Happy Autumnal Equinox! As this traditional celebration of the Ancient Britons is presumably a public holiday in Brexit Britain, you can take the rest of the day off to read this lot
Happy invoicing!
- Crash Course: How Boeing's Managerial Revolution Created the 737 MAX Disaster - A shift in management culture at Boeing, driven by the imperatives of Wall Street, led to catastrophic shortcomings in the 737 MAX: ”Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software—another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse… Capitalism does half-assed things like that, especially in concert with computer software and oblivious regulators.”
- Ancient slag offers insight into the uneven pace of technological advances - No, not northernladyuk: ”Tel-Aviv University archaeologist Erez Ben-Yosef and his colleagues went rummaging through heaps of slag, the glassy waste discarded after smelters separate copper from its ore… Less copper mixed with the slag suggests more-efficient smelting, so by tracking changes in the slag, Ben-Yosef and his colleagues could track the progress of a technology that powered the ancient world.”
- Qatar-OSCAR 100 Narrowband WebSDR - HT to Paddy for this realtime access to the narrow band transponder onboard the Es'hail-2 satellite. Whatever that means
- How I Capture Striking Time-Blended Astrolandscapes, and You Can Too - Paul Schmit explains the techniques he uses to create remarkable day-and-night landscape photographs: ”In late summer, in the midlatitudes of the Northern Hemisphere (a.k.a. my part of the world), it is possible to point an ultra-wide-angle lens toward the southwest and capture the setting sun on the right side of the frame, and then, after the last hints of daylight disappear from the horizon (a couple hours later), capture the dense, luminous core of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, moving through the left side of the frame, all without any need to reposition the camera.”
- Asteroid Dust Triggered an Explosion of Life on Ancient Earth - We are stardust, we are golden: ”Forget the dinosaurs and the massive crater, and rewind an extra 400 million years from that dramatic moment… Unlike the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, this earlier space rock never made it to Earth. Instead, a collision in the asteroid belt flooded the solar system with so much dust that, given some other changes at the time, allowed life on Earth to flourish, new research suggests.”
- Take a stunning 250,000-kilometer-long video tour of Saturn's rings - ”Kevin M. Gill… took a pile of images taken on July 26, 2009, from just before the equinox, stitched them together in 3D, and remapped them into a cylindrical projection, creating an animation that makes it feel like you're flying above the rings at the equinox, following them around Saturn for 250,000 kilometers!” Wheeee!
- My Father Was Left Out of Martin Scorsese's Bob Dylan Movie - Jaqcues Levy, who collaborated with Dylan on most of the lyrics for the album Desire and put his experience in the theatre to work as director of the Rolling Thunder Revue, is oddly missing from Scorsese's film. His son, Julien, tells the story of the collaboration and describes how central Jacques was to the project: ”Dylan, my father would later say, confided to him that he was sick of jets and limos… Rolling Thunder was to be no ordinary tour, and, envisioning himself an act in the circus rather than its ringleader, Dylan turned to my father, a professional with years of experience choreographing stage productions and helping different personalities coalesce into a coherent product. Dylan asked him to direct the tour. He accepted.”
- Play with your food: How to Make Sconic Sections - ”The conic sections are the four classic geometric curves that can occur at the intersection between a cone and a plane: the circle, ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola. The scone is a classic single-serving quick bread that is often served with breakfast or tea… In what follows, we’ll show you how to bake cone-shaped scones, to slice them into plane geometric curves, and to highlight those curves by selective application of toppings.” Yum!
- Reverse-engineering precision op amps from a 1969 analog computer - Ken's back: ”We are restoring a vintage1 computer that CuriousMarc recently obtained. Analog computers were formerly popular for fast scientific computation, but pretty much died out in the 1970s. They are interesting, though, as a completely different computing paradigm from digital computers. In this blog post, I'm going to focus on the op amps used in Marc's analog computer, a Simulators Inc. model 240.”
- School Reading Books of the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's - ”A visual database for all those books you forgot!” There's even one about Thomas Cook customers trying to get home:
Happy invoicing!
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