Too big to fail/rev XX

Too big to fail, a concept embedded in finance also applies to defense. Example no. 1, the F 35.

In the pursuit of $$

A must see to see why, in the pursuit of money, tragedy can result, especially in terms of systems that fly.

But there’s a much deeper and scandal-ridden story about how this plane got to market, and it starts with Boeing’s fierce rivalry with Airbus — and their race to put a new engine in their planes.

The video above shows how those business problems led to technical ones — and, eventually, two terrible tragedies.

Any questions and ... thanks Alex & Richard for turning me onto this.

Lover boy :)

Being shagged by a kakapo is a life changing event, right? :)

Researchers who work with the birds notice they each have their own personality. Many are curious and enjoy interacting with humans. In one BBC special, a hand-raised kakapo named Sirocco gained international fame after trying to mate with zoologist Mark Carwardine's head. Sirocco is now the spokes-bird for New Zealand conservation. Although Carwardine maybe didn't think so at the time, the video is incredibly entertaining:

Yes indeed.

It's a miracle :)

Nearly a billion has been pledged to rebuild ND. Awesome

Just the beginning ...

The first image of a black hole, from the galaxy Messier 87. CreditCreditEvent Horizon Telescope Collaboration, via National Science Foundation

Black holes rule and ... they exist big time. To whit.

“We have seen what we thought was unseeable,” said Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and director of the effort to capture the image, during a Wednesday news conference in Washington, D.C.

The image, of a lopsided ring of light surrounding a dark circle deep in the heart of the galaxy known as Messier 87, some 55 million light-years away from Earth, resembled the Eye of Sauron, a reminder yet again of the implacable power of nature. It is a smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity.

The network of telescopes was sensitive enough to observe daily variations in the bright ring around the M87 black hole.

Just the beginning ... of a new era in astronomy is at hand. Stellar without question.

EKCD yet again. :)

Makes one feel small doesn't it?

538's take on how they did this is truly astounding. Excellent to a fault. :)

Just one more thing ... :) The pix below shows the Messier 87 black hole in context
via the Chandra X-ray observatory.

The Core of M87: Chandra Captures X-rays in Coordination with EHTScientists have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to obtain data of Messier 87 during the April 2017 observations by the Event Horizon Telescope.

X-ray Layout: Wide Field & Close-up

X-ray Close-up & Event Horizon Telescope Image

Our Planet

A must see, a must act, a documentary everyone on planet earth should see.

Now I remember ... :)

1969 those were the daze. :)

Sounds like politicians not remembering some gross malfeasance doesn't it, but only funnier.

One Starry Night ... :)

Creativity and innovation go hand in hand, especially when it involves science and the solving of a wicket problem: to whit, do primordial black holes give rise to dark matter? If so, how do you find said entities? The answer, microlensing.

Gravitational microlensing relies on chance events where from our viewpoint, one star (or a black hole - ed) passes in front of another star. The farther star is usually a bright star, and the near one is normally one we couldn't ordinarily see from Earth. When it passes in front of the farther star, however, its gravity causes the light from the farther star to bend and the star is magnified from our point of view. 

The answer, thus far, no.

The latest bit of emptiness was published this week, and it seemingly puts an end to one of the possible remaining explanations for dark matter: black holes that formed shortly after the Big Bang and have been structuring the Universe ever since. While earlier studies have seemingly ruled out larger versions of these primordial black holes, the new study closes the window on anything more massive than a large asteroid. And it was all accomplished with just a single night of telescope time.

Wicked problem No. 2 ... Could smaller primordial black holes give rise to dark matter?

If primordial black holes were common, they'd create plenty of these smaller microlensing events, and we should be able to spot them. But dedicated searches for them came up with very few of the events, as did the Kepler planet-hunting telescope, which stared at a large field of stars on and off for several years. Combined, these suggested that any primordial black holes would have to be extremely odd, weighing less than our Sun.

But these small, primordial black holes couldn't be ruled out on theoretical grounds. This led a group of Japanese researchers to try to rule them out on observational grounds.

To find out, innovation and persistence comes into play.

Enabled by some new telescope hardware, the Japanese researchers decided to go bigger. The hardware is something called the Hyper Suprime-Cam, an 870 megapixel monster attached to an 8 meter telescope. Configured properly, it could capture the entire Andromeda galaxy in a single frame, and it can do so about every 90 seconds. That's fast enough that even a light black hole can be captured multiple times during the microlensing. To make sure they could capture as many events as possible, the researchers were given an entire night with the telescope all to themselves, with seven hours of total observation time.

The Hpyper Suprime-Cam

End result ...

Although the Hyper Suprime-Cam has a lot of pixels, Andromeda has even more stars. To detect individual lensing events, the team used software that compared consecutive images and highlighted any pixels that showed changes between them. After a night of observations, there were over 15,500 events that had to be sorted through. But these included things like variable stars, stellar flares, and eclipses in binary star systems. Focusing on short-term changes cut the number to about 12,000, while searching for symmetric "bumps" in which the light intensity goes up and drops down again left the researchers with a total of 66 possible microlensing events.

At this point, they simply examined each event manually. Most of them were simply imaging artifacts caused by bright stars shifting near pixel boundaries; at least one was an asteroid. By the time all of them had been examined, there was only one candidate that could possibly be a microlensing event. It wasn't a great match, but there were no other obvious explanations for it.

Innovation & persistence indeed. :)

Much ado about nothing :)

Web Comics ... from the beginning

Web comics like the truly excellent XKCD & Dinosaur Comics have been around for years, chronicling the web and society in ways both funny and touching at the same time. Well, the Verge came out with a wonderful piece Web Comics: An Oral History where web comic creators discuss how they, and the web, have changed over the last 20+ years. Worth a read without question. 

It can be hard to remember how primitive the internet landscape was in the late ‘90s, the era when webcomics came of age. The only way to share things was through email and instant message, and a seconds-long video clip could crash email servers if too many people sent it around. Something Awful was still a “weblog.” We went to websites — plural — to check for updates every day.

Webcomics creators often went online after being rejected by newspaper syndicates, gatekeeper conglomerates that grew increasingly conservative in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The best ones grew into beloved phenomenons, and the nascent funny T-shirt industry allowed many artists to make a living on daily cartoons throughout the 2000s.

Social media and a glut of internet merchandise have shifted the economics. Artists increasingly rely on Patreon, book sales, and other sources of revenue, while new webcomics often pop up exclusively on Instagram, foregoing the expense of a dedicated site. But in those early days, webcomics were some of the most influential pieces of the early-ish internet — vibrant and weird. They formed followings, which became communities, which became culture.

“MY EARLY COMICS JUST SORT OF BELONGED TO THE INTERNET.”

Jon Rosenberg, Goats and Scenes from a Multiverse: I started putting my comics online in April 1997 when I got 5MB of server space with my dial-up account. There wasn’t anything on the internet. Even if your comics were complete shit — which mine were — there was an expectation that people would look at them. What else were you going to look at?

It was also a way to get around newspaper syndicates. Most of the packets I sent to them got rejected out of hand, but I got one letter back from a big editor, Jay Kennedy [of King Features Syndicate]. I’ve got it up on my wall. He said mixing animals and humans in the cast was confusing.

All of the comics that inspired me to become a cartoonist mixed humans and animals. It just revealed to me what bullshit it all was, that syndication wasn’t something I needed or wanted to pursue.

Excellent to a fault. :)