Monday Links from the Bench vol. CDLXXXIX

[Zigenare]

Makes you think a bit when you consider that the development started a mere 60 years ago, about 10 years after Mach 1 had been achieved.

And the origin of the Titanium used to build the things!

I wonder what they're working on now at the "Skunk Works"!

[DoctorStrangelove]

Makes you think a bit when you consider that the development started a mere 60 years ago, about 10 years after Mach 1 had been achieved.

[northernladuk]

I do like the SR-71 stories and must admit I didn't know anything about Oxcart at all so really interesting read.

A little extra read about some of the differences between the two here if you did enjoy NF's link.

OXCART vs Blackbird: Do You Know the Difference? — Central Intelligence Agency

[DoctorStrangelove]

SR71 Speed check.

'Nuff said.



Nice set of links.

[NickFitz]

Getting to one of those inflection points where I have to double-check the Roman numerals before posting

• Where on Earth Is Sam Sayers? - ”On a perfect summer day, a solo hiker went missing from a Cascade trail. A search ensued unlike anything the state of Washington has ever seen. Nine months later, the mystery has consumed the lives of thousands. Where did she go?”
  
  
• The Oxcart Story - ”One spring day in 1962 a test pilot named Louis Schalk, employed by the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, took off from the Nevada desert in an aircraft the like of which had never been seen before. A casual observer would have been startled by the appearance of this vehicle; he would perhaps have noticed especially its extremely long, slim, shape, its two enormous jet engines, its long, sharp, projecting nose, and its swept-back wings which appeared far too short to support the fuselage in flight. He might well have realized that this was a revolutionary airplane; he could not have known that it would be able to fly at three times the speed of sound for more than 3,000 miles without refueling, or that toward the end of its flight, when fuel began to run low, it could cruise at over 90,000 feet.” The CIA'a official history of OXCART, also known as the A-11 and then the A-12, which was ultimately cancelled because the SR-71 was considered sufficient. Bonus linky: Embrace the Paste, all about the tubular food prepared for U-2 pilots. (The images seem broken, but each one is a link to the full-size version. Strange that the USAF can't maintain a website properly…)
  
  
• A nearby binary neutron star collision may have seeded the early solar system with gold - Where the bling came from: ”In a new study, astronomers have found that a small fraction of all the gold on planet Earth was likely formed in a single, catastrophic, and very weird event: The merger of two neutron stars.”
  
  
• Slime Molds Remember — but Do They Learn? - The gloopy things are getting smarter: ”Evidence mounts that organisms without nervous systems can in some sense learn and solve problems, but researchers disagree about whether this is ‘primitive cognition.’”
  
  
• Sacred Spaces: The Grand Interiors of Modern Churches Across Europe and Japan by Thibaud Poirier - ”Thibaud Poirier travels the world photographing the architectural spaces that surround us as we live, sleep, study, and pray. In his most recent series, the French photographer captured the interiors of 29 modern churches across Germany, The Netherlands, France, Denmark, and Japan to see how each city has designed structures of worship within the last century. ” This is the church of the Resurrection of Christ, Köln, Germany designed by Gottfried Böhm, 1957.
  
  
  
  
  
• A revolution in time - How the invention of year numbering that is independent of events allows history and the future to exist: ”From earliest recorded history right up to the years after Alexander the Great’s conquests in the late 4th century BCE, historical time – the public and annual marking of the passage of years – could be measured only in three ways: by unique events, by annual offices, or by royal lifecycles… While chronology and dating might at first seem not the most exciting of things, they are the stuff that history is made on, for dates do two things: they allow things to happen only once, and they insist on the ordering and interrelation of all happenings.”
  
  
• The exoplanet next door - ”The hunt for exoplanets has, in some ways, been about the hunt for an Earth-like planet – something warm where water could exist… A new discovery published August 24 in Nature hits closer to home, with an Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of its star. What’s more, that star is Proxima Centauri, only 4.24 light-years away.” We should pop round with a cake or something
  
  
• How a Half-Inch Beetle Finds Fires 80 Miles Away - The beetles have turned up to all kinds of fires, or even things that just seem like fires: ”They have descended on at least one UC Berkeley football game at California Memorial Stadium -- rather unfortunately situated in the midst of some recently burnt pine hills -- at which an estimated 20,000 cigarettes were being smoked. The beetles’ disappointment on discovering the source of the ‘fire’ was probably only matched by the irritation of the smokers swatting confused beetles attempting to bite their necks and hands.”
  
  
• The Lost Picture Show: Hollywood Archivists Can’t Outpace Obsolescence - We all know about old film stock self-combusting, but even modern digital creations are at risk of being lost for a variety of unexpected reasons: ”When Pixar wanted to release its 2003 film Finding Nemo for Blu-ray 3D in 2012, the studio had to rerender the film to produce the 3D effects… The movement of seagrass, for instance, had been controlled by a random number generator, but there was no way to retrieve the original seed value for that generator.”
  
  
• Meet Stefano Cerio, the Italian Artist Capturing Abandoned Amusement Parks in China - ”Stefano Cerio has a passion for capturing desolate locations normally populated by tens of thousands of people.” The headline is a bit misleading as these parks aren’t abandoned: he went early in the morning, before people showed up. This is at Huairou:
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!