Starship Was Doomed From The Beginning

Musk’s impotent attempts to get his giant shiny phallus to work are the perfect metaphor for the man. Indeed, Starship seemed promising at first if you didn’t ask too many questions. But, after back-to-back failures and having never come close to completing its design brief (including actually landing Starship and making the spacecraft fully reusable), as well as a litany of painful design flaws, such as only being able to take 50% of its promised payload capacity to orbit, many are starting to question the viability of this idiotic machine and its “iterative design process.”. And so they should. Indeed, with the most recent launch failure as context, it becomes evident that Starship was doomed from the get-go and that SpaceX might never be able to rectify this mess.

Unusual Guns of the Pitt Rivers Museum

Misschien wel mijn favoriete museum ter wereld.

The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford is a historical and anthropological museum and it is a treasure trove of extraordinary objects and I guarantee like no place you have ever seen and on the third floor is the arms and armour collection…….

The intent was for Matt Easton (Schola Gladiatoria) and I, to wander the gallery chatting about whatever we came across that caught our interest; and there is loads. The reality was that we simply never got past the gun cases and that isn’t even my core interest!

So in this film we talk guns from 17thC grenade launchers and PCP airguns to blunderbusses and an automatic tiger lance…..enjoy.

Gene-edited ‘Peter Pan’ cane toad that never grows up created to eat its siblings, control invasive species – ABC News

Cane toad tadpoles are known to be voracious cannibals with a preference for snacking on their kin, both in egg and hatchling form.

This is especially true in Australia where rates of cannibalism of hatchlings by tadpoles have been recorded as 2.4 times that of South America — where the cane toad originated.

The gene-edited tadpoles take this cannibalism to a new level.

The modified hatchlings grew a little bigger than regular tadpoles and ate three times as many eggs, according to results of yet peer-reviewed trials conducted by Professor Shine’s team.

Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals | Quanta Magazine

Our brains can do math, employ logic, explore abstractions and think critically. But we can’t claim a monopoly on thought. Among a variety of nonhuman species known to display intelligent behavior, birds have been shown time and again to have advanced cognitive abilities. Ravens plan(opens a new tab) for the future, crows count and use tools(opens a new tab), cockatoos open and pillage(opens a new tab) booby-trapped garbage cans, and chickadees keep track(opens a new tab) of tens of thousands of seeds cached across a landscape. Notably, birds achieve such feats with brains that look completely different from ours: They’re smaller and lack the highly organized structures that scientists associate with mammalian intelligence.

EQ-Bench Leaderboard

EQ-Bench 3 is an Emotional Intelligence benchmark focused on active conflict mediation skills. It evaluates the ability of language models to navigate complex emotional territory in challenging and diverse scenarios.

The benchmark employs a set of conflict scenarios where the model must mediate between two or more parties with conflicting interests, emotional states, and communication patterns. Unlike the original EQ-Bench which assesses the ability to predict emotional states, EQ-Bench 3 targets active emotional intelligence abilities.

GlyphDrawing.Club -blog

This article is a detailed (but not exhaustive) micro-history on the character DEL (0x7F) as it appears in Amiga’s Topaz font ( ⌂ ), and how it was used in Amiga ASCII art between 1993–2005.

GlyphDrawing.Club -blog

This post is a companion piece to my article The origins of DEL (0x7F) and its Legacy in Amiga ASCII art. That article is all about the character DEL, what it is, how it was used, and why it even has a visual representation, but with a focus on Commodore’s Amiga computers. Whereas AmigaOS’s Topaz font renders DEL with diagonal lines, IBM’s PC renders it… as a house. This bonus article is about that.

Mammoth genetic diversity throughout the last million years | ScienceDaily

A new genomic study has uncovered long-lost genetic diversity in mammoth lineages spanning over a million years, providing new insights into the evolutionary history of these animals.

Every picture from Venus’ surface, ever | The Planetary Society

In 1975 and 1982, four of the Soviet Union’s Venera probes captured our only images of Venus’ surface.

The dark side of the Moomins – New Statesman

Tove Jansson’s beloved stories, which turn 80 this year, are not cute: they are angry tales of apocalypse and breakdown.

Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem is a Communist Committee | Article | Culture.pl

In September 1974, the FBI received a letter. The accusations in the letter were shocking – it told of a communist conspiracy aimed at the hearts and minds of America through propaganda in the subtle guise of science fiction. Major science-fiction publishers and organisations had been infiltrated, and their agents, notable figures in the genre, were abroad in the West. The orchestrator of it all was a communist committee, acting under the name… Stanisław Lem.

Features – Lost City of the Samurai – Archaeology Magazine – May/June 2025

On the outskirts of Fukui, a city of a quarter of a million people in central Japan, a handful of shops and restaurants, a smattering of homes, and a few rice fields line the Ichijo River as it snakes its way through a narrow valley protected on three sides by mountain ranges. Locals as well as tourists enjoy the valley’s scenic beauty, but on the surface there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the spot. However, a deep history lurks beneath the serene landscape. Few places in Japan are less populated today than they were five centuries ago—but the Ichijo Valley is one of them. It may be difficult to imagine that this was once the location of the lively city of Ichijodani, where events that helped alter the course of Japan’s history took place.