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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • Very much. One of the very first things they did at the outset of the war to try to delay Ukrainian aircraft from getting in the air was use ballistic missiles. In a very expensive way to do this, I recall that one of the things they did was to try to crater runways at Ukrainian airbases by dropping ballistic missiles onto them down the length of them. Had satellite footage showing a series of ballistic missile-created craters down the length of them.

    kagis

    It looks like Russia does have anti-runway weapons – the BetAB-500ShP is apparently one. I assume that they just couldn’t use it in that role because they couldn’t get air superiority.


  • Empire State Building-sized

    I linked, in my other comment, to the Tunguska Event, but the WP article happens to have an image showing the Empire State Building next to the Tunguska Event impactor (as well as the Chelyabinsk one) and I just had to highlight that, because the Tunguska impactor is much smaller.

    The Tunguska event was a large explosion of between 3 and 50 megatons[2] that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate (now Krasnoyarsk Krai), Russia, on the morning of 30 June 1908.[1][3] The explosion over the sparsely populated East Siberian taiga flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km² (830 sq mi) of forest, and eyewitness accounts suggest up to three people may have died.

    The Tunguska event is the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history, though much larger impacts occurred in prehistoric times. An explosion of this magnitude would be capable of destroying a large metropolitan area.[10] The event has been depicted in numerous works of fiction. The equivalent Torino scale rating for the impactor is 8: a certain collision with local destruction.


  • SOONER OR LATER, it was bound to happen. On 30 June 1908, Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and four thousand kilometres—a margin invisibly small by the standards of the universe. Again, on 12 February 1947, yet another Russian city had a still narrower escape, when the second great meteorite of the twentieth century detonated less than four hundred kilometres from Vladivostok, with an explosion rivalling that of the newly invented uranium bomb.

    In those days, there was nothing that men could do to protect themselves against the last random shots in the cosmic bombardment that had once scarred the face of the Moon. The meteorites of 1908 and 1947 had struck uninhabited wilderness; but by the end of the twenty-first century, there was no region left on Earth that could be safely used for celestial target practice. The human race had spread from pole to pole. And so, inevitably…

    At 09.46 GMT on the morning of 11 September, in the exceptionally beautiful summer of the year 2077, most of the inhabitants of Europe saw a dazzling fireball appear in the eastern sky. Within seconds it was brighter than the sun, and as it moved across the heavens—at first in utter silence—it left behind it a churning column of dust and smoke.

    Somewhere above Austria it began to disintegrate, producing a series of concussions so violent that more than a million people had their hearing permanently damaged. They were the lucky ones.

    Moving at fifty kilometres a second, a thousand tons of rock and metal impacted on the plains of northern Italy, destroying in a few flaming moments the labour of centuries. The cities of Padua and Verona were wiped from the face of the earth; and the last glories of Venice sank for ever beneath the sea as the waters of the Adriatic came—thundering landwards after the hammer-blow from space.

    Six hundred thousand people died, and the total damage was more than a trillion dollars. But the loss to art, to history, to science—to the whole human race, for the rest of time—was beyond all computation. It was as if a great war had been fought and lost in a single morning; and few could draw much pleasure from the fact that, as the dust of destruction slowly settled, for months the whole world witnessed the most splendid dawns and sunsets since Krakatoa.

    After the initial shock, mankind reacted with a determination and a unity that no earlier age could have shown. Such a disaster, it was realized, might not occur again for a thousand years—but it might occur tomorrow. And the next time, the consequences could be even worse.

    Very well; there would be no next time.

    A hundred years earlier a much poorer world, with far feebler resources, had squandered its wealth attempting to destroy weapons launched, suicidally, by mankind against itself. The effort had never been successful, but the skills acquired then had not been forgotten. Now they could be used for a far nobler purpose, and on an infinitely vaster stage. No meteorite large enough to cause catastrophe would ever again be allowed to breach the defences of Earth.

    So began Project SPACEGUARD. Fifty years later—and in a way that none of its designers could ever have anticipated—it justified its existence.

    That’s the opening text of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendevous with Rama. When it was published in 1973, it was science fiction speculating about the future. Today, we’re doing it – and on a much faster schedule than Clarke had envisioned. That’s kinda cool.

    https://science.nasa.gov/planetary-defense/

    Planetary Defense at NASA

    https://phys.org/news/2021-11-nasa-deflect-asteroid-planetary-defense.html

    NASA to deflect asteroid in test of ‘planetary defense’


  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.worldTerminal colours are tricky
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    Not to mention that the article author apparently likes dark-on-light coloration (“light mode”), whereas I like light-on-dark (“dark mode”).

    Traditionally, most computers were light-on-dark. I think it was the Mac that really shifted things to dark-on-light:

    My understanding from past reading was that that change was made because of the observation that at the time, people were generally working with computer representations of paper documents. For ink economy reasons, paper documents were normally dark-on-light. Ink costs something, so normally you’d rather put ink on 5% of the page rather than 95% of the page. If you had a computer showing a light-on-dark image of a document that would be subsequently printed and be dark-on-light on paper, that’d really break the WYSIWYG paradigm emerging at the time. So word processors and the like drove that decision to move to dark-on-light:

    Prior to that, a word processor might have looked something like this (WordPerfect for DOS):

    Technically, I suppose it wasn’t the Mac where that “dark-on-light-following-paper” convention originated, just where it was popularized. The Apple IIgs had some kind of optional graphical environment that looked like a proto-Mac environment, though I rarely saw it used:

    Update: apparently that wasn’t actually released until after the Mac. This says that that graphical desktop was released in 1985, while the original 128K Mac came out in 1984. So it’s really a dead-end side branch offshoot, rather than a predecessor.

    The Mac derived from the Lisa at Apple (which never became very widespread):

    And that derived from the Xerox Alto:

    But for practical purposes, I think that it’s reasonably fair to say that the Mac was really what spread dark-on-light. Then Windows picked up the convention, and it was really firmly entrenched:

    Prior to that, MS-DOS was normally light-on-dark (with the basic command line environment being white-on-black, though with some apps following a convention of light on blue):

    Apple ProDOS, widely used on Apple computers prior to the Mac, was light-on-dark:

    The same was true of other early text-based PC environments, like the Commodore 64:

    Or the TRS-80:

    1000009146

    When I used VAX/VMS, it was normally off a VT terminal that would have been light-on-dark, normally green, amber, or white on black, depending upon the terminal:

    And as far as I can recall, terminals for Unix were light-on-dark.

    If you go all the way back before video terminals to teleprinters, those were putting their output directly on paper, so the ink issue comes up again, and they were dark-on-light:

    But I think that there’s a pretty good argument that, absent ink economy constraints, the historical preference has been to use light-on-dark on video displays.

    There’s also some argument that for OLED displays – and, one assumes, any future displays, where you only light up what needs to be light, rather than the LCD approach of lighting the whole thing up and then blocking and converting to heat what you don’t want to be light – draw somewhat less power for light-on-dark. That provides some battery benefits on portable devices, though in most cases, that’s probably not a huge issue compared to eye comfort.



  • Heh. From a legal standpoint, if you burgle the ISS, it sounds like you can manage to get in trouble in an impressive number of jurisdictions.

    https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10869/2

    Congressional Research Service

    If You Do the Space Crime, You May Do the Space Time

    International Space Station Intergovernmental Agreement

    Commercial space flights from the United States have included at least one purely private visit to the International Space Station (ISS), a permanently inhabited research-oriented facility in low Earth orbit cooperatively operated by the United States, Member States of the European Space Agency, Russia, Canada, and Japan. Criminal conduct on the ISS implicates an ISS-specific agreement. Modifying and displacing an earlier agreement, the 1998 ISS Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) signed by the governments of the cooperating countries provides that, in general, each country retains “jurisdiction and control” over (1) the “flight elements” or areas it provides and registers in accordance with the agreement (for instance, the habitation module provided by the United States); and (2) “personnel in or on the Space Station who are its nationals.” In other words, unless a more specific provision of the IGA applies, each signatory retains jurisdiction over the areas and personnel it has provided to the project.

    So it sounds like basically, from a criminal jurisdiction standpoint, the ISS is a bunch of little territories, made up of bus-length modules.

    So if you go through the ISS grabbing stuff, you’re probably now committing crimes in US territory, territory of European states, Russian territory, Canadian territory and Japanese territory.


  • Obama’s is actually a hyperrealistic painting, based on the label. Probably directly based on a photograph, but not itself a photograph. I don’t think I’d seen it prior to this.

    Trump Term 1 looks like the first time we dropped the painting as a medium for the photograph.

    Hah. I was looking at them again and realized that they got much lighter, and I just realized what I bet that was.

    Most of the original paintings are done indoors, and almost all of those are dark. The light ones are outside. The only exception is #13, Millard Filmore. Then, suddenly, at Theodore Roosevelt, all of the portraits are indoors…but almost all are bright.

    I realized that that’s right about when electrical lighting showed up. It looks like the White House got electric lights in 1891, during Harrison’s term:

    President Benjamin Harrison and First Lady Caroline Harrison refused to operate the switches because they feared being shocked and left the operation of the electric lights to the domestic staff.

    I assume that Harrison’s portrait, done at the beginning of his term, would have predated that.

    William McKinley was after that and was also dark – I don’t know why. Maybe tradition. But it’s the final one. After that, virtually everyone is in bright environments.


  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldAre the 'doors' on the ISS locked?
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    I mean, if you have the ability to build a spacecraft and get there, you’ve already overcome far larger barriers. Any physical security on the door is going to be comparatively irrelevant as a barrier.

    Locks, like walls and other passive defenses, aren’t designed to stop people. They’re designed to keep basically-honest people honest and slow down the rest to the point where other things, like people, can deal with them.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe#Burglary_ratings

    The highest safe rating here against burglary is 30 minutes of resistance against someone equipped with suitable tools (like, cutting torches and such).

    If you can get up to the ISS, it’s a pretty safe bet that nobody’s going to show up in 30 minutes to do anything about you entering.






  • Every user creates an account on one instance. You did so on lemmy.world, which is the largest instance out there, a popular one. That is their home instance.

    Posts and comments from other instances will be visible to an instance as long as the two instances are federated – that is, the instance admins have not explicitly cut them off from each other. Lemmy.world and lemmy.today are federated.

    Normally, any user from any instance can see and post to any community on a federated instance.

    A given community on a source instance will not actually see its content be copied to a destination instance until at least one user on the destination instance has subscribed to that community – this helps reduce bandwidth usage on the network. I’m subscribed to [email protected], and probably other users on lemmy.today are as well, so we can see this community.

    EDIT: Oh, sorry, I think I see the confusion. I meant that of the instances I listed, lemmy.world was defederated with all except lemmy.ml, not that it was defederated with all instances out there except lemmy.ml.

    You can see instance relationships at /instances, so for lemmy.world, https://lemmy.world/instances








  • I mean, there have always been bad games. There were bad games for the NES:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Entertainment_System_games

    It’s just that the ones on that list that people remember are the few that someone would still be playing forty years later, the really exceptional ones. Typically, if someone in 2025 is thinking of an older game, they’re thinking about the best of the best from that time period.

    I’ve seen arguments that a lot of “the good old days” mindset for many things comes from survivorship bias.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

    Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data.

    Survivorship bias is a form of selection bias that can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because multiple failures are overlooked, such as when companies that no longer exist are excluded from analyses of financial performance. It can also lead to the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property, rather than just coincidence as in correlation “proves” causality.

    In architecture, for example:

    Just as new buildings are being built every day and older structures are constantly torn down, the story of most civil and urban architecture involves a process of constant renewal, renovation, and revolution. Only the most beautiful, useful, and structurally sound buildings survive from one generation to the next. This creates a selection effect where the ugliest and weakest buildings of history have been eradicated (disappearing from public view, leaving the visible impression that all earlier buildings were more beautiful and better built).