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April 22, 2021 Archives
Thursday, April 22, 2021
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Mars Helicopter Ingenuity Completes Second Flight
Raise the roof: In its second flight, Ingenuity has reached a higher altitude and performed some new maneuvers. https://t.co/3lqyyfImQV #MarsHelicopter pic.twitter.com/CsDlFSEEtw
— NASA Mars (@NASAMars) April 22, 2021
Posted at
15:22
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Empire of Grifters: “Quadro Tracker”
The amazing “Quadro Tracker”—invented by a former used car salesman named Wade L. Quattlebaum—is like Doc Smith’s “object compass”, except with dead ants, it claimed to be able to detect lost golf balls, drugs, weapons, explosives, missing persons, and game animals. Around 1000 units were sold at prices ranging from US$400 to US$8000 each to gullible school districts, law enforcement agencies, and airports, including the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Quadro Corporation, who marketed it between 1993 and 1996 before being shut down by the FBI and its principals indicted for mail fraud, said it worked via “static electricity produced by the body inhaling and exhaling gases into and out of the lung cavity” to “charge the free-floating neutral electrons of the signature card with the major strength of the signal”.
At trial in January 1997, the three principals of the company were acquitted of mail fraud and conspiracy.
learning about the "Quadro Tracker", a bomb/drug/person-locating device a bunch of cops & school districts bought in the 90s that turned out to just be a box of dead ants pic.twitter.com/PBxOk23PTb
— Jack Grimes (@Jackapedia_) April 21, 2021
Posted at
12:31
CONTEXT: Damage to Lunar Orbiting Spacecraft by Ejecta from Lunar Landings
From the talk I gave at the ASCE Earth & Space conference today. When you land on the Moon, your rocket exhaust is faster than lunar escape velocity and there is no atmosphere to slow down the dust you blow. We need to worry about damaging things in orbit.
— Dr. Phil Metzger (@DrPhiltill) April 21, 2021
Short thread... /1 pic.twitter.com/l4LsqB9nJa
Posted at
11:24
CONTINUITY: Stable Planetary Orbits within the Event Horizon of a (Kerr-Newman) Black Hole?
Here is an interesting 2011 paper I'd not previously encountered: “Is there life inside black holes?” by Vyacheslav I. Dokuchaev of the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Abstract:Bound inside rotating or charged black holes, there are stable periodic planetary orbits, which neither come out nor terminate at the central singularity. Stable periodic orbits inside black holes exist even for photons. These bound orbits may be defined as orbits of the third kind, following the Chandrasekhar classification of particle orbits in the black hole gravitational field. The existence domain for the third kind orbits is rather spacious, and thus there is place for life inside supermassive black holes in the galactic nuclei. Interiors of the supermassive black holes may be inhabited by civilizations, being invisible from the outside. In principle, one can get information from the interiors of black holes by observing their white hole counterparts.
The author further calculates that within a supermassive black hole, such as exist in the centres of many galaxies, the tidal forces on a planet following such an orbit would not disrupt it or its inhabitants. “We hypothesize that civilizations of the third type (according to Kardashev scale) may live safely inside the supermassive BHs in the galactic nuclei being invisible from the outside.”
Perhaps we don't observe galactic-scale civilisations because once they approach that level of technology they decamp to new homes within supermassive black holes, where their access to energy is unlimited (by exploiting the Penrose process around the central singularity), they can observe the entire future of the external universe and the folly of civilisations still stuck there in an instant, and their activities are protected by the ultimate stealth of an event horizon.
Posted at
10:14