A little late with the news, but anyway the SpaceX’s Falcon-9 has successfully landed on the drone barge “Of Course I Still Love You”. The landing deck is 170 by 300 feet long, and the Falcon’s legs stand 60 feet apart. As you can see by the whitecaps, the sea was very rough with high altitude crosswinds of 50 mph and low altitude winds of 25 mph.
For true space geeks, the beautifully produced full 18 minute video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZXu_rYF51M
Some great stuff coming out of the Tollense battefield dig, as long as you can ignore lines like “If you fight with body armor and helmet and corselet, you need daily training or you can’t move” (Hansen).
Somebody (possibly Henson himself) posted Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War over at Kuro5hin in 2006. I had no idea Kuro5hin still existed, and Henson’s paper could use some consideration of group selection, but anyway it’s a worthwhile and controversial read.
It seems to me that if Henson’s basic thesis is right, our current global political situation is not just eerily similar to that of the mid-1930s, it’s actually the same phenomenon – so we better get it under control.
Wikipedia has a nice technical write up that explains why you should never, ever use the .local suffix the way Microsoft has frequently recommended.
But I like this politically incorrect version better:
Microsoft: “Gee, nobody is using the .local piece of the globally shared Internet namespace, so let’s tell all our customers that it’s best practice to use it for our totally super cool version of Kerberized LDAP service called Active Directory!”
Novell: “Oh noes, Microsoft has made an inferior competitor to our flagship technology! It’ll probably destroy our market advantage just like their inferior networking stack did!”
Linux/Unix: “Oh noes, when somebody attaches the new Microsoft technology to an existing mature standards-based network, Kerberos breaks!”
Microsoft: “HA HA HA HA HA HA HA we are totally following the standard, lusers!”
Linux/Unix: “grumble whine we will patch Kerberos even though we don’t agree.”
Microsoft: “whatevs. Did you notice we broke your DNS too? :)”
Apple: “Hey, IETF, we have this cool new zeroconf technology. We want to reserve the .local namespace for it.”
IETF: “OK, sure, you’ve filled out all the forms and attended all the meetings and there’s two independent implementations so you’ve done everything correctly. We have no valid reason to deny this allocation.”
Novell: “Hey, we were using SLP already, what did you just do?”
Apple: “Oh, whoopsie, did we just eat your lunch? HA HA HA HA HA”
Microsoft: “Hey, what just happened?”
Apple: “HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA RFC6762, lusers!”
Linux/Unix: “grumble mumble whatevs. We can do mDNS.”
Microsoft customers: “OH NOES WE ARE SCREWZ0RRED”
Microsoft: “Meh, you didn’t really want Apple products on your networks anyway.”
:TEN YEARS LATER:
Microsoft customers: “How much would it cost to fix this network?”
Microsoft: “What, were you talking to us? Everything’s fine here. Windows 10 forever!”
Legavrik wanes and there’s no need of candles to put the cattle to bed.
A fine Imbolc, St. Brighid’s day, Candlemas, St. Mary’s feast, or Groundhog day, as you prefer!
I stumbled across this discussion of Asian thingies.
I believe I have seen these in a non-Asian context. I think I need to hit the books…
Professor Ziony Zevit believes that the Hebrew word “tsela”, which is the word used in the Old Testament of the Bible to describe the bone taken from Adam and used in the creation of Eve, should not be translated as “rib”, and proposes a different bone – one that many animals have, but men and women notably don’t.
The Experimental Delta Clipper (DC-X) of the 1990s was canceled before it ever made it into space.
The Rotary Rocket Company’s incredibly innovative Roton was designed to land with helicopter blades instead of a parachute or a landing rocket. After the collapse of the small telecommunications satellite market in 1999 the company went out of business without ever building their unique spinning aerospike main engine; without a clear mission, investors were unwilling to fund the various exotic technologies that the company was successfully pioneering.
In 2013 SpaceX’s series of “grasshopper tests” picked up where the DC-X left off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwwS4YOTbbw
But SpaceX’s plan to land their Falcon 9 lifter on a seagoing barge has not yet succeeded.
And bringing us up to date, Blue Origin landed the New Shepard on the 23rd. I love the final replay of the landing sequence!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pillaOxGCo
Once upon a time, tractors and other farm implements came with a wrench that fit all the nuts and bolts on the machinery. Farmers being the clever and parsimonious people they are, they never paid for ten wrenches when just one would do the job! I used to find these things laying all over the place in Uncle Irving’s junkyard; now they are collector’s items.
There’s actually an international organization, based in France, that studies them.
The site’s all in French, but there are lots of enjoyable and interesting photos if you click around their archives.
Heather writes:
One of my web design e-newsletters had a link to the indoors Google Street View of the British Museum. So I wandered around a bit and found this… Celtic Life in Iron Age Britain: A British Museum exhibition of Iron Age objects from collections across the UK.
Medievalists.net has an article titled Why Cats were Hated in Medieval Europe that I liked. It references Irina Metzler’s article Heretical Cats: Animal Symbolism in Religious Discourse which seems to be only available in German, and Joyce Salisbury’s The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages which is available in English as an ebook.
Medievalisterrant chimes in with a post on Cats as pets in the Middle Ages.
November 13th, 1002 Æþelræd Unræd ordered the slaughter of all the Danes in England. Although at that point Aethelraed could only really enforce his will in about a third of his domain, this ill-advised plan did manage to cause the death of Harald Bluetooth’s daughter Gunhilde, and in some histories the St. Brice’s Day Massacre leads directly to the conquest of England by the Danish King Sweyn Forkbeard (Gunhilde’s brother) and Sweyn’s son Knut the Great.
Never program time. Call the system instead, and let the sysadmins do their job. The GNU ‘date’ program is excellent, and a good sysadmin will maintain it rigorously.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty-lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. — William Gibson, The Gernsback Continuum
The photoessay This Used to Be the Future reminded me of a childhood spent reading yellowed 1940s science fiction.
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13th century double-edged European knightly sword, 2lb 10oz (1.2kg), 38″ (964mm) long and 6½” (165mm) across the quillons. Found in the river Witham, Lincolnshire, in July 1825, and presented to the Royal Archaeological Institute by the registrar to the Bishop of Lincoln. The blade was broken near the tip and mended “in modern times” according to the British Library website.
Said to bear an indecipherable inscription “+NDXOXCHWDRCHWDRCHDXORUN” inlaid in gold wire on one side, but to me it looks more like “+NDXOXCHWDRCHWDRCHDXORVI+”.
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Harking back to my previous post on girl scouts of 1918…
Girl Scouting today’s still got that moxie.
Jainism is arguably the oldest religion continuously practiced by mankind. Arguably, because Hindus say their tradition is older, and will often claim that Jainism is merely a splinter sect of Hinduism. Jains typically disagree, but Jains are non-violent and nominally atheists – so they don’t get a lot of respect from the violent theists that control most of the world. In any case both religions are so ancient that their origin stories are unlikely to have escaped embellishment by later generations.
Anyway, the BBC is reporting that India’s Supreme Court has revoked their earlier decision that made it illegal to voluntarily stop eating and drinking as a spiritual practice. Since this is often the only avenue a bedridden, terminally ill person has to gain release from incessant suffering, I have to applaud.
Bruce Schneier‘s crypto-gram linked this, which in turn links some great images of medieval chained libraries.
