2025-11-02

Worthy

• This is epic: NASA's Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage

  It has been in development since 2006, originally begun under the Presidency of George W Bush as the Crew Exploration Vehicle for the Constellation program. Literally my entire adult life. Duke Nukem Forever took only 14 years. You can make a whole new fully qualified engineer from conception to graduation in less time.

  You might be forgiven for thinking that because SLS is big like the Saturn V, there is also room somewhere in the fairing for a lunar lander, like in Apollo, but you’d be wrong. The mass budget on SLS for a lunar lander is 0 kg. I’ve trawled through the (public) archives in search of internal NASA documentation raising the flag that deleting the lunar lander on a lunar landing rocket might be an oversight, but have thus far found nothing. If you have a document, I’d be keen to review it. With a launch rate of one per two years, it’s not like another SLS could launch a different lunar lander.

  SLS and Orion do not meet NASA’s internal safety standards, and it’s not even close. Even with ten successful uncrewed test flights, fundamentally flawed designs would not create great enough statistical certainty on safety, and instead NASA proposes to fly Artemis II with people around the Moon, a uniquely demanding mission, in a unique configuration with a heat shield design and life support system that has never been tested before. It is quite something to have managed to engineer a spacecraft even more dangerous than Shuttle, but NASA, Boeing, and Lockheed have done it. Once again, NASA is rolling the dice on tragedy and national humiliation.

  • I cannot do any justice with excerpts. read the whole thing.

Horseshit

• The truth of Ancient Rome hides under its myth of decadence

• America's best ski town is hiding in the New Mexico high desert

• NASA pushes back after Kim Kardashian claims the 1969 moon landing was fake

• What History's Great Disasters Have in Common

• The Rise of Digital Motherhood: How Baby Monitors Became Mandatory

• No One Knows How Big Pumpkins Can Get

• Wall Street's Elite Are Turning Marathon Times into a Status Symbol

• Addiction Markets: Abolish Corporate-Run Gambling

  corporate-run gambling is now pervasive in America, and Americans don’t like what they see. Gambling, particularly online sports betting, is now everywhere. About a fifth of Americans placed a bet in the past year, mostly through gambling apps. Since 2018, when online sports gambling got a big boost from a key Supreme Court decision, Americans have bet more than half a trillion dollars on sports. And the attempts to change our culture are extremely visible; I watched the Dolphins-Ravens game last night on Amazon Prime, and I lost count of the number of ads for DraftKings and FanDuel, with various celebrities lending their names to this cultural phenomenon. Every major sports media network, sports league, and podcast are now working with a major gambling company. At this point, gambling is intrinsic to the financing of sports; FanDuel now operates “15 regional sports networks across the country previously on the brink of bankruptcy.”

  While the religious right and Catholic institutions oppose gambling, progressives have not been particularly concerned until recently, preferring to scold around questions of race and gender than traditional fire and brimstone sins. But that is changing, as the left swings more towards concern over inequality and economics than non-commercial questions.

• UBCO study debunks the idea that the universe is a computer simulation

• Scientists are one step closer to testing ancient skeletons for pregnancy

• Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now? | Vogue

  there was an overwhelming sense, from single and partnered women alike, that regardless of the relationship, being with a man was an almost guilty thing to do. On the Delusional Diaries podcast, fronted by two New York-based influencers, Halley and Jaz, they discuss whether having a boyfriend is “lame” now. “Why does having a boyfriend feel Republican?” read a top comment. “Boyfriends are out of style. They won’t come back in until they start acting right,” read another with thousands of likes. In essence, “having a boyfriend typically takes hits on a woman’s aura,” as one commenter claimed. Funnily enough, both of these hosts have partners, which is something I often see online. Even partnered women will lament men and heterosexuality—partly in solidarity with other women, but also because it is now fundamentally uncool to be a boyfriend-girl.

• The U.S. tried permanent daylight saving time–and hated it

celebrity gossip

• Andrew had 40 prostitutes brought to five-star Thailand hotel room

Musk

• Want to Know What Tesla Is Doing with Cybertrucks? SpaceX Has 'Em All

• Sam Altman tried to cancel his Tesla Roadster, but he was ghosted

Robot uprising / Humanioid Helpers

• Humanoid robots could lift 4k times own weight thanks to 'artificial muscle'

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• GTA developer accused of sacking 30 staff in 'union-busting' move

  • Rockstar accused of "ruthless" firing ahead of GTA6, cutting unionised employees

• Prusa Open Sources a Solution for Smart Filament Tagging

• Some crazy person has created a version of Windows 7 that fits in just 69MB of disk space.

• Ducking annoying: why has iPhone's autocorrect function gone haywire?

• The cloud is really just someone else's computer

• Closing Windows 11's Task Manager accidentally opens up more copies

• Bluesky Will Test a 'Dislike' Option

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• Making batteries more like bombs | Orca Notes

  what if we could make batteries more like TNT, and assemble them at the molecular scale, with anode and cathode only angstroms apart? Polymer chemistry seems to give us the tools for this kind of thing fairly straightforwardly. We already have plenty of ion-conducting polymers—that’ll do for the separator. We also have oxidizing and reducing monomers, and conjugated electron-conducting elements. All the ingredients for a tiny battery.

  • Lithium batteries are already decent incendiaries, as much as i like the idea of a Shipstone power source the problem of stabilizing stored energy is going to put a hard limit on the density we can achieve, i think. We could use nitroglycerin as automotive fuel, but we find it convenient to use less energy dense but safer fuels instead. The proposed approach likely has many other benefits beyond raw density to offer.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• AI blew open software security, now OpenAI wants to fix it with agent Aardvark

• A.I. Is Making Death Threats More Realistic

• Insuring Against an Oracle Default Is Getting Costlier. Is It a Bad Omen for AI?

• Big Tech Earnings Reveal Cracks in Case for AI Spending

• Los Angeles to equip city workforce with Google AI

• Meta Bought 1 GW of Solar This Week

• What We Know About Energy Use at U.S. Data Centers Amid the AI Boom

• OpenAI Moves to Complete Potentially the Largest Theft in Human History

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• You won't see interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS zoom closest to the sun on Oct. 30 — but these spacecraft will | Space

  we have a flotilla of spacecraft exploring the solar system that will have much better viewing angles than we get here on Earth. The small armada of spacecraft at Mars, for example, have a view of the hemisphere of the sun that 3I/ATLAS is currently rounding. In fact, our Mars missions had a ringside seat to 3I/ATLAS' closest approach to the Red Planet on Oct. 3, when it was 0.19 AU (17.6 million miles, or 28.4 million km) distant. Other spacecraft that will be able to watch 3I/ATLAS at perihelion include NASA's Psyche mission to the asteroid of the same name and the Lucy mission to Jupiter's Trojan asteroids. Meanwhile, the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy moons Explorer (JUICE) probe, which recently conducted a flyby of Venus on its elongated journey to the Jovian system, will be closest as it heads in the general direction toward 3I/ATLAS. Unfortunately, because JUICE is currently using its primary antenna as a sun-shield to protect its instruments, it won't be able to transmit the data from its observations of 3I/ATLAS back to Earth until next February.

• First Evidence for a Non-Gravitational Acceleration of 3I/ATLAS at Perihelion | by Avi Loeb

  If 3I/ATLAS is propelled by the rocket effect of ejected gas, then momentum conservation implies that the object would lose half its mass over a characteristic timescale equal to the ejection speed divided by the measured non-gravitational acceleration. For a thermal ejection speed of a few hundred meters per second, the evaporation half-life of 3I/ATLAS is 6 months. This implies that over the month it takes 3I/ATLAS to cross a spatial scale of order its perihelion separation from the Sun, 3I/ATLAS would lose about a tenth of its mass. Such a massive mass loss should be detectable in the form of a large plume of gas surrounding 3I/ATLAS during the upcoming months of November and December 2025.

  The reported level of non-gravitational acceleration corresponds to a modest spatial deviation of order ten times the radius of the Earth over a period of a month, insufficient to bring 3I/ATLAS significantly closer to any Solar System planet from its original gravitational path.

Crypto con games

• Coinbase CEO Exposes Prediction Market Vulnerability

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Cracks in the Credit Market Could Be a Warning for Wall Street

• Credit market hit with $200B 'flood' of AI-related issuance

• Meta, XAI Spread Risks of AI Splurge with Off-Balance-Sheet Debt

• At $1.2T, More High-Grade Debt Now Tied to AI Than Banks

• AI giants turn to debt to finance tech race

• Credit Fraud Fears Loom After BlackRock's HPS Zeros Out Bad Loan

• Lenders rewrite their collateral rules, suggesting a is crisis waiting

• Fed 'Chorus' Comes Out Against Latest Cut, Citing Inflation

• Nvidia's $400B Week Fueled by Jensen Huang's Dealmaking Spree

• Gold Surpasses US Treasuries for First Time in 30 Years

• Automakers hunt high and low for chips as supply crisis worsens

Trump

• The Myth of the '20 minute timer' on the RNC Pipe Bomb

  nearly five years later, Younger’s story is collapsing under the ight of newly released evidence. FBI laboratory documents, recently made public by the Select Subcommittee on January 6th, completely disprove her claim about a 20-minute timer—and appear to represent the most significant and consequential flaw in her entire account: There was nothing on the RNC device capable of pointing to any number, let alone the number 20.

  there are even more questionable factors related to the RNC device than what we have already presented. What comes next explains how the original 40-minute window that once centered the bomb’s placement around Younger’s own movements in the alley is now shielded by the one digital record that could prove which timeline was real. In an amazing “coincidence,” it turns out that the cell phone data that might have identified the alleged suspect from the evening of Jan 5 vanished inside the very federally backed communications program that employed Younger when she discovered the bomb while teleworking on Jan 6.

• US intelligence director says former strategy of 'regime change' is over

Democrats

• Explosive report claims a network of charities connected to George Soros funneled $40M to support Zohran Mamdani's political rise in tax-dodging scheme

  Antar said he uncovered how Soros's tax-exempt organizations helped fund activities that 'mimicked what looked like a grassroots campaign', including large-scale door-knocking efforts. 'The problem is they weren't campaigning for a general cause like women's rights,' he said. 'They were campaigning for a specific candidate. And that's the rub.' Under US tax law, a 501(c)(3) may fund a 501(c)(4) for nonpartisan purposes such as issue advocacy or civic engagement. But that money is not supposed to be used to directly support or oppose a candidate, a line that can be difficult to prove without internal communications or evidence showing intent.

  • The nonprofits i worked with, back when, were very concerned with those rules and would refuse to speak of "the $party candidate" for fear of being too specific. But they were not leftist aligned and as we know its (D)ifferent when They Do It.

Left Angst

• Top Trump Officials Are Moving onto Military Bases

• You Can't Refuse to Be Scanned by ICE's Facial Recognition App, DHS Document Say

• A flood of Chinese graduate students in STEM was a boon to U.S. students

• "Read A Book"

  One of the more maddening aspects of the rise of wokeness in the last decade was how some of the younger advocates for “social justice” responded to criticism. “Read a book,” they’d tell me, and roll their eyes. I was twice their age, had relevant degrees from Oxford and Harvard, but I could obviously only believe what I believed because I had never “read a book.” No discussion was possible until I had “educated” myself — a task they refused to expend any “emotional labor” on. A few exasperated huffs, a slight panic in their angry eyes, and they were gone.

• No Country for Old Media: The Shameful Blackout on Arctic Frost

  Since the Democrats have complete control of the legacy media, they decide what matters. They have manufactured nearly every major crisis where Trump is concerned. So much so that they’ve inadvertently manifested a Boy Who Cried Wolf scenario for themselves, which is why they’re so dangerous now. They are willing to do and say anything to win a war they’ve already lost.

• Top researchers consider leaving U.S.: 'The science world is ending'

• Are Britain and the US Losing Their Allure for Top Talent?

• Colorado launches lawyers at Trump admin over space base relocation

• Gilded Rage – Why Silicon Valley went from libertarian to authoritarian

• ICU nurse, army veteran among US citizens caught in ICE dragnet

• Shutdown Pain Spreads at One Month, Touching Millions

• The Federal Election Commission is down to 2 members. FEC work at a standstill

• ICE Has Diverted over 25,000 Officers from Their Jobs

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Drone startup backed by Peter Thiel crashed and burned in armed forces trials

• US will not send officials to COP30 climate talks

World

• An odd brew: the case of the man behind a Scottish tea fraud

• Why are councillors in London running for office in Bangladesh?

• Illegal teeth-whitening industry exposed by BBC

• Tanzania Elections: Complete Media and Internet Blackout

• Australian influencer family move to UK to avoid social media ban

• Darfur’s besieged capital falls to the Rapid Support Forces

  • Visible from space, Sudan's bloodied sands expose a massacre of thousands

• Nutella maker in hazelnut stand-off with Turkish dealers

• The idolatry of victimhood 

  A victims’ commissioner (the current one a victim herself) was created in 2010. Inquiries, once a rarity, became an instinctive reaction to any government mistake. Laws named after victims pass Parliament with ease, dealing with everything from mould in flats to terrorism. A victims and courts bill, which will give victims more rights in their dealings with the police, is weaving its way into law. If any man personifies the rise of the victim it is Sir Keir Starmer. The prime minister has few fully formed political beliefs beyond a vague idea that human rights are good because the state can be very bad. Victims are mentioned 24 times in Labour’s most recent manifesto. For comparison, “pensioners” appear twice. At the party’s annual conference in Liverpool the Labour leader was introduced on stage by Margaret Aspinall, whose son died at Hillsborough. “This party was founded to hear working-class people like that,” said Sir Keir. “To look directly into the eyes of their suffering.” Labour once advanced their economic interests, now it manages their emotional needs

• Italy to launch age verification system for porn sites

• Satellite Images Reveal Scale of Melissa Destruction in Jamaica

• Huntingdon train stabbing latest news: Multiple people attacked and two arrested

  Witnesses described seeing a man with a large knife, and passengers hiding in the toilets to escape the rampage, The Times reported. One witness told the paper there was “blood everywhere” and people were getting “stamped” on by others as they tried to flee. “I heard some people shouting ‘We love (you)’,” the witness said. The attack is understood to have started shortly after the LNER train left Peterborough station.

Israel

• Israel still blocking most Gaza aid as military carries out more attacks

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• How teenager gave a street concert and was caught up in Russia's repressive past

China

• Chinese Public Toilets Dispense TP after 30 second ad

• BYD profit plunges 33% as China EV price war squeezes margins

Health / Medicine

• Scientists look to genetics to explain why GLP-1 drugs work only for some people

  • Even opioids only work for some people.

• Powerful new antibiotic that can kill superbugs discovered in soil bacteria

• FDA announces plans to relax rules about copycat drugs.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Scientists May Have Miscalculated How Many Humans Are on Earth

• Genetically Engineered Fungus Could Help Fix Your Mosquito Problem

• Michael Mann Finally Goes Away | National Review

  Mann has finally dropped any claims against us after wasting God knows how much money from his (presumed) financial backers, and Mark Steyn’s post on how Mann’s famous hockey stick graph is intellectually bogus and wrong is still right here for your reading pleasure. Mann boasted that he would destroy us, and we are still here, alive and thriving, while he is slinking away in humiliation.

• The mystery of why leaves change colour in the autumn

• Chimps Can Revise Their Beliefs When Shown New Evidence, Study Finds

• Selection and transmission of gut microbiome alone can shift mammalian behavior

• Could smaller families 'rewild' the planet – and make humans happier?

• What the Air You Breathe May Be Doing to Your Brain

• Black vultures attack and kill cattle. Climate change is one reason they're spreading north

  Black vultures, scavengers that sometimes attack and kill sick or newborn animals, didn't used to be a problem here. But now Bryant frequently sees the birds following a birth. He hasn't lost a calf in several years, but they've killed his animals before. So now he takes measures to stop them. In some of his fields, he erects a scarecrow of sorts—a dead black vulture—aimed at scaring off the birds. It's a requirement of his depredation permit through the Kentucky Farm Bureau, which allows him to shoot a few birds a year. The dead bird keeps the live birds away for about a week, but they eventually come back, he said.