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June 25, 2021 Archives
Friday, June 25, 2021
CONTEXT: U.S. Director of National Intelligence UFO/UAP Report
Document: “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence https://t.co/TZ2TPv1bMh [PDF, 9 pages]
— John Walker (@Fourmilab) June 25, 2021
Posted at
21:29
CONTEXT: Fools and Their Money—“Wenew” Selling “Iconic Moments” in Plastic
Beeple and the founder of Pitchfork are launching an NFT site where you can buy moments in time https://t.co/czc6SlLIpH pic.twitter.com/mGLQoaJ4OT
— The Verge (@verge) June 24, 2021
Walker's Law is “Absent evidence to the contrary, assume everything is a scam.” Sometimes, however, the thing itself presents its own evidence of its status, as Cicero put it, res ipsa loquitur. Here we have Wenew, founded by somebody calling himself “Beeple”, who is best known for selling a non-fungible token (NFT) for US$ 69.3 million in a Christie's auction.
Wenew co-founder Michael Figge said, “A lot of things in the NFT world feel like a cash grab right now, and we wanted to put storytelling first.” Res ipsa loquitur.
Posted at
12:24
CONTINUITY: Kerbal Space Program: Ten Year Anniversary, Version 1.12 Released
On June 24th, 2021, version 1.12 of Kerbal Space Program was released. This is a free update for all current customers, and will be downloaded and installed automatically if the game was purchased via Steam. This will be the final major update; at least one incremental update, 1.12.1, will be forthcoming. Here is the announcement and complete change log.
This marks the tenth anniversary of the initial release of Kerbal Space Program. Developers will now move to the Kerbal Space Program 2 project which, it is hoped, will be released some time in the twenty-first century. (See second-system syndrome.)
Here is a video summary of new features in version 1.12 by Matt Lowne.
“The Kerbal Effect” is a video produced by the developers to celebrate the tenth anniversary.
Posted at
11:35
THE HAPPENING WORLD: International Space Station: Third EVA to Upgrade Solar Arrays
Posted at
11:28
THE HAPPENING WORLD: Programmable Chemical Synthesis
The full title of this talk is “The First Programmable Turing Complete Chemical Constructor (Chemputer)”. I'm not sure one can really define Turing completeness for a system like this, but it is nonetheless an impressive achievement. There's an interesting discussion of “cloud chemistry”, where you can send synthesis procedures to remote labs and get the result back in the mail—imagine the possibilities.
Posted at
11:13