Orion Nebula.
Orion’s sword is actually anchored in the center by a large nebula, a nursery of stars. I’m surprised the iPhone at 5x did this well. I ran it through a couple of sharpening programs to get this result.
Ars Technica: The diagnosis is in—bad memory knocked NASA’s aging Voyager 1 offline.
After all that time in the unshielded radiation of space, I’m not surprised those old chips might be going bad.
Atlas Obscura: What's the fastest language in the world?
Quite interesting. Now I want to learn Basque. Some used to posit that the Basque have a significant quantum of Neanderthal in their genetics; not sure if that’s still in vogue. Nevertheless - nothing I like better than having rare talents. I took eight years of a dead language - Latin. I may not speak it, but I use it daily nonetheless. Surprising how these things prove valuable at some point in a lifetime. Did you know you speak Basque?
Bizarre — one of my favorite words. Basque.
You’re welcome.
Guardian: Vegetables are losing their nutrients. Can the decline be reversed?
I knew about this long ago. There was a place in Kingston, NJ, just north of Princeton, called the “Brain-Bio Center”. The physician who worked out of that location - cannot recall his name right off - wrote books and warned of these deficiencies all the way back to the 80’s. He was widely considered a crackpot at the time. I recall a teacher of mine saying, “He’s nuts. A bean is a bean. It can’t grow without having a base level of nutrients.”
Now justified. One reason I keep an ear out for crackpots. You never know!
CNN: Here’s how to see the upcoming worm moon lunar eclipse.
Day late, I believe. Should have peaked here at 1AM. Couldn’t see anything with the cloud cover. I certainly feel the energy, though.
NY Times: What’s Next for the Coronavirus?
“At Yale University, Akiko Iwasaki and her colleagues are testing whether a 15-day course of the antiviral drug Paxlovid can eliminate a slowly replicating reservoir of virus in the body.” If you know someone suffering from long COVID, forward them this article. That quote is from the last few paragraphs.
Reuters: Exclusive: Musk's SpaceX is building spy satellite network for US intelligence agency, sources say.
Well, this explains Putin’s recent interest in sending nukes to space, I guess.
LiveScience: NASA's Voyager 1 sends readable message to Earth after 4 nail-biting months of gibberish.
Such good news. Amazing that it’s lasted this long. Here’s to more discovery!
Open Culture: An Introduction to the Astrolabe, the Medieval Smartphone.
Appropriate following the previous.
Fifteen minutes of linkfinding.
ReadWriteWeb: Apple iMac could be set to try out touchscreen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. After I use my iPad, it drives me crazy when I try poking my laptop or desktop’s screen.
Paris Review: Backyard Bird Diary. Always wanted to create one of these kinds of diaries. Been a long time since I’ve sketched. I should buy some colored pencils.
Capital+Main: Power of the Pulpit: How Conservative Congregations Scale the Church-State Wall to Political Victory. Listen to what Bible scholar Dan McLellan says about this.
AppleInsider: Neil Young tries excusing his return to Spotify by saying Apple Music is now as bad. Water-drop torture is the same, no matter the brand.
PVC: Podcast playback: immersive reading + italics on website-desktop & mobile. I know there are rules for use of italics; I use them when they make the most sense for emphasis. Keeping their ‘power’ is paramount.
Vox: Biden is not “waging war” on American energy. He’s boosting it. Yet OPEC still has its heavy hand on prices. Seen that recent $0.30/gallon price increase?
DP Review: Nikon Z9 gets firmware v5.0 with portrait processing options and feature refinements. A Z8 or Z9 is on my dream wishlist.
SciAm: How the Solar Eclipse will impact electricity supplies. Paywall keeps me out. If you’ve got a subscription, enjoy.
CNet: Do You Need a Screen for a Projector? As an A/V professional, I can tell you that you’ll be blown away by the quality of a good projection screen. The materials have advanced so very far. Contrast and color are exponentially better than they were just a decade ago.
Zeldman: Open-source moderation.
Pasadena Star-News: JPL’s Voyager team ‘extremely hopeful’ after ailing, faraway craft shows signs of former self.
“In the past couple of weeks, Voyager 1 has shown promising signs of improvement. The probe is finally transmitting patterns of 1’s and 0’s that look familiar to the engineers.”
Open Culture: How Engineers Straightened the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
I feel I may have fielded a similar link before, but it’s good, so here it comes again.
The Register: Grab a helmet because retired ISS batteries are hurtling back to Earth.
Dang it, I donated my old motorcycle helmets. {LOL}
Guardian: El Niño forecast to drive record heat from the Amazon to Alaska in 2024.
Past time to install a mini-split a/c unit, Santa Feans.
3 Quarks Daily: Free Will, Pragmatism, And The Things Best Left Unsaid.
Oh, this is a great one. Take time to sit with it.
“Even Sapolsky recognizes that there’s something inherently sad about giving up one’s own sense of agency, and mentions the 2016 article in The Atlantic, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will … but We’re Better Off Believing in It Anyway.” I’m not sure about the first half of that headline, but I agree with the second. I don’t know the degree to which the future is determined, but I know for certain that it isn’t helpful for me to think of it as being so.”
Guardian: ‘Brain fog’ from long Covid has measurable impact, study suggests.
Excuse my drooling. But really, this is no joke.
Vox: Winter heat waves are now a thing. Here’s how to make sense of them.
“When temperatures rise above 32 degrees Fahrenheit, it leads to more rain than snow. Regions like the Western US rely on snow accumulation in the mountains to store water for use throughout the year, and more rain than snow can mean more flooding in the winter and drought in the summer. On the other hand, if air temperatures rise but stay below freezing, that can lead to more snowfall since there is more water in the air.”
There’s a lot of denial in Santa Fe. So many have moved in here from California and Texas, they have no experience of what Santa Fe’s “original” climate was. They enjoy and celebrate it now … whereas we who have been here a decade or two, are mourning the major flora and fauna changes, the unlivable summer heat.
I’ve related before, Santa Fe was always a ‘ceiling fan’ town. A/C was not necessary. Most evenings, even in summer, were light-sweater temperatures.
No longer. We’re getting weeks of 95 plus fahrenheit days. Let that Sun cook the flat asphalt roofs, which radiate that heat far into the wee hours of the morning … some weeks, unable to completely cool off, building heat within our adobe homes.
It’s not a good situation.
It’s really hard to interact with people who have a layer of Teflon in their brains to the realities they live in. Trying to find the proper conversational ‘hooks’ to get people to restart their thinking processes on this is a real challenge. You would think that walking them through a landscape littered with dead piñons from the ‘03 beetle die-off (95% of piñons in SF died, fully 50% of our city-altitude forests) would generate a reaction. Nope. “I think the grey trunks are SO BEAUTIFUL”. Nice, I agree in theory. But not when you’re walking through a field of a hundred tree-corpses. A complete rejection of reality.
The Register: FAA gives SpaceX a bunch of homework to do before Starship flies again.
It’s about time. Time they stop littering! And that litter is quite toxic, from my threadbare knowledge.
Guardian: Is the 100-year old TB vaccine a new weapon against Alzheimer’s?
“There are good reasons to believe that trained immunity could reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s. By bolstering the body’s defences, it could help keep pathogens at bay before they reach the brain. It could also prompt the brain’s own immune cells to clear away the amyloid beta proteins more effectively, without causing friendly fire to healthy neural tissue.”