DDE

"Hey Bing, Windows is telling me to press any key, but I don't see an 'Any' key on my keyboard!?"

I still think the situation is both qualitatively different in itself, and the quantitative differences are so tremendous they have a quantitative effect as well. Igor Shafarevich (or, likely, one of his many non-Soviet sources) pointed out that TV, unlike books, can't be rewound - you can't pause and mull over a point, you're forced to be maximally receptive in the moment and stay glued to the screen, and you also can't catch the anchor contradicting themselves five minutes later. The Internet brings its own array of issues - off the top of my head, extreme democratization that gives platform to absolute loons, complete lack of borders or even the most rudimentary pre-censorship, all topped off with interesting and perverse algorithmic incentives... anyone remember Elsagate? However, I think the bigger problem is sheer information overload. Information, impressions, visuals, cuteness, [redacted to be child-friendly], parasocial relationships... it's all hosed at us in an unprecedented torrent that we cannot handle effectively, and this leads to two things: (1) exaggeration in a continuous arms race of simulacra and (2) makes the consumers learn to consume information in a quick, surface-level fashion, preferably through the use of established patterns of thought. Two examples of the results. One, NPC streamers... and we know why almost all of them are female. https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2023/07/19/the-bizarre-tiktok-npc-livestream-trend-where-creators-act-like-robots-explained/?sh=4b56986c2d05 Two, and here I must introduce you to one of my Telegram subscription, a political strategist and GR specialist named Maria Sergeyeva (who has a very dated Wiki page). These days, the woman mostly runs about with the concept of "Netflix politics": it doesn't matter what you're advocating for, what your political program is, or what your politics even are. Politics are a TV series; you use established fictional tropes and references to cast yourself as the hero and your opposition as the villains, and you maintain a steady stream of media episodes to keep yourself relevant. Good governance, good ideas, leadership? Like anyone cares for that... The most egregious and oft-mocked approach is to declare oneself Harry Potter fighting Voldemort.

"Pass me the manual." "Oh, now of all times you're going to start reading it?" "No."

Today, I have encountered magic. One, the FPS Booster mod for Cities: Skylines it the... goat. In the middle of my urban sprawl, my FPS was down to 17. Now, I don't know what the game's odd habit of updating all the 10,000 unused interface icons had to do with it, but now it's up to a reasonable 24. I used the built-in FPS cap and I'm happy as a clam now. Two, switching The Witcher 3 back to DX11 and letting NVIDIA "optimize" my graphics settings has made much of the dithering - which is an inherent issue of the shadow implementation in RED Engine, as I've gathered - go away.

Have you heard of Tsiolkovsky's corrugated all-metal airship? Well, someone by the name of Perelman got so enthusiastic he proceeded to, ahem, imagine a "structurally feasible" craft 1000 m long and 300 m tall capable of "lifting" (i.e. was he judging by weight alone?) two hundred thousand people.

Today in this thread: Boeing engineering.

Answer is in the screenshot. Can anyone help me pinpoint why the shadow is turned into dots instead? (slightly to the right of the center of the screen)

The year kicks off with a smallish tsunami off Japan's west coast. Fun (no).

It's a commonly cited reason among car owners, yeah. But usually it goes hand in hand with soending hours in traffic jams.

If SpaceX were an independent country, the US would be sixth in the 2023 launch total, trailing behind India's seven launches with six successes and two failures. However, SpaceX's 96 successful launches still don't constitute half of 212 globally.

Indeed. But it wasn't available. That's why they called it a "perilous adventure".

Yes, but at the time - and for a long while afterwards - maritime travel across open sea was based on latitude alone. You'd simply sail north or south and then adopt a course east or west and pray you don't deviate or run out of provisions until you find land again. Using a clock wasn't proposed until 1530, major efforts began in the 1700s, with Britain's Longitude Act establishing the Board of Longitude and a bunch of prizes, and John Harrison began to put forward practical deisgns in the 1730s, which were initially treated as a military secret. No, it was a really, really big deal. Apparently the method was used in land surveys, but like the also proposed lunar observation method, shipborne astronomy of this sophistication was deemed impossible. For thise who like their longitude long-form:

So many questions... Is that a Earth orbital rendezvous lunar flyby ship from L-1, and a very scaled-up Sputnik 3?

Looks like I've got a very bemusing sort of tinnitus in my right ear (could be "objective", i.e. I've heard it when my neck is bent rather dubiously...) Not the usual buzzing or other "glitchy" noises, not running water or an airplane taxing, but... a sleeping cat breathing out through the nose, once, about 0.5 sec in duration (believe me, I 1. know that sound and 2. it's happened where there are no cats around, and it's clearly unaffected by headphones).

Belarus's national Earth remote sensing program is canned to redirect funds for a potato storehouse at the Tolochino cannery https://pravo.by/document/?guid=12551&p0=C22300935

"I've got good news and bad news" "Bad news?" "We mistook the landing strip with the river." "...And the good news?" "It's -40⁰C." https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-plane-lands-frozen-river-by-mistake-prosecutors-2023-12-28/

Longevity of electronics, as said above, was a known problem, and remains a known problem. Notice also the use of an on-paper upper stage, and, today, the well-known reticence to increase Roscosmos funding while demanding they do more with less. Hell, the announcement of a Luna-27-2 backup was already a surprising reversal of old policy.

OK, this is a bit unhelpful, but it had to be shared.

That one was a solar probe with a Jupiter gravity assist. I guess the alternative designation is "Ju-S", which is as obvious as ever. Launch vehicle is Proton with a Shtorm hydrolox fourth stage. At some point this was also entertained under the program name Zeus, along with a more direct Mercury probe named Hermes. I'm also seeing references to "program of program" studies like Galactica and Prognosis, but none of them ever came close to even sketching hardware. Edit: Anatoly Zak indicates that Tsiolkovsky was to/could also include a Jupiter descent vehicle, and Lavochkin had begun putting together an appropriate centrifuge in the early 1990s. https://www.russianspaceweb.com/spacecraft_planetary_plans.html

Plesetsk, 10:30 MSK, Soyuz-2.1v, military payload https://t.me/roscosmos_gk/11934 Kosmos 2574, but NSF are pretty clueless as to what it is - they keep repeating the old inside scoop about a cartographer

Earlier MiG-21 models had an ejection seat that took the windscreen with it. https://t.me/fotozak/5887

Efficiency-wise, both lose to boil-off-powered non-hypergolic bipropellant ones. Buran burnt syntin with vaporized oxygen (although it generally deliberately heated the oxidizer) and ACES was designed to run on hydrolox boiloff. And that the thing worked at all means even an ignition system isn't too complex for RCS. Let alone two valves for a hypergol instead of one higher-pressure one for a cold gas thruster.

Satellite RCS tends to be built exclusively with pulsed thrust capability, it can't sustain a continuous burn. Instead it's rated for a million solenoid valve activations.

Stitched together. https://t.me/fotozak/5863 Fregat-Orion! /s

Do we? In vacuum, they produce mostly-transparent plumes miles in size, e.g. the Apollo 8 TLI. Whereas in an atmosphere, RCS of comparable design looks like a rocket engine, e.g. syntin-oxygen. http://buran.ru/images/gif/rsu.gif So, basically, no, there is no qualitative difference between RCS and chemical main engines. This video, I believe, gets plume effects on the ship accurate, less so for the missiles.