DDE

So a lot of people have heard about the mid-century German 1000-ton tank project, right? Well, it's not a German project. Edward Grotte first suggested it to the Soviets a decade earlier. And it makes some sense when described as a coastal defense tank, i.e. it really is intended to accomodate the main armament of a warship. The Soviets asked for a 500-ton variant before looking at the bills for the T-35 and potential T-39, and cringing; the coastal defense tank would briefly come back as the T-103 project (with a 130 mm main gun). Grotte, meanwhile, left for home in the mid-1930s, and while there were a few transmission-related patents to his name, he was very active in the press as seen above. His next employeers (Speer), found him, and then his employer's ultimate boss found him in 1942 and asked to develop the monster further.

There doesn't seem to be a decent explanation. Ever since the Löwe in 1941 there was a fierce competition between a 149 mm (data presented below), a 128 mm or an 105 mm L/70. Ultimately, it seems that late 1941 saw the Germans suffer the same fear of secret enemy wonder weapons that the Soviets were suffering in early 1941. A March 1941 report indicated that the Germans already had a 90-ton Panzer VII with a 105 mm gun on the production line. The reaponse were design requests for gargants like the KV-5. Logically, you can see how this in turn would fuel German developments. They expected KV-5-like tanks by 1943, i.e. at Kursk, whereas Fall Blau would have provided the Germans with enough petrol for an army of superheavies.

Yesterday's launch from Plesetsk. Absolutely no info on actual Kosmos number or payload

Alexey Leonov and David Scott's book finally gets released in Russian. https://t.me/bigboss_books/1222

Yak-55 x 2

It is a very furiously denied rumor.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/windows-12-may-require-a-subscription

How foolish. When the market is down, you've got to stock up!

How resistant is a GCNR against various lateral forces from maneuvering? I'm wondering whether it would even survive combat action without the fissioning vortex burning through the wall.

Because a subscription-only Windows is only planned for 12, and you still have to be scalped somehow.

(a) which is why I specified "across the board"; (b) I doubt the excellence is ever all-around, and a shoddy casting process can easily overlook competency gaps for "name power" (I imagine being bad at writing further compromises your ability to detect a poor fit for the role - or to notice that no-one can play your shoddy script well). The Wiki quotes Chibnal as saying that Whitaker was his first pick, and that even without any context also sounds like a rather bad sign. I am fully cognizant of the fact that acting quality can swing quite violently between individual productions as a result. But I'm also rather bitter that perfectly fine people are being shoved into roles they have no business handling, sometimes due to quite immutable characteristics, and too often it doesn't even seem to be about making bank or personal interest. Is there a miscasting conspiracy these days?

It would be too far up.

Why, it's so bad it's hilarious! To be fair, it's not a production design. The doors from a Lada kinda give it away. To me, the proportions are suspiciously like an electric locomotive. Another joker's already christened it Lada Hippo.

...which wouldn't have been a hard blocker for a female Thirteenth, but it would've required a conscious and incredible effort across the whole board to make it work. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be the acting and directing capacity across all of Greater Hollywood* to pull this off, heck, we're at a point where there's only one actress (Emily Blunt) who can pull off a serious action girl type that isn't a character-less sociopath. A character of such complexity as the Early Revival-era Doctor is simply beyond existing capabilities. Across the whole industry, the politics seem to be gasoline poured onto a preexisting dumpster fire of somewhat inexplicable decline in quality and cognitive empathy.

Today's subject of giggling throughout the RuNet: photographs of MAMI's electric car testbed "Memorable design: ✓" "Guys, where am I? Guys... is it still the 31st? Guys, why is my head spinning?" "Optimus, are you sure we're on the right planet?"

According to the maps I see, the Greenland plume is minor/offshoot to the larger Iceland/mid-Atlantic plume. The problem is, is there even a plume? I dug beyond surface-level publications, and it seems that there are two rival explanations, likely varying on a case-by-case basis, for intra-plate volcanism. Besides plumes, there's also plate tectonics, as in the crust simply tearing up enough to admit magma to the surface. And Iceland is a rather stark example of that in action, being a 24 mln years old mini-continent, so is there even a plume involved? Other plate-related factors include the slowly melting fragments of subducted plates, but there seems to be no consensus how deep they sink. There's also a curious lack of (known) plumes beneath Eurasia (even though the African plate is AFAIK just as, if not more, thick and stable, as the Eurasian plate). The asymmetry seems to correspond to the mysterious large low-shear-velocity provinces, which, depending on who you ask, are superplumes fueled by slabs of ancient (750+ MYO) oceanic crust, or the remnants of Theia. I'm getting the distinct impression we know painfully little about deep geological processes.

Got visual https://t.me/fotozak/5815 and Fregat sep https://t.me/space78125/2237

Arctica-M №2, launch successful.

Hello, I'm not Roland Emmerich but I'm looking for an apocalypse. Inspired by One, what region today is the one most likely to become an extinction-level igneous province? Is it even possible to tell? Two, how quickly would the catastrophe occur? Grasping onto the most recent LIP, the Columbia River group, a 500 km lava flow, is said to have occurred in less than a week, indicating rather remarkable output. What would the global timeline be, then?

TL:DR The Earth was already experiencing volcanic winters (up to -10°C global anomaly) and choking on toxic fumes before the asteroid offed the dinosaurs Recurring volcanic winters during the latest Cretaceous: Sulfur and fluorine budgets of Deccan Traps lavas https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37792933/

Idea for an anti-littering sign

And that's where you stumble across the real problem. Potential automation has to compete with the real and immediate solution* of bringing in cheap bodies, physically or remotely; LLMs and the like have managed to squeeze in because they're pure software, they're relatively versatile, and they scale up with enormous ease. A piece of physical automation is unlikely to have any of those properties. * there are questions whether the cheapness of immigrant labor persists over time, or whether it's more of a received wisdom among the managerial class who don't bother to check the actual math. It is also important to watch out for cases where the difference in wages is the result of lack of tax and quasi-tax payments per worker through either widespread lawbreaking, or abused or even deliberate administrative preferences - because this just means the business is using taxpayers to get subsidized labor. There are even wilder schemes where these mechanisms drive and inflate an entire industry, e.g. the Russian housing construction sector... ...I'll shut up now.

Yes and no. This "poetry" is still very much limited, menial and repetitive. All of the practical application of GPTs I've heard of are for repetitive mental tasks. Outside of that, it's just a toy.

TIL how the Maus ended up with a 75 mm co-axial... at the time they were focusing on the 150 mm gun, someone wanted an anti-infantry secondary turret.

And in the process, it becomes the plaything of agents and studios, except for the occasional dumb slip-up. An acceptable outcome.