US man, 81, sentenced to six months for creating giant hybrid sheep for hunting | Montana | The Guardian
An 81-year-old Montana man was sentenced on Monday to six months in federal prison for illegally using tissue and testicles from large sheep hunted in central Asia and the US to create hybrid sheep for captive trophy hunting in Texas and Minnesota.
Inside the Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight
Wat een fantastisch ding!
The Soviet space program used completely different controls and instruments from American spacecraft. One of the most interesting navigation instruments onboard Soyuz spacecraft was the Globus, which used a rotating globe to indicate the spacecraft’s position above the Earth. This navigation instrument was an electromechanical analog computer that used an elaborate system of gears, cams, and differentials to compute the spacecraft’s position. Officially, the unit was called a “space navigation indicator” with the Russian acronym ИНК (INK),
We only learnt of our son’s secret online life after he died at 20
When Mats Steen died from a muscle-wasting disorder, his parents believed that his life had been a tragically lonely one — until hundreds of emails from strangers arrived. It turns out that he’d found friendship and even romance in a gaming community
Ancient Artillery – Antigone
Catapult artillery became standard equipment in the Roman army throughout the centuries of Rome’s rise and fall. Over the centuries, engineers arrived at optimal designs for different types of catapult and developed mathematical design processes to achieve the optimum match between size of projectile and size of catapult.
We know a great deal about the workings of ancient artillery, firstly because of ancient technical treatises written between about 250 BC and AD 100 which have come down to us largely intact, and secondly because of the work of people who have puzzled out the missing pieces of information by building successful reconstructions over the last century or so.
A Sudoku Solver in APL – YouTube
Om de zoveel tijd stoot ik hier weer eens op en kijk ik mt open mond naar de tovenaar achter het klavier.
Development of a Sudoku solver in APL.
You might want to hit pause now and again.
Experiment for yourself at http://www.TryAPL.org.
Notes on the algorithm
Believe it or not, this lush landscape is Antarctica
A fast-warming region of Antarctica is getting greener with shocking speed. Satellite imagery of the region reveals that the area covered by plants increased by almost 14 times over 35 years — a trend that will spur rapid change of Antarctic ecosystems.
“It’s the beginning of dramatic transformation,” says Olly Bartlett, a remote-sensing specialist at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, and an author of the study, published today in Nature Geoscience, that reports these results.
GEICO is Terminating Insurance Coverage of Tesla Cybertrucks, Says “This Type of Vehicle Doesn’t Meet Our Underwriting Guidelines” | Torque News
Haha.
GEICO, the second-largest vehicle insurance underwriter in the US, has decided it will no longer cover Tesla Cybertrucks. The company is terminating current Cybertruck policies and says the truck “doesn’t meet our underwriting guidelines.”
TikTok’s parent launched a web scraper that’s gobbling up the world’s online data 25-times faster than OpenAI | Fortune
The China-based parent company of video app TikTok released its own web crawler or scraper bot, dubbed Bytespider, sometime in April, according to research from Kasada, a company that specializes in bot management for companies with online data. The existence of the bot was also confirmed by Dark Visitors, which monitors scraper bots.
ByteDance’s bot has quickly become one of the most, if not the single most, aggressive scrapers on the internet, the research shows. It’s scraping data at a rate that’s many multiples of other major companies, such as Google, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, and Anthropic, which use their own scraper bots to help create and improve their large language or multimodal models, known as LLMs or LMMs.
The 727 That Vanished | Smithsonian
According to press reports, the aircraft began taxiing with no communication between the crew and the tower; maneuvering erratically, it entered a runway without clearance. With its lights off and its transponder not transmitting, 844AA took off to the southwest, and headed out over the Atlantic Ocean. The 727 and the two men have not been seen since.