JoeDaDude

This phenomena is not limited to the UK, or even other countries receiving publicity for the same thing, like South Korea, Italy, and Japan. With some uncertainty, and averages worldlwide, it could lead to lower population by the century's end.

https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...

It was a German school in South America (no WWII refugees there, lol). I guess the school leadership was taught that way, and they were sure to make the kids learn that way too - with fountain pens!

FWIW: I went to an unusual grade school which required us 3rd graders to use fountain pans. There were many stained fingers and homeworks, but yet, they insisted on using what seemed to us archaic devices. Fast forward to now, decades later, and I have recently rediscovered fountain pens and what a delight it is to use one compared to the cheap disposable ball point. I am using an inexpensive Pilot Metropolitan pen and, given a choice, will never go back to ball points.

You do realize this mission is taxpayer funded. Intuitive Machines is getting paid as part of a contract to NASA under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLIPS) program.

https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-lunar-payload-services/

https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/clps/intuitive-machine...

For those not interested in taking photos, this Virtual Bookshelf project was posted some time ago:

https://github.com/petargyurov/virtual-bookshelf

The closest thing I can think of is the strange art of bell ringing in peals [1], aka change ringing, in which bells in church towers are rung in every possible order. One of the very longest takes 18 hours.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peal

The article makes no mention of a receive-only antenna mounted on the underside of the aircraft. One source [1] says "...there was a second “V” antenna mounted on the underside of the fuselage and connected in parallel with the top “V” antenna. If so, it was removed or disconnected before the plane left Miami." Note TFA does say the 250-foot antenna was removed in Miami, but does not mention the second V-antenna

More recently there was a lot of speculation the underside antenna broke during takeoff from LAE New Guinea, this being the explanation of the puff of smoke seen in the film [2] of the takeoff. The TIGHAR folk [3] are convinced the underside antenna was present on the aircraft and broke off during the takeoff.

[1]. https://earharttruth.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/pan-am-radio-p...

[2]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntkOyDanuRw

[3]. https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Research/Bullet...

There is a known threat in using lasers to damage the solar cells which would lead to the batteries fully discharging and the satellite becoming useless for lack of electrical power.

Orellana's voyage down the Amazon river is the subject of one episode of Michael Wood's Conquistadors, a series of travel videos linked below. Orellana described seeing large communities and cities from the river, recording the existence of a large population that had been decimated by the time the wider world ventured into the Amazon.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5mko7v

Richard Rhodes' books are essential reading for anyone interested in the history of nuclear weapons and their development. I will add a second reference, "The First War of Physics" by Jim Baggott which covers the American, German and Soviet weapons programs. Not much on Japan's plans though.

Tangential, but those who love the language used in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, surely know about the opera Akhnaten by Philip Glass which used some of the text, both translated and in Egyptian. (Warning, opera, and especially Philip Glass' operas, are not everyone's cup of tea. You may like it or hate it. The point here is to showcase Book of the Dead text).

Hear the opening verses in English here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRyauSlnP54

Hear the opera scene in Egyptian with subtitles here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XENvMGyy4J8

I can't speak for Amazon's, or any publishers policies, but there is at least one publisher screening submissions to hopefully filter out AI generated stories. That would be Clarkeworld, a science fiction magazine, who was famously overwhelmed with low quality AI-generated submissions, as was discussed on HN last year.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35999896

Readers of old science fiction may be interested to know about the film version of Olaf Stapledon's novel Last and First Men. The film, mostly a voice over reading of some parts of the novel, was made with many Spomeniks as a background.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8015444/

1. I've been dabbling in Japanese for while. It's time to get serious and pass the Japanese Language Proficiency test, even if at the lowest level.

2. Piano. While I can play some simple degree, I have a large bucket list of more complex pieces. I want to play three of them this coming year.

Awesome! I'll see you over at the HamSci forums.

https://hamsci.org/

I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect the Principal Investigator was sold a bunch of baloney from the crowdsource outfit. They do take a large portion of the funding, after all. The PI had already been through Phase I and Phase II of NASA funding and likely went to crowdfunding because he lost Phase III.

https://www.nasa.gov/general/an-innovative-solution-to-nasas...

I once met some people involved in Planetary Defense. One of them launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund development of his concept, the Hypervelocity Asteroid Intercept Vehicle. The crowdfunding campaign only raised some 4% of the needed funs. Nobody wanted to pay to save the Earth!

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/help-defend-earth-against...

At one time there was a Stanford course on the subject of General Game Players. The final project was to submit a player and see how it performed on a small set of games described by GDL. These were variations on Backgammon, Othello, and similar, with some rule changes.

While much of the course material survives [1], those rulesets do not. The only GDL example I could find was the somewhat trivial example of Tic Tac Toe, see section 2.6 Tic Tac Toe Game Rules here [2].

[1]. http://ggp.stanford.edu/public/lessons.php

[2]. http://ggp.stanford.edu/chapters/chapter_02.html

An email for Michael Genesereth, teacher of the course, is on the course website. I might shoot an e-mail and see if he has GDL files to share.

I learned about GDL several years ago from folk working on General Game Player AIs, that is AI that could play any well described game. They were working primarily in Java at the time. A casual search show that, shockingly, there is no python library available for GDL (yet), they are still using Java.

http://www.ggp.org/

https://github.com/ggp-org/

Whoa, so cool!! You know what would be even cooler? if you could have it play any game described by the Game Description Language [1]. it looks like the project is most of the way there, since the environment methods looks like calls to data that would be included in a GDL description.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Description_Language

A handful of games have been invented with the purpose of giving humans an edge over AI. They may have had a chance when the best AI was alpha-beta search, but against modern reinforcement methods, I don't believe they have a chance.

The games invented were Octi [1] and Arimaa [2].

[1]. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/450/octi

[2]. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4616/arimaa

A casual search shows some discussion of AI-resistant board games here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/eaept6/tell_me_...

"If You Want Something Done, Ask a Busy Person To Do It" - often heard quote.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/01/30/busy/

This is the BGG entry for the game, or at least a very similar game:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/68214/virus-wars

IMHO, I'd date the concept of artificial life further back than Christopher Langton. I'd start with Von Neumann's Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata. Though the book was published in 1966, Von Neumann was working on the concept as early as the 1940s. In his work,

"He asked what is the threshold of complexity that must be crossed for machines to be able to evolve. His answer was to specify an abstract machine which, when run, would replicate itself. In his design, the self-replicating machine consists of three parts: a "description" of ('blueprint' or program for) itself, a universal constructor mechanism that can read any description and construct the machine (sans description) encoded in that description, and a universal copy machine that can make copies of any description." From wikipedia [1]

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_construc...

I recently learned that the US Navy was installing crystal radios in ships as late as 1942. And why not? With one, the ship could still receive AM voice or Morse code even it it lost all electrical power.

https://californiahistoricalradio.com/wp-content/uploads/202...

The cartoonist's name is not given. Does anyone know who created it?

But (pun intended) surely I'm not the only person reminded of this piece:

https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/bosch-butt-music-garden-ear...

IN what could be interpreted as irony, Lee Seedol went on to invent more board games.

https://www.dicebreaker.com/series/wizstone/news/go-player-d...

Not mentioned in the brief bio is Fleming's work during WWII. Notably, he conceived of Operation Ruthless, a plan to stage a German plane ditching, and capture the German rescue ship with an Emigma code book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ruthless

Great talk! I'd like to see explained a separate branch tree explaining how WWV, WWVB, and WWVH, the shortwave stations that continuously broadcast time, get their time from (I presume) the USNO.