JPL faces hot comets

JPL is coming to terms with comets not all being cold from the start after the StarDust mission returned Forsterite (Peridot) along with all of the ice and dust.

“Remarkably enough, we have found fire and ice,” said Donald Brownlee, Stardust principal investigator and professor of astronomy at the University of Washington in Seattle. The returned samples show high-temperature materials from the coldest part of our solar system.

This looks like more serious overturning of “basic” solar system principles, and may yet point out more alternatives to the obsolete drift-forever and Oort-cloud-only comet models.

This progress will largely be painful for those individuals betting their careers on one or the other theory, but it really seriously invites genuine new exploration and the raising of novel practical theories for testing and experiment.

Comets, they said, may not be as simple as the clouds of ice, dust and gases they were thought to comprise. They may be diverse with complex and varied histories.

See? (-:

Comments

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

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