The fact that the Project Hail Mary patch includes the flag of Ireland but zero African nations still fries me. You mean to tell me that a country of 5m without a space program contributed more than South Africa, which has produced both a space agency and an astronaut???
Not to mention, in the book they PAVED THE FUCKING SAHARA to get enough astrophage for the mission. Afriaca deserves a whole fucking back patch dedicated the sacrifices they were forced to make.
this video is a must-watch if you’re following the Florida Learjet crash:
A meteorologist and pilot wanted to know how is it that a plane equipped with Doppler radar did not see the storm ahead?
Turns out that the onboard radar can tilt and if the pilots had tilted it downwards, they would have seen that stronger storm building up.
How did they figure this out?
They took the actual National Weather Service Doppler radar data from the storm, then recalibrated and resampled it to simulate exactly what a Learjet’s onboard Collins WXR-840 X-band radar (the 3 cm wavelength system many of these jets carry) would have seen at 35,000 feet in −47 °C air.
The result is striking. At a normal 0° tilt, the returns look like faint ice-phase echoes. A nothingburger, basically.
Tilt the same radar down roughly 5° and it suddenly lights up with the stronger lower core of a rapidly intensifying storm directly ahead.
NWS data shows the storm tops were around 31,000 ft just before the jet penetrated, shot up to 40,000 ft while they were in it, then collapsed back to ~33,000 ft after they exited.
This confirms that they flew into a storm cloud with explosive growth and collapse with violent updrafts and downdrafts, exactly the kind of thing an X-band radar looking straight ahead at cruise altitude can easily under-sample.
@EricBurrisWX walks through the radar geometry, the crystal reflectivity at those temperatures, and low-key gives one of the clearest, most technically grounded explanations out there.
Disagree. Yes, XM weather radar is delayed 5-15 minutes. That doesn't matter so much when making strategic (versus tactical) decisions.
Here's the radar return from the day of the accident. It "accurately depicts the threat in front of you" pretty well.
When approaching Florida from hundreds of nm to the west, it's pretty obvious things look better north of Orlando and lousy to the south.
A 10 degree course change to the north looks a lot safer than trying to pick one's way through the mess to the south with onboard radar. "Real time" or not.
Also parts of the Bahamas look rather dicey. Better to know that sooner versus later.
Furthermore, this was a personal charter. The crew and customers could have modified their plans more easily than a scheduled airline flight.
If what you're trying to say is picking one's way through thunderstorms using delayed XM radar is a fool's errand, then I agree. But that wasn't my point.
My point is that areas of intense convective activity are best avoided altogether. A convective SIGMET is useful, but a picture of overall activity and movement gives good situational awareness. As shown in the photo below.
That situational awareness should translate into sound strategic decisions versus the conditions that seemed to catch this crew by surprise.
The biggest eye opener during my travels around Southeast Asia is how much Australians HATE Americans. Australia has never even crossed my mind, but they really do dislike us. 😂
Does anyone else find it odd how the entire F-117 fleet has been kept airworthy despite being retired for nearly twenty years
A rare look at 25 F-117A Nighthawks flying together in a historic formation flyover.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This historic footage shows the 25 F-117 Nighthawk formation flyover on October 27, 2006 at Holloman AFB for the aircraft's 25th anniversary. The F-117 was retired from active service in 2008.
theaviationist.com/2017/11/01/tha…
fightersweep.com/11139/watch-25…
This was the radiation on my flight.
If I were standing outside a nuclear power plant the radiation would probably be around 0.05µSv/h.
I'm never flying again.
.@JeffBezos: The bottom half of income earners in the US pay 3% of the taxes. It should be 0%.
"It's absurd we do this."
"Why is a nurse in Queens making $75k/year paying 1k/mo in taxes?"
"We shouldn't be asking this nurse to send money to Washington. They should be sending her an apology."
In May, Jeff Bezos told CNBC the bottom half of earners should pay zero income tax
Mercor CEO @BrendanFoody says Bezos is right:
“The largest positive externality in the economy is creating jobs. & the largest way that the government collects tax revenue is by taxing jobs.”
“The fact that we do this for the bottom half of Americans that are making under 70K a year is so deeply irrational.”
“The bottom half of Americans constitute 3% of federal government tax revenue, & yet it’s a giant burden on them.”
“Then I saw my hero, Jeff Bezos, posting about this on X. & so I retweeted him, & then he reposted me.”
CAT LADIES
I’ve been reading the 1958 autobiography of Major Greg “Pappy” Boyington. A Marine Corp fighter ace and Medal of Honor recipient in WW2, he spent 19 months as a POW in Japan where he went from 190 lbs to 110 lbs.
Upon his release, he was asked by a reporter what he wanted to do. He said he wanted go home and take his son hunting.
After all he’d suffered and done on behalf of his country, Boyington got home and received a letter from a woman in NYC:
“Written on stationery with a cat monogram on it, after welcoming me home in one sentence, she then went on at great lengths to write how horrible she thought I was to go hunting ‘as if you haven’t had your bloodlust satisfied now.’”
Cat ladies aren’t new. It’s just that our grandpas didn’t let them near the reigns of power.
This is the last photo ever taken of Marco Siffredi, just before he attempted to snowboard down Mount Everest.
On September 8, 2002, the French daredevil reached the 29,000-foot summit of Earth's highest point. Though critically exhausted from the climb and the high altitude, Siffredi stood with his board perched over the precipice and decided to forge ahead with his plan.
He strapped on a fresh oxygen tank, bid his Sherpa adieu, and began his descent, never to be seen again.
Photos taken just before tragedy struck
historydefined.net/photos-ju…
The dog exists because Ice Age hunters could not live on lean meat.
Wolves and people wanted the same animals, and for a long time nobody could explain why a band of hunters would feed a rival through a winter. In 2021 a team of Finnish researchers did the sums for the coldest stretch of the last Ice Age and found the answer in the human liver.
By late winter a reindeer or a horse has burned through its fat and is nearly all muscle. A person can only clear so much protein. Push it much past a third of what you eat and you get sick, then weak, then worse, however full your stomach is. So a hunting band took what it needed, the marrow, the brain, the tongue, every scrap of fat, and was left sitting on a heap of lean meat it could not safely finish.
A wolf can live on lean meat for months.
The surplus went to the pups by the fire. Nobody was competing for it. A few thousand winters of that and you have a dog.
So the oldest friendship on earth rests on one fact about your metabolism: you are the fat-eater in the partnership. Your ancestors dealt with the skinless chicken breast twenty thousand years ago by throwing it to the wolf.
Today the lean cut is on your plate with a health sticker on it, and his descendant gets a brown biscuit made of maize.
He was better fed in the Ice Age. So were you.
SORRY, BUT STUDENT LOANS SHOULD HAVE 0% INTEREST.
Why should borrowing $50,000 for an education turn into owing $80,000?
Give people a clear repayment plan to pay back what they actually borrowed.
No interest piling on another $30k.
No years of payments that barely touch the balance.
You borrowed $50k. You should owe $50k.
Education debt shouldn’t grow while you’re trying to pay it off.
we will never get another quote or image as profound as this again.
happy birthday to the great carl sagan
JUST IN🚨: Mexico just went universal. 120 Million citizens now get free healthcare - no premium, no copays, no requirements.
We had a great time at MAX POWER — and made a lot of news!
We're recruiting a new class of astronauts, making major advancements on the Moon Base, and challenging students to a $1 million design competition. Catch up with everything we announced at the festival: nasa.gov/general/max-power-n…
ALT A plane trail forms a large heart shape in the blue sky to the left of the giant, cube-shaped Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center.
ALT A child wearing a green hoodie and virtual-reality goggles holds his right arm out, with the controller in his hand at the very front of the photo. Two adults watch behind him.
ALT NASA astronaut (and Artemis III commander) Randy Bresnik, wearing his blue flight suit, sits atop a vintage blue-green Corvette and waves to the camera.
ALT Two planes, seen from a distance, fly in parallel, their trails forming white lines behind them. A bright Sun shines to their left.
Earth is still in an Ice Age, and almost nobody knows it.
Ice ages don't end when the glaciers melt; they end when all polar ice disappears completely. Right now, ice still covers Antarctica and the Arctic; which means by scientific definition we are still in an Ice Age.
What we are living in - right now - is called an interglacial period, a warm pause, a temporary thaw between glacial advances. The current interglacial - called the Holocene - began about 11,700 years ago. Every human civilisation, that has ever existed - Ancient Egypt, Rome, China - all of it happened inside this single warm pause.
And here is what makes this deeply unsettling; in the last 2.58 million years the Earth has cycled through at least 50 glacial advances. The warm pauses between them typically last 10,000 to 30,000 years. We are already 11,700 years into ours.
The ice cores drilled from Antarctica tells us exactly what happened before. Every interglacial ends; every one! The temperature drops, the glaciers advance, and ice sheets kilometres thick crush everything beneath them.
During the last Glacial Maximum just 20,000 years ago, ice sheets covered most of North America, Northern Europe and Asia. New York City was under a kilometre of ice. And none of that required a catastrophe.
It happened slowly and quietly, driven by wobbles in Earth's orbit around the Sun, called the Milankovitch cycles. The next glacial advance will come; not tomorrow, not in our lifetime. But it will come.
We are not living 'after' the Ice Age: We're living inside it.
facebook.com/share/v/1MaGGCR…
I’m curious what people think about this situation…
A woman I know in her early 40s. Objectively dropdead gorgeous and I don’t just mean women think she’s beautiful, men almost universally seem to agree. She’s never been married, no children, never had a relationship longer than 2 years. She says she very much wants to find a husband and have a lasting relationship, but it just never seems to happen.
What would your first instinct be about why she struggles to find a lasting relationship?
My fellow anesthesiologist Dr. William Perez was so disturbed by the operating room experience of anesthetizing brain-dead donors that he refused to continue participating:
“First, I had to provide anesthesia to the brain-dead organ donor in a virtually identical fashion to that which I provide for other critically ill patients. It turns out that brain-dead patients react to scalpels and electrocautery similarly to my other patients. Without adequate anesthesia, they become tachycardic and hypertensive. Perhaps even more bothersome was the fact that I had to administer paralytics to prevent our organ donors from moving during the case.”
“The first thing I noticed was the normal respect for the patient seemed to be missing from the room.
Part of this may be that harvest teams are almost invariably from outside institutions and organ procurement companies. They travel about harvesting organs routinely and seemed, at least to me, unconcerned with the organ donor as a person.
Perhaps everyone simply considered the patient on the table to be gone, so they acted consistently with that. But the joking, the music, the conversation—it all seemed so out of place.”
“From cutting out and removing the heart, lungs, and liver to the later harvest of corneas and replacing long bones with the equivalent of broomsticks, the entire sequence was somewhere between disturbing and horrific.”
