Tags: space

While I’ve been listening to Hounds Of Love, I’ve also been reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey.

Here’s a passage from an early chapter as the crew of the International Space Station watch a typhoon forming:

How wired and wakeful the earth seems suddenly. It’s not one of the regular typhoons that haphazardly assault these parts of the world, they agree. They can’t see it all, but it’s bigger than projections had previously thought, and moving faster. They send their images, the latitudes and longitudes. They are like fortune tellers, the crew. Fortune tellers who can see and tell the future but do nothing to change or stop it. Soon their orbit will descend away to the east and south and no matter how they crane their necks backward at the earth-viewing windows the typhoon will roll out of sight and their vigil will end and darkness will hit them at speed.

They have no power – they have only their cameras and a privileged anxious view of its building magnificence. They watch it come.

The penultimate track on Hounds Of Love is the magnificent Hello Earth with its eerie Georgian chant for a chorus, and magnificent uilleann piping from the late great Liam Óg O’Flynn on the bridge. It too features a narrator watching from space:

Watching storms

Start to form

Over America.

Can’t do anything.

Just watch them swing

With the wind

Out to sea.

All you sailors, (“Get out of the waves! Get out of the water!”)

All life-savers, (“Get out of the waves! Get out of the water!”)

All you cruisers, (“Get out of the waves! Get out of the water!”)

All you fishermen,

Head for home.

Matching the song to the book feels like pairing a fine wine with a delicious morsel.

Atlas of Space

A nifty interactive 3D map of our solar system

The Shape of a Mars Mission (Idle Words)

You can think of flying to Mars like one of those art films where the director has to shoot the movie in a single take. Even if no scene is especially challenging, the requirement that everything go right sequentially, with no way to pause or reshoot, means that even small risks become unacceptable in the aggregate.

The Tyranny of Now — The New Atlantis

I’m not a fan of Nicholas Carr and his moral panics, but this is an excellent dive into some historical media theory.

What Innis saw is that some media are particularly good at transporting information across space, while others are particularly good at transporting it through time. Some are space-biased while others are time-biased. Each medium’s temporal or spatial emphasis stems from its material qualities. Time-biased media tend to be heavy and durable. They last a long time, but they are not easy to move around. Think of a gravestone carved out of granite or marble. Its message can remain legible for centuries, but only those who visit the cemetery are able to read it. Space-biased media tend to be lightweight and portable. They’re easy to carry, but they decay or degrade quickly. Think of a newspaper printed on cheap, thin stock. It can be distributed in the morning to a large, widely dispersed readership, but by evening it’s in the trash.

The Unraveling of Space-Time | Quanta Magazine

This special in-depth edition of Quanta is fascinating and very nicely put together.

Apple announced some stuff about artificial insemination at their WorldWide Developer Conference, none of which interests me one whit. But we did get a twitch of the webkit curtains to let us know what’s coming in Safari. That does interest me.

I’m really pleased to see that on desktop, websites that have been added to the dock will be able to intercept links for that domain:

Now, when a user clicks a link, if it matches the scope of a web app that the user has added to their Dock, that link will open in the web app instead of their default web browser.

Excellent! This means that if I click on a link to thesession.org from, say, my Mastodon site-in-the-dock, it will open in The Session site-in-the-dock. Make sure you’ve got the scope property set in your web app manifest.

I have a few different sites added to my dock: The Session, Mastodon, Google Calendar. Sure beats the bloat of Electron apps.

I have encountered a small bug. I’ll describe it here because I have no idea where to file it.

It’s to do with Spaces, Apple’s desktop management thingy. Maybe they don’t call it Spaces anymore. Maybe it’s called Mission Control now. Or Stage Manager. I can’t keep track.

Anyway, here are the steps to reproduce:

1. In Safari on Mac, go to a website like adactio.com
2. From either the File menu or the share icon, select Add to dock.
3. Click on the website’s icon in the dock to open it.
4. Using Apple’s desktop management (Spaces?) available through the F3 key, drag that window to a desktop other than desktop 1.
5. Right click on the site’s icon in the dock and select Options, then Assign To, then This Desktop.
6. Quit the app/website.
7. Return to desktop 1.

Expected behaviour: when I click on the icon in the dock to open the site, it will open in the desktop that it has been assigned to.

Observed behaviour: focus moves to the desktop that the site has been assigned to, but it actually opens in desktop 1.

If someone from Apple is reading, I hope that’s useful.

On the one hand, I hope this isn’t one of those bugs that only I’m experiencing because then I’ll feel foolish. On the other hand, I hope this is one of those bugs that only I’m experiencing because then others don’t have to put up with the buggy behaviour.

The Lunacy of Artemis (Idle Words)

Maciej rips NASA’s Artemis programme a new one:

Advocates for Artemis insist that the program is more than Apollo 2.0. But as we’ll see, Artemis can’t even measure up to Apollo 1.0. It costs more, does less, flies less frequently, and exposes crews to risks that the steely-eyed missile men of the Apollo era found unacceptable. It’s as if Ford in 2024 released a new model car that was slower, more accident-prone, and ten times more expensive than the Model T.

When a next-generation lunar program can’t meet the cost, performance, or safety standards set three generations earlier, something has gone seriously awry.

European astronaut rookies make the grade - BBC News

Rosemary and her dad are regular attendees of Brighton Astro so everyone is pretty excited about this news!

Okay, Color Spaces — ericportis.com

Everyone is quite rightly linking to this great interactive explainer on colour. It does a great job of describing complex concepts in a clear accessible way.

How NASA Learned to Love the Worm Logo - The New York Times

A delightful ode to a once-divisive design.

Monaspace

Five lovely monospaced variable fonts.

Erik Wernquist - Short Film: “One Revolution Per Minute”

Suppose you had a luxury spacecraft spinning at 1RPM to create 0.5g using centripetal force, as is often depicted in science fiction:

I believe that the perpetually spinning views would be extremely nauseating for most humans, even for short visits. Even worse, I suspect - when it comes to the comfort of the experience - would be the constantly moving light and shadows from the sun.

Clamp calculator | Utopia

Oh, this is a nice addition to the Utopia set of tools: when you don’t need a full-on type scale but you still want to figure out fluid clamp() values, the clamp calculator has you covered.

It’s got permalinks too!

Why We’ll Never Live in Space - Scientific American

In space travel, “Why?” is perhaps the most important ethical question. “What’s the purpose here? What are we accomplishing?” Green asks. His own answer goes something like this: “It serves the value of knowing that we can do things—if we try really hard, we can actually accomplish our goals. It brings people together.” But those somewhat philosophical benefits must be weighed against much more concrete costs, such as which other projects—Earth science research, robotic missions to other planets or, you know, outfitting this planet with affordable housing—aren’t happening because money is going to the moon or Mars or Alpha Centauri.

404 Page Not Found | Kate Wagner

Considering the average website is less than ten years old, that old warning from your parents that says to “be careful what you post online because it’ll be there forever” is like the story your dad told you about chocolate milk coming from brown cows, a well-meant farce. On the contrary, librarians and archivists have implored us for years to be wary of the impermanence of digital media; when a website, especially one that invites mass participation, goes offline or executes a huge dump of its data and resources, it’s as if a smallish Library of Alexandria has been burned to the ground. Except unlike the burning of such a library, when a website folds, the ensuing commentary from tech blogs asks only why the company folded, or why a startup wasn’t profitable. Ignored is the scope and species of the lost material, or what it might have meant to the scant few who are left to salvage the digital wreck.

Space Elevator

Scroll up to the Kármán line.

Some simple ways to make content look good - Set Studio

This is a terrific walkthrough from Andy showing how smart fundamentals in your CSS can give you a beautiful readable document without much work.

Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer - YouTube

This video was in my “Watch Later” queue for ages but I finally got ‘round to watching it this weekend. It’s ace! Great content, great narrative, great delivery—would’ve made a good dConstruct talk.

Fujichia: Sayable Space

This game is hard:

Sayable Space is a television game for 1 or more people, it consists of saying “Space” out loud at the same time as Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) during the intro to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Or actually that’s just half of the game. The second half is saying “Space”, and the first half is remembering that you are playing this game.

Inside the Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight

The positively steampunk piece of hardware used for tracking Alexei Leonov’s Apollo-Soyuz mission.