DDE

The opthalmologists won't be free. Sorry, I still can't get over how people just stare up at the sun to the point of sustained damage.

Yeah, basically Khrunichev went bust developing it exclusively out of their own pocket. This in turn became a great excuse to sell off the expensive land under Khrunichev, forcing Angara's production to move to the stillborn Energiya Block A production line at Omsk, which didn't do the timeline any favors.

Probably closer to Kampfgesetz or whatever, with a side helping of "thermoethics". The world isn't a prison, but it is what you make it out to be, and if you don't out in a constant, coordinated effort, if you leave things be and let them slide, they degrade, rust, rot, decay and die. Not exactly an unnatural mindset for a space traveller, eh?

I doubt it. I do believe there is an initial bias towards empathy. You can't rely on it to run a big society, though. Yes. But life is an unnatural phenomenon. Any increase in complexity comes not from some synergistic murmuration, but through a coherent push with a unified will. Both the free market and government dictate have their niches. "The form is the despotism of the internal idea that prevents matter from disintegrating. If the bounds of this natural despotism are broken, the phenomenon dies."

Hence the civilizationists' argument why humanity needs more backups that are still here but different. At which point... bye-bye international Mars colony run by some sort of a global government. That's just capitalism allocating resources more efficiently, as advertised.

Oh, it is possible to deliver in that timeframe. But what if, hear me out, we gave the rocket scientists about a tenth of the necessary budget, and were utterly amazed they preferred to twiddle their thumbs, find excuses and set up rat lines and Swiss bank accounts instead of working? After all, that's how Angara happened. For the first decade, it received 4% of the funding it was supposed to. Combine that with a stalwart example of KB feudalism (Makeyev's pet Korona) and you have an absolute swamp that needs a new authoritarian like Korolev or Webb to sort it out. Borisov, meanwhile, just rattles off what his grammar-deficient PR team pushes his way. Be happy they don't boast of building a factory to produce carburetors for electric cars (there's such a scandal going on right now, someone included a news article from the equivalent of the Onion in a regional ministry's annual report, to great public embarrassment).

Oh, how very, very familiar. Unfortunately, going from experience, the late Uber driver was involved, she just didn't know she was being used as a courier. Heck, there's been a dozen cases in Russia where the couriers realized what they were being used for and opened up the packages to find thick wads of cash. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/16/us/ohio-uber-driver-murder-charge/index.html Warn your relatives, folks, you're now in the same boat as us, it seems. Unexpected calls from the FBI, FRS or Bank of America, "secure accounts", urgently needing you to read that code from a text message or installing an "anti"-virus on your phone, oh no, someone's taken a loan on you and the only way to rescind that loan is to set fire to a local public building while yelling (e.g.) "Glory to Comrade Kim!" And that's before deepfakes go industrial-scale.

Korona SSTO has been making rounds in the press again. I find it alarming that it's still a thing alongside Amur-SPG (Falcon-Methanski) and is getting more and more official endorsement. The last thing Roscosmos needs on their plate is a Korolev-Chelomei situation, but instead they're just throwing more and more things at the wall (Angara, Soyuz-5, Bartini's Krylo, even Don/Yenisei SHLV is still making noises).

During the closing days of WWI, the Germans developed the B-1E Elektronbrandbombe, a 1 kg incendiary bomb with a thermite payload in a casing of an aluminum-magnesium alloy known as Elektron. It was the predominant Luftwaffe incendiary in WWII, leading to many raised eyebrows as contemporary materials keep referring to "electron(ic) bombs".

Ah, a six-day work week due to upcoming Labor Day. I only learnt about it on Monday. It's a barrier that never goes away. Frankly, I think the bigger problem is the pathologization of any eccentricity. You're expected to be "quirky" in ways that are seemingly harmless (and easily commoditized), but that genuine strangeness is actually a lot more dangerous and untolerated in this ultra-connected, hyper-socialized world than it used to be. It has become an impairment. Although I do sense there used to be a pretty severe asymmetry of tolerance based on the sex (will this get censored?) of the individual, guess we achieved equality of discrimination. I can't promise it will get better. Maybe take a gap year while you can, because afterwards HR will look at you funny for having a hole in your resume. Then months will start to fly past like days, and you'll be headed to an early midlife crisis, just like me. ****...

As someone who experienced the lockdown in a city of twenty million... you will quickly find people not wanting to ever be in a crowd. Intsead, they could likely succumb to parasocial relationships...

Rebel Moon's premise belongs here. An interstellar-capable empire bullies peasants to give up grain.

Bunch of mission patches https://t.me/fotozak/6529

Don't forget "pharmacological cash cow" in case with ADHD. It's the reason why I'm really skeptical of its prevalence, much less so with autism where the pharmacological remedies seem non-existent and misdiagnosis is nowhere near as likely.

What if they were told it was perfectly safe?

I know the feeling. Last week I found a non-material typo in the heading of a report we've worked on for a year. Cringe.

Hm. I wonder whether this affects the ultrarich more or less. Without research, the feel I get is decidedly ambivalent - there's this one billionaire playboy philanthropist that's sired almost a dozen, but one anecdote doesn't indicate whether they buck the trend or not - and then there's their tendency to live for themselves, children be damned. Maybe the Moon can have highly preferential divorce legislation...

Sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sections? Well, here I was scared of sub-sub-sub-sub-sections in Russia's rendition of the Basel III standard.

"What if Jaws and Saw had a crossover?" - evolution, 270 mln years ago At the turn of the previous century, a rather unusual Permian-era fossil was spotted by an ethnographer Alexander Bessonov in the literal town of Perm and referred to Alexander Karpinsky It was quickly concluded that these are teeth, shark teeth to be specific (although the various early sharks have been further broken down and this is now deemed closer to a ratfish). The "teeth whorl" and its owner were dubbed Helicoprion bessonowi, and an elephant in the room remained: where did this thing go on the animal? Not pictured is one tentative suggestion that this thing was rotary. And yes, Karpinsky did end up sticking it on every imaginable part of the beast. The latest view by the guys interviewed a decade ago by NatGeo suggested a single file of teeth on the lower jaw, growing from the mouth outwards, and with the jaw closing they would very much perform a buzzsaw motion. Edit: ah, found the artist's webtsite. Perfect.

Mudskippers are evolution's gift to evolutionary biologists. They're basically Amphibia, take two, a form of fish that have developed adaptations for an almost entirely terrestrial lifestyle (their gills are mostly non-functional), but completely independent from the original amphibians, and using very different solutions. These solutions allow them to be a lot faster than our tetrapod ancestors, which is important because they're not nearly as alone on land as they were.

Oh, wait until I fetch you US's first UCAV. Same energy

Until individual tank ECM and micro-flak are perfected, nerds are going to be subjected to aesthetic suffering That thing looks like solid sheet metal, not nets

Shower thought: the Halo franchise has plenty of AIs, but there's not even a whiff of humanoid robotics - only incorporeal avatars. In fact, UNSC seems to have more "smart" AIs than they have Spartan-IIs, and they have no trouble putting the AIs in charge of extremely powerful armaments. At the same time, their power armor tech suggests a pretty extreme level of robotics-adjacent technology. So why bother with the ethically dubious Spartans at all when you can build AI-driven Myrmidons? It's particularly laughable in hindsight, when you know that the later armor variants are able to accomodate both the wearer and the AI melded with their mind. Why even bother when you can have an extra set of metal hands? Morning edit: to clarify, I don't even mean "human-passing" androids. When UNSC committed to superhumanly tall - never mind socially stunted due to abnormal upbringing - Spartans and power armor tech, they gave up on blending in with humans for infiltration purposes.

Well, by that definition, we get to Rutland of Jutland

Meanwhile, we had to consider whether we needed to move the middle cat back to town about 40 miles away because he wouldn't let his claws get trimmed...