN (my first language) used, and I’ve never understood why Pascal didn’t have an operator for exponentiation. Better late than never.
- This article doesn’t quite gel in some respects, but it’s as good an attempt as I’ve seen to explain why Xerox never really made much money on the startling computer concepts it originated back in the crazy years of the ’70s. I worked there at the time, and top-down management was responsible for a lot of it, as well as top management that wasn’t computer literate and thought of everything simply as products to be sold.
- Japanese scientists found that treating the hair follicles of bald mice with dimethylpolysiloxane grew new hair. Dimethylpolysiloxane is used to keep McDonalds’ deep fryers from boiling over, and given that Mickey D’s fries are one of my favorite guilty pleasures, I suspect I’ve ingested a fair bit of the unprounceable stuff. No hair yet, though I keep looking in the mirror.
- German scientists, lacking a reliable supply of bald mice, have discovered a species of bacteria that not only enjoys living in solutions of heavy metal compounds, but actually poops gold nuggets. How about one that poops ytterbium? I still don’t have any ytterbium.
- Eat more protein and lift more weights if you’re a guy over 40. Carbs are no food for old men.
- Evidence continues to accumulate connecting sugar consumption to Alzheimer’s. Keep that blood sugar down, gang. I want to be able to BS with you all well into my 90s. Try cheese as snacks. It’s as addictive as crack(ers.)
- If in fact you like cheese on crack(ers), definitely look around for St. Agur double-cream blue cheese. 60% butterfat. Yum cubed. A little goes a long way, which is good, because it keeps you from eating too many crack(ers.)
- And don’t fret the fat. The Lancet has published a study following 135,000 people, and the findings indicate that there is no connection between dietary fat and heart disease. Ancel Keys was a fraud. Ancel Keys was the worst fraud in the history of medical science. How many times do we have to say it?
- 37,132 words down on Dreamhealer. It’s now my longest unfinished novel since college. (It just passed Old Catholics, which may or may not ever be finished.) Target for completion is 70,000 words by May 1. We’ll see.
- On March 17th, it will be 60 years since Vanguard 1 made Earth orbit as our 2nd artificial satellite. Probably because it’s so small (a 6″ sphere, not counting antennae) it is now the satellite that’s been in orbit the longest, including those the Russians launched. The early Sputniks & Explorers have all burned up in the atmosphere.
- I never knew that the parish church of my youth was Mid-Century Modern, but squinting a little I would say, Well, ok. Here’s a nice short visual tour of the church where I was an altar boy and confirmed and learned to sing “Holy God We Praise Thy Name.” It hasn’t aged as well as some churches (note the rusty sign) but some of the art remains startling. I met Carol in the basement of that church in 1969, and will always recall it fondly for that reason alone.
- Ever hear of Transnistria? Neither had I. It’s a strip of Moldova that would like to be its own country, (and has been trying since 1924) but just can’t get the rest of the world to agree. It has its own currency, standing army, and half a million citizens. (I’ll bet it has its own postage stamps, though why I didn’t notice them when I was 11 is unclear.)
- A guy spent most of a year gluing together a highly flammable model of a musk melon (or a green Death Star, if you will) from wooden matches, and then lit it off. He even drew a computer model, which needed more memory to render than his system had. Despite the bankrupt politics, we live in a wonderful era!
