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The lonely science post thread

farmerbarleymow

farmerbarleymow

I'm Petee's spirit animal
Post up random and unconnected science stuff here.

This pleased me the other day - a teacher has installed a solar system in the corridor of his school. Every corridor should have one.

Eu2O7hLXAAAknT0


Video of it in the tweet below.

 
Where are the space arks? by Tom Stevenson
Vol. 43 No. 5 · 4 March 2021
War in Space by Bleddyn Bowen. Edinburgh, 356 pp., £85, July 2020, 978 1 4744 5048 5
Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics and the Ends of Humanity by Daniel Deudney. Oxford, 443 pp., £22.99, June 2020, 978 0 19 090334 3

The father of the Chinese space programme was a scientist on the Manhattan Project. Qian Xuesen went to America on a scholarship programme in 1935 and studied at MIT and Caltech before being recruited to work on jet propulsion and the atomic bomb. He would probably have remained in California, had he not been swept up in the red scare. After being questioned by the FBI and put under house arrest, Xuesen was traded to China in 1955 in return for eleven pilots captured during the Korean War.
Click to expand...

He was put in charge of the Chinese nuclear weapons programme and the programme that produced the Dongfeng series of ballistic missiles. China launched its first satellite, Dongfanhong-1, in 1970, using a rocket based on Xuesen’s missile designs. In hindsight the Xuesen affair was a remarkable blunder by the Americans. China made its first lunar landing in 2013. In June last year, it launched the final satellite in its geolocation network, BeiDou – its equivalent of the US government’s GPS, Russia’s Glonass and the EU’s Galileo. Like Nasa, the China National Space Administration has a rover on its way to Mars. Excluded by the US from co-operating on the International Space Station, it is now starting to build its own equivalent, the Large Modular Space Station.
Click to expand...
 
What's going on with the Hedge Sketch of posts #5 and 6? :confused:

I definitely wrote post #5 after #6...



e2a: Ignore me. I've worked it out now :rolleyes:
 
How Popperian falsification enabled the rise of Neoliberalism
Charlotte Sleigh
If you ask philosophically minded researchers – in the Anglophone world at least – why it is that science works, they will almost always point to the philosopher Karl Popper (1902-94) for vindication. Science, they explain, doesn’t presume to provide the final answer to any question, but contents itself with trying to disprove things. Science, so the Popperians claim, is an implacable machine for destroying falsehoods.
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Popper spent his youth in Vienna, among the liberal intelligentsia. His father was a lawyer and bibliophile, and an intimate of Sigmund Freud’s sister Rosa Graf. Popper’s early vocations draw him to music, cabinet making and educational philosophy, but he earned his doctorate in psychology from the University of Vienna in 1928. Realising that an academic post abroad offered escape from an increasingly antisemitic Austria (Popper’s grandparents were all Jewish, though he himself had been baptised into Lutheranism), he scrambled to write his first book. This was published as Logik der Forschung (1935), or The Logic of Scientific Discovery, and in it he put forward his method of falsification.
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The process of science, wrote Popper, was to conjecture a hypothesis and then attempt to falsify it. You must set up an experiment to try to prove your hypothesis wrong. If it is disproved, you must renounce it. Herein, said Popper, lies the great distinction between science and pseudoscience: the latter will try to protect itself from disproof by massaging its theory. But in science it is all or nothing, do or die.
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Mation said:
(I will read the article if you tell me it's in there, but can't easily be summarised.)
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I couldn't easily. It's tied into Hayek and Mises.

Science is profoundly altered when considered analogous to the open market. The notion that scientific theories vie with one another in open competition overlooks the fact that research ambitions and funding choices are shaped by both big-p and small-p politics. There is a reason why more scientific progress has been made in drugs for the treatment of diseases of wealth than of poverty. Moreover, career success in science – which shapes future research agendas when a person becomes a leader in their field – is a matter profoundly inflected by gender, race, class and dis/ability.
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Reminds me of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian, a great read if you get the time.
 
Scientists may have solved ancient mystery of 'first computer'
Fri 12 Mar 2021
From the moment it was discovered more than a century ago, scholars have puzzled over the Antikythera mechanism, a remarkable and baffling astronomical calculator that survives from the ancient world.

The hand-powered, 2,000-year-old device displayed the motion of the universe, predicting the movement of the five known planets, the phases of the moon and the solar and lunar eclipses. But quite how it achieved such impressive feats has proved fiendishly hard to untangle.
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Encryption Lava Lamps
What’s encrypting your web traffic as you surf the internet? An advanced algorithm created by a supercomputer? Actually, if the site you’re visiting is encrypted by the cybersecurity firm Cloudflare, your activity may be protected by nothing other than a wall of lava lamps. There couldn’t possibly be a groovier way to keep the internet secure.

Cloudflare covers about 10 percent of international web traffic, including the websites for Uber, OKCupid, or FitBit, for instance. And the colorful wall of lava lamps in the company’s San Francisco headquarters might be what’s generating the random code. The wall features over 100 lava lamps, spanning a variety of colors, and its random patterns deter hackers from accessing data.

As the lava lamps bubble and swirl, a video camera on the ceiling monitors their unpredictable changes and connects the footage to a computer, which converts the randomness into a virtually unhackable code.
Click to expand...
Bleeding hippies
 
You can find out what the Earth looked like hundreds of millions of years ago, including where your city is located.

dinosaurpictures.org

Ancient Earth

Earth looked very different long ago. Search for addresses across 750 million years of Earth's history.
dinosaurpictures.org

www.smithsonianmag.com

This Map Lets You Plug in Your Address to See How It's Changed Over the Past 750 Million Years

The interactive tool enables users to home in on a specific location and visualize how it has evolved between the Cryogenian period and the present
www.smithsonianmag.com www.smithsonianmag.com
 
farmerbarleymow said:
You can find out what the Earth looked like hundreds of millions of years ago, including where your city is located.

dinosaurpictures.org

Ancient Earth

Earth looked very different long ago. Search for addresses across 750 million years of Earth's history.
dinosaurpictures.org

www.smithsonianmag.com

This Map Lets You Plug in Your Address to See How It's Changed Over the Past 750 Million Years

The interactive tool enables users to home in on a specific location and visualize how it has evolved between the Cryogenian period and the present
www.smithsonianmag.com www.smithsonianmag.com
Click to expand...
It's a bit unclear to me how they're defining "location". Is it the coordinates or the chunk of rock your location is currently on?
 
RubyToogood said:
It's a bit unclear to me how they're defining "location". Is it the coordinates or the chunk of rock your location is currently on?
Click to expand...
It appears to be the chunk of rock. If you select "show equator" in the display options, then it makes it a bit easier to see whereabouts on the globe you are, as you move through time.
 
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