JoeDaDude

In the excerpts I read, I did not see any lines of code, let alone 26.

To those who complain about Koyaanisqatsi being dated, remember this film was made before such a thing as music videos existed. You might even say it was one of the first, the other being Disney's Fantasia.

I thought they were referring to Snoopy and Shawn the Sheep plushies, both of which were to be on Artemis-1 as zero G indicators.

https://science.howstuffworks.com/snoopy-artemis.htm

For those (like me) getting off on the nostalgia factor, there is a museum dedicated to the ZX spectrum and related PCs:

https://loadzx.com/en/

Lots of nekkid people.

At one time, probably the early 80's when the first clones of the IBM PC came out, being able to run MS Flight Simulator was an indication of a clone's ability to run all other IBM PC software. I remember one clone manufacturer used a screenshot of FS in their ad at the time.

FWIW, there is also this online course:

https://www.udemy.com/course/programming-games-for-the-atari...

Author Nick Abadzis got a lot of responses about the factual, sad fate of Laika in his graphic novel. So much that he wrote several alternate (entirely fictional) endings to the story to make readers feel better.

https://www.bigplanetcomics.com/category/comics/the-alternat...

Author Nick Abadzis created a graphic novel of the story of Laika [1]. While I expect it includes some fictional elements, a lot of the story in the graphic novel was true, including Laika's unfortunate demise. He got so many comments about the sad ending that he wrote several alternate endings to placate his readers. You can se them in reference [2].

[1]. https://www.nickabadzis.com/laika-graphic-novel

[2]. https://www.bigplanetcomics.com/category/comics/the-alternat...

Fun fact: Kurt Vonnegut once invented a board game, as was revealed in one of his letters [1]. This was discussed on HN when it came to light [2]. TL;DR: The game was called General headquarters, ostensibly a war game, but very abstract, almost chess like. Vonnegut tinkered a lot with the concept and rules so there is no known definitive version of the game. Some board gamers made an effort to go through his papers to but were unsuccessful or have nothing to report [3]. The game was never published.

[1]. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kurt-vonnegut-board-game_n_21...

[2]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596537

[3]. https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/883385/kurt-vonneguts-board...

Edit to provide this update: One Geoff Engelstein managed to get access to Vonnegut's papers and the game rules, but was unsuccessful in getting the game published [4]. Per Barnes & Noble who turned him down, “Not enough people know who Kurt Vonnegut is” .

[4]. https://www.getrevue.co/profile/gengelstein/issues/gametek-t...

I agree on the benefits of the LinkedIn one-click, but it's all about who receives it on the other end. I did the LinkedIn one-click apply once and received a questionnaire with 10-15 questions, the answers to which were all on my resume. One of the questions: Please provide a link to you LinkedIn profile.

ON e photo shows what looks like a radio spectrum, which I'm guessing came from the optional 4G LTE modem. It would be great if that modem could be used as a generic SDR, putting programmable sniffing capabilities in a small portable device.

Nice to see a freeware tool for this, it might be the only one. There is a commercial tool that works quite well if people don't wat to mess with with LaTeX:

http://www.hexdraw.com/Word/

Vassal is not exactly what you are asking for (not web based for example) and it does not generate maps or counters, you have to create your own and import them. But it does allow players to share a screen, move counters, and play a game over internet. This is known by most wargamers, so my apologies if I am pointing out the obvious,.

https://vassalengine.org/

It's really nice to see all these people and hardware in photos, great website which I will show to friends and family.

My only gripe: Why include fiction, like Asimov's laws of robotics, or Robby the Robot? There are plenty of real life milestones to cover.

In my family we have known of a coat of arms in our name for some time, so I was surprised to find that Amazon was selling bags, sweatshirts, etc. with a very different coat of arms also attributed to my family name.

After some digging, I found out they are using a military insignia given by the king to one of his noble captains with my name. The insignia would be something like a flag to identify his army on the field, So I guess there are many uses for coats of arms.

I have much to learn about heraldry, I'd appreciate any references I could read.

Err... could you make a nuclear reactor with the plutonium in your backyard?

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

In grade school, the German elementary school (long story) I went to insisted that all us 2nd and 3rd graders use fountain pens. Oh, the tragedies that ensued! The stained fingers, the spills on clothing, the blotches on homework. And nothing could be erased!

You'd think that would have traumatized me, but once all grown up, I never liked ball point pens. Mechanical pencils are nice, sometimes very nice, but today I have gravitated back to fountain pens. The writing is smooth and effortless and looks fantastic, in spite of my poor handwriting. I am no connoisseur of fine pens, nibs, or inks, but today I write my journal and sign my checks with a fountain pen.

From second hand anecdotes, I understand a lot of work involves handling dangerous chemicals, maybe enough to scare people away after a couple of years. I know one person that did exactly that, the risk wasn't worth it anymore.

There was a game-of-life board game created way back when, The Immigration Game, which has since been implemented in Golly.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/129088/immigration-game

How could I forget Gorilla.bas? At the time, I had a coworker who was obsessed with the game, always trying to get people to play with him during working hours.

One day when he was out, I messed with the qbasic source and made his gravity concept be a random number. My coworker's winning streak ended as did his constant nagging to get people to play!

Sorry for your loss. I'm glad you got to speak with him in the time you had.

I recorded my mother telling stories of her childhood, her parents, and grandparents when she was growing up in Oklahoma. I captured some great stories about how my ancestors traded with Native Americans, and when an uprising came, their farm was spared when all others were burned down, how my great grandmother fought off a mountain lion that came in the cabin when she was ironing clothes (she killed it by beating it with an iron, which is a family heirloom now), how my grandmother lost two brothers to the influenza epidemic, how my mother collected milk bottle caps to get tickets to the matinee as a teenager...

So many stories, and I know I barely scratched the surface. If you are reading this, and haven't gotten your family members to tell the stories, not only of their own lives, but of their parents, grandparents, do it now.

Claudio Maccone's proposal, to put a radio telescope at the solar focal point for SETI or communications purposes, is included as a chapter titled "Radio Links enabled by Gravitational lenses of the Sun and Stars" in the book Communications with Extraterrestrial Intelligence edited by Douglas Vakoch [1].

[1]. https://www.seti.org/book/communications-extraterrestrial-in...

Just to be clear, the music in the video is not Philip Glass' Koyaanisqatsi at all. FWIW, Koyaanisqatsi was a 1982 film [1], effectively a 90 minute music video before videos were a thing.

The film has lots of unsavory city clips in contrast with nature clips [2] to make the point of Life Out of Balance, the subtitle of the film. The music and film clips are frequently used to illustrate decay. or the unhealthy nature of city life in general, most notably in a Grand Theft Auto commercial [3].

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

[2]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDW-1JIa2gI

[3]. https://www.thefader.com/2007/03/30/video-grand-theft-philip...

In that vein, I remember SimLife, which had a whole textbook dedicated to it, showing how to model real world things like predator/prey cycles.

https://www.amazon.com/SimLife-Official-Strategy-Guide-Secre...

See a full description of the simulation software at:

https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/optical-engineer...

Philip Sabin, quoted in TFA, is a professor at King's College London with a long list of publications related to warfare [1]. He is also known as a war game designer where he puts his ideas in rule sets designed to simulate the battles he has studied. See his list of game credits in [2].

[1]. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/professor-philip-sabin

[2]. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/6341/philip-sabi...

This sounds like a good time to insert the very old joke about how the size of a horse's ass determined the size of the booster rockets.

https://cs.trains.com/trn/f/111/t/256024.aspx

The author mentions being inspired by the anime The Mysterious Cities of Gold. I found that anime to be historically well informed (informed, but not historically accurate, just consider the flying Conder machine). This led me to do some digging on the story and I found the real, historical inspirations for the characters.

Shameless plug, read my findings here:

https://jeffzurita.com/2019/05/19/estevan-and-the-cities-of-...

Honest question: Did you feel this way when you were working on your PhD at CERN? Were you working toward solving everyday problems, or fundamental science problems? If the latter, what changed your views since then?

I hope I don't come off as confrontational, it is not the least my intention. It just sounds like you have seen both sides of this issue and maybe you have a deeper understanding you could share.