The Institutions of Science With Lord Martin Rees
I love just about every answer that Martin Rees gives in this wide-ranging interview.
Link tags: astro
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Aegir.org | Five Moons
In a way, I find these pictures—taken by someone from the ground with regular equipment—just as awe-inspiring as the images from the James Webb Space Telescope.
Days Since Incident
I love this list of ever-increasing timelines. All that’s missing is the time since the Carrington Event, just to remind us what could happen when the next one hits.
Awesome astrophotography from the South Downs | Science | The Guardian
To mark the start of the Dark Skies Festival today, here are some fantastic photographics taken not that far from Brighton.
Inertia - CSS-Tricks
Here’s a thoughtful response from Chris to my post about Svelte, Astro, and React.
Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond | The MIT Press
A new biography of Vera Rubin by Ashley Jean Yeager. One for the wishlist!
Robin Rendle ･ The web is too damn complex
The modern web wouldn’t be possible without big ol’ JavaScript frameworks, but—but—much of the web today is held back because of these frameworks. There’s a lot of folks out there that think that every website must use their framework of choice even when it’s not necessary. And although those frameworks solve a great number of problems, they introduce a substantial number of trade-offs; performance issues you have to deal with, complex build processes you have to learn, and endless dependency updates that can introduce bugs.
Introducing Astro: Ship Less JavaScript
In Astro, you compose your website using UI components from your favorite JavaScript web framework (React, Svelte, Vue, etc). Astro renders your entire site to static HTML during the build. The result is a fully static website with all JavaScript removed from the final page.
YES!
When a component needs some JavaScript, Astro only loads that one component (and any dependencies). The rest of your site continues to exist as static, lightweight HTML.
That’s the way to do it! Make the default what’s best for users (unlike most JavaScript frameworks that prioritise developer convenience at the expense of the end user experience).
This is a tagline I can get behind:
Ship Less JavaScript
Strangest of All: Anthology of Astrobiological Science Fiction [PDF]
Eight sci-fi stories gathered together by the European Astrobiology Institute. This free book is also available as .mobi and .epub.
The First Women Trained To Conquer Space - Supercluster
The cosmonaut counterparts of the Mercury women astronauts: Zhanna Yorkina, Irina Solovyova, Tatyana Kuznetsova, Valentina Ponomareva, and Valentina Tereshkova.
Ponomareva recalled there being no envy between the women in the squad. According to her, it was a healthy spirit of competition. Everyone did their best to be number one, but also supported each other’s efforts.
One of those cosmonauts went to space: none of the women training for the Mercury missions did. There would be a shockingly gap of twenty years between the launch of Valentina Tereshkova and the launch of Sally Ride.
Figures in the Stars
A lovely bit of data visualisation from Nadieh showing the differences and commonalities in constellations across cultures. As always, she’s written up the process too.
Astronomical Typography
Typography meets astronomy in 16th century books like the Astronomicum Caesareum.
It is arguably the most typographically impressive scientific manual of the sixteenth century. Owen Gingerich claimed it, “the most spectacular contribution of the book-maker’s art to sixteenth-century science.”
Web Push Notifications Demo | Microsoft Edge Demos
Push notifications explained using astrology. But don’t worry, there’s also some code, just in case you prefer your explanations to also include models that actually work.
Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans? - The Atlantic
So, could researchers find clear evidence that an ancient species built a relatively short-lived industrial civilization long before our own? Perhaps, for example, some early mammal rose briefly to civilization building during the Paleocene epoch about 60 million years ago. There are fossils, of course. But the fraction of life that gets fossilized is always minuscule and varies a lot depending on time and habitat. It would be easy, therefore, to miss an industrial civilization that only lasted 100,000 years—which would be 500 times longer than our industrial civilization has made it so far.
Cooking with Ursula K. Le Guin
Recipes inspired by The Left Hand Of Darkness.
I mostly stuck to Le Guin’s world-building rules for Winter, which were “no large meat-animals … and no mammalian products, milk, butter or cheese; the only high-protein, high-carbohydrate foods are the various kinds of eggs, fish, nuts and Hainish grains.” I did, however, add some hot-climate items found in Manhattan’s Chinatown for their space-age looks and good flavors (dragonfruit, pomelo, galangal, chilis, and kaffir limes).
Serve with hot beer.
Seeing Earth from Outer Space
A lovely interactive photo essay charting the results of what happens when evolution produces a life form that allows a planet to take selfies.
Greetings, E.T. (Please Don’t Murder Us.) - The New York Times
Steven Johnson dives deep into the METI project, starting with the Arecibo message and covering Lincos, the Drake equation, and the Fermi paradox.
He also wrote about what he left out of the article and mentions that he’s writing a book on long-term decision making.
In a sense, the METI debate runs parallel to other existential decisions that we will be confronting in the coming decades, as our technological and scientific powers increase. Should we create superintelligent machines that exceed our own intellectual capabilities by such a wide margin that we cease to understand how their intelligence works? Should we ‘‘cure’’ death, as many technologists are proposing? Like METI, these are potentially among the most momentous decisions human beings will ever make, and yet the number of people actively participating in those decisions — or even aware such decisions are being made — is minuscule.
Hertzsprung-Russell diagram animation | ESA/Hubble
When I was in Düsseldorf for this year’s excellent Beyond Tellerrand conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Nadieh Bremer, data visualisation designer extraordinaire. I asked her a question which is probably the equivalent of asking a chef what their favourite food is: “what’s your favourite piece of data visualisation?”
There are plenty of popular answers to this question—the Minard map, Jon Snow’s cholera map—but we had just been chatting about Nadieh’s previous life in astronomy, so one answer popped immediately to mind: the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.
The Orrery at The Interval: An Invitation to Long-Term Thinking — Blog of the Long Now
The Long Now Foundation has been posting some great stuff on their blog lately. The latest is a look at orreries, clocks, and computers throughout history …and into the future.
Edge of darkness: looking into the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way | Science | The Guardian
Building a planet-sized telescope suggests all sorts of practical difficulties.