2021-08-07

Cool

Powering the Lunar Base – Casey Handmer's blog

I also looked into mounting solar panels on a very tall tower, similar to a radio mast. These are strong, light, and tall, so perhaps there was some trade between aluminium tower sections and panels that could put the panels high enough that they’d never be shaded, even in the depths of Lunar winter, and thus avoid more batteries than the 2 hours or so necessary to endure a Lunar eclipse.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the minimum altitude necessary to avoid any shading is 2750 m, rather taller than any structure ever built on Earth.

The Problem with Perceptual Hashes

Perceptual hashes are messy. The simple fact that image data is reduced to a small number of bits leads to collisions and therefore false positives. When such algorithms are used to detect criminal activities, especially at Apple scale, many innocent people can potentially face serious problems.
Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten

My problem is: doing anything in medicine is illegal until you clear a giant hurdle. To clear the hurdle, you have to pay millions (sometimes billions) of dollars, fill in thousands of pages of forms, conduct a bunch of studies that can be sabotaged for reasons like “this drug is too good so it would be unethical to have a control group”, and wait approximately ten years. You have to clear this hurdle to do anything, even the most obviously correct actions. Everything starts out illegal, and then a tiny set of possible actions is exempted from the general illegality. The easiest name for this hurdle is “the FDA”, since they’re the agency charged with enforcing it.

NASA is looking for people who want to spend a year simulating a mission on Mars - TheBlaze
Preorders for This Electromagnetic Rifle Are Being Taken for $3,775

The company says the weapon is “capable of accelerating any ferromagnetic projectile (under 1/2″ in diameter) to 200+ fps [feet per second]” and can produce up to 100 Joules of force, or 75 foot-pounds, similar to the muzzle energy of some .22 rifles,

Deep dive into stupid: Meet the growing group that rejects germ theory

Ars also reached out to Facebook to understand how all of the health misinformation and falsehoods in the group fall in the company's moderation policies. The social media giant is said to be actively monitoring the site, reviewing posts, and removing violating material. Broadly, if a group repeatedly breaks rules, Facebook will permanently remove it.
What We Are Not Teaching Boys About Being Human
UW moves 70-ton Chamberlin Rock off campus after student backlash

The rock, formerly known as Chamberlin Rock, was being taken off-campus following an initiative last June by the Wisconsin Black Student Union and Wunk Sheek to remove it because a nickname given to the boulder is a racial slur.

FBI Busts International Plot To Take Out Myanmar's UN Ambassador In New York
US unleashes B-52s in bid to stem Taliban advance
- no paywall US unleashes B-52s in bid to stem Taliban advance | Center For Middle Eastern Studies
- HN Comment
Entire bases were abandoned overnight, full of supplies and equipment: https://youtu.be/f37xrmiqmnU?t=132 There are videos of Taliban rolling through cities in American humvees: https://t.co/cdHsZgjSv8 Its a matter of time before they take Kabul.