king i think it is not fucking sufficient at all. wolftopia or bust

Also Wolftopia is gorgeous by the way

Wolftopia is nearly the size of Saturn and orbits two stars that closely orbit each other!

Wolftopia is OPALESCENT are you KIDDING ME

The kid who discovered it is NAMED Wolf Cukier. That makes the name an even cuter suggestion from his brother 🥺

this was such a delight to read

Earth’s Rotation Visualized in a Timelapse of the Milky Way Galaxy by Aryeh Nirenberg

How the media depicts the Apollo 11 mission:

Actual quotes from the Apollo 11 mission:

also according to michael collins when the three of them were discussing what neil armstrong should say when he first stepped on the moon, collins suggested armstrong say “Oh, my God, what is that thing?”  and then scream and cut out his mic.

lbh michael collins is the true MVP of apollo 11

hey, @bunjywunjy - this might be your jam (and any other dinosaur enthusiasts, it’s a heck of a read)

man that’s not just a heck of a read it’s fuckin GROUNDBREAKING is what it is!

this dude actually found a large fossil deposit that was created not just close to, but actually DURING THE K-PG EXTINCTION EVENT.

IT’S LITERALLY A WINDOW BACK IN TIME TO THE CHICXULUB IMPACT, AND TURNS OUT IT WAS WORSE THAN ANYTHING WE COULD POSSIBLY HAVE IMAGINED

it’s a geologic snapshot of the apocalypse.

reading the full article is certainly a trip, and to summarize for those who are intimidated by longer reads:

- chicxulub is the given name for the meteor that struck/initiated the event

- the paleontologist within is described as making groundbreaking discoveries of multiple species every day, but many of his peers discount him because they’re grouchy old dudes he accidentally had a fragment of a turtle bone involved in a larger reconstruction of a fossil this one time and they won’t let him live it down.

- the extinction event was so fast and so destructive, this guy describes this particular dig-site as being so densely layered with dead and dying creatures, there is a lot of organic tissues that have been preserved, and he is able to even discern that many of the marine and freshwater fish may have still been alive as they were buried due to molten glass being found in their gills, implying they were still attempting to breathe.

- they looked into exactly when and how this could have happened, having freshwater and marine animals stacked on top of mammals and larger dinosaurs (including an amazing deinonychus forearm discovery he was able to match to feather fossils he was finding atop the pile), and rather it being the initial tsunami, they are fairly sure that it was caused by a seiche of catastrophic proportions, which would have been set off within the first hour of the event. denser and larger creatures sunk to the bottom, leaving lighter debris like leaves, small fish, feathers, and molten glass on the surface.

summary: terrifying!

This is fucking incredible

Holy SHIT!

Here’s a famous book snippet describing how feasible that we could find dinosaur fossils on the moon.

@paleogay

Adding this, since I didn’t know the word and pronunciation

so, yeah, the Caribbean Sea seiched up outta its bed and walloped the land with a deluge of sea creatures right after the impact apocalypse

nasa employee: oh hey u guys are back early

astronaut: moon’s got dinosaurs

nasa employee: what?

astronaut: *loading a pistol and getting back on the rocket-ship* moon’s got dinosaurs.

jesus christ

Astronaut tweets

The sky as seen from the mountains of Murree, Pakistan. You’re going to want to click on these.

sorry what

That header photo doesn’t do the dragon justice. (For shame!). Here’s NASA’s own photo:

(Source [Because NASA is funded by taxpayer money, all their images are public domain, BTW])

THE TIME HAS COME

C-can we come back to the hole in the sun bit

I couldn’t resist

Laika: 1954-1957

Opportunity Rover: 2004-2019

HOW DARE

you’ve heard of: getting emotionally attached to your roomba

now get ready for: genuinely mourning the mars rover like a deceased loved one  

SHE SERVED MANKIND FOR SO MANY YEARS AND NOW SHE’S JUST LAYING UP THERE COLD AND ALONE UNDER A COVER OF DUST TAKEN FROM US BY A SPACE STORM AND SHE WILL NOT BE GIVEN A PROPER RESTING PLACE UNTIL HUMANS REACH MARS AND RETRIEVE HER 

This was Opportunity. Let me tell you about her sister, Spirit. And their stories are how you can tell their names apart, because they were so appropriately named.

They were twins, identically built in every way. They sent Spirit to the north, and Opportunity to the south. They sent Spirit to what they thought was a dried sea bed, that unfortunately turned out to be nothing of the sort. It was plains, covered in millions of slightly too large, unremarkable, and extremely inconveniently placed rocks. You see pictures of thousandands of rocks? More than likely it came from Spirit.

The nearest interesting feature were mountains that were miles away. And the rovers? They only travel dozens of feet every Sol (One Sol is a martian day, which is 25 hours long). She was only designed to last for ninety days. So they had a hard choice to make. Keep her in her designated area and look at rocks they probably wouldn’t learn much new from, or set course to those mountains, which she likely wouldn’t live long enough. They chose the mountains.

Opportunity was set to land in (or near, can’t remember) a large crater, which they thought was interesting but didn’t expect much. But almost immediately, they found signs of mars having been wet.

Spirit, along her way, got stuck on a rock that they didn’t see. And their efforts to get her off, ended up bogging her down. Winter was approaching, and she spent months stuck. They thought that would be the end of he. Howerver, there, but for the grace of god, she managed to get free before winter.

Meanwhile, Opportunity kept find lots of cool new things.

Spirit along the way somewhere, her front wheel broke down. They thought that might be the end of her. Until someone thought to do the inconcievable- they turned her around, and drove her backwards. She backed herself everywhere she went from there on, dragging her dead front wheel in the sand. She slowed down conciderably, but somehow she kept going.

Opportunity still kept finding neat things that massively advances our knowledge of Mars.

Somewhere aling the way, dust so badly covered Spirit’s solar panels, she was losing power. She was dying. Again, they thought it would be the end of her. But a powerful dust devil happened along and hit her, which ended up blowing most of the dust off her. She started getting good power again.

Spirit made it to the mountain, several years after she landed. The mountain was more rugged than though thought. It was a gamble if she could make it up before winter. If she didn’t, that would be the end of her. It sounds like I’m overusing that, but no. She nearly died several times.

So they decided to go for it. They sent her up, and she barely made it. She took the first photo from a mountain view on another planet. I tried to find it, but the searches are all overrun with Opportunity photos right now.

I am unsure of what happened to Spirit after that, but she wasn’t around much longer. Opportunity had a relatively easy time. She had ample opportunities to find new things. But Spirit fought tooth and nail for every achievement she had.

That’s how you tell them apart. Opportunity had plent of them. And Spirit was full of fight.

And this was the last set of images she ever sent back to us-

Whaddup, I’m crying!

THE BRAVEST GIRLS IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM OKAY

Whoa guys, I just got a wild idea. I’m just putting this out there…

what if it can fold up to fit inside?

WHOA LOOK AT THAT IT CAN FOLD IN HALF TO FIT INSIDE THE LM AND THEN ALL THEY HAVE TO DO WHEN THEY GET TO THE MOON IS PULL THIS THING TO UNFOLD IT AND GET IT OUT AT THE SAME TIME THIS IS SO CLEVER I’M  S H O O K 

yes we can

THERE WAS A SHOW CALLED MOON MACHINES THAT DID AN ENTIRE ONE HOUR EPISODE ON THE LUNAR ROVER! IT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO EXIST BUT THEN SOMEONE REALIZED THERE WAS A TINY WEDGE SPACED VOID BETWEEN THE LANDING STRUTS THAT COULD FIT A TINY SOMETHING! A PAIR OF FORD EMPLOYEES FIGURED OUT HOW TO ORIGAMI DECEPTICON A TINY CAR INTO THAT SHIT AND USED A GI JOE TOY TO BUILD A MODEL VERSION THAT THEY RC DROVE INTO WERNER VON BRAUN’S OFFICE!

Sorry for the all caps, but the lunar rover is honestly one of the coolest fucking engineering accomplishments of all time and deserves to be recognized as such.

“We’ve got a tiny space, we might be able to fit something extra in on the descent ship.”

“…Hey, wouldn’t it be fucking sweet if they had a moon go-kart that folded up?”

“IT FUCKING WILL BE SWEET BECAUSE IT’S GOING TO HAPPEN NOW”

I always love how badly moon truthers underestimate the reality of the Apollo program.

Reblogging this mostly because *I* didn’t know how they folded up the moon rover, and it’s really neat.

Origami Decepticon  = new band name. 

We have a mini cousin of this, of sorts. It is a strange, lightweight item that looks like a complicated laptop bag with four wheels. You put it over your shoulder with its strap.

Then, when you want to leave a situation quickly, you set it down and give it a quick shake. It immediately stands up, expands, and turns into a toddler’s stroller, with a roomy little shopping basket underneath, and a folding hood to keep the weather off. You click the handlebar into place, clip the toddler in, insert any shopping or bulky items into the basket, and briskly trot away. People gaze after you in open shock. It is apparently fascinating and alarming. I can definitely see how a rover-sized version would upset folk.

The concept of “Foldy thing turned into wheely thing” and the reverse are apparently so incredible that sometimes, when we collapse the thing to put it in a car or under a seat or something, strangers ask us to do it again. I have no problem believing that conspiracy theorists struggle with the concept. I mean, it’s a common item that most people with small babies will have, and every baby-wheel item manufactured since the early 2000s is designed explicitly to collapse so it can fit into cars, but why let common household design interfere with a good theory?

SO ELODIE CAN YOU EXPLAIN HOW YOU PULLED A SMALL PERAMBULATOR OUT FROM UNDER A CHAIR?

No. I refuse to explain anything. Fake news

Excellent post is excellent.

So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:

1) Binary files are 1s and 0s

2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches

You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…

You can knit Doom.

However, after crunching some more numbers:

The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…

3322 square feet

Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.

Hi fun fact!!

The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:

Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.

This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer. 

But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine. 

Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:

But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!

Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,

and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.

tl;dr the textiles industry is more important than people give it credit for, and I would suggest using a machine if you were going to try to knit almost 3 megabytes of information.

@we-are-threadmage

Someone port Doom to a blanket

I really love tumblr for this 🙌

It goes beyond this.  Every computer out there has memory.  The kind of memory you might call RAM.  The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory.  It looked like this:

Wires going through magnets.  This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily.  Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1.  Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:

You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is.  But these are also extreme close-ups.  Here’s the scale of the individual cores:

The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers.  Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.

And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon.  This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive.  It had to be hand-crafted, and took a lot of time.

(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)

Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”

I mean let’s also touch on the Jacquard Loom, if you want to get all Textiles In Sciencey. It was officially created in 1801 or 1804 depending on who you ask (although you can see it in proto-form as early as 1725) and used a literal chain of punch cards to tell the loom which warps to raise on hooks before passing the weft through. It replaced the “weaver yelling at Draw Boy” technique, in which the weaver would call to the kid manning the heddles “raise these and these, lower these!” and hope that he got it right. 

With a Jacquard loom instead of painstakingly picking up every little thread by hand to weave in a pattern, which is what folks used to do for brocades in Ye Olde Times, this basically automated that. Essentially all you have to do to weave here is advance the punch cards and throw the shuttle. SO EASY. 

ALSO, it’s not just “little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,” it’s “the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.” Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon. 

And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn’t use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were also sewing to some STUPID tight tolerances-in our costume shop if you’re within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, you’re usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC. 

The women who made the spacesuits were BADASSES. (and yes, I’ve tried to get Space-X to hire me more than once. They don’t seem interested these days)

A Stunning Composite Photo of the Super Blood Wolf Moon Eclipse Rising Over a Barn in Texas Hill Country

Super blue blood moon rises behind Parthenon, in Athens January 2018

how the fuck did the ancients react to this without thinking the gods were pissed

This is what it would look like if a giant mirror orbited Earth at the distance of the ISS. Credit to vsauce.

Well, this is pretty cool.

This makes me extremely nervous

THANKS I HATE IT

Why would it do that

VIDEO FROM THE SURFACE OF A COMET

This is truly incredible.

Details:

while the stuff in the foreground is dust/ice on the surface of the comet itself, the background is actually stars. i saw a stabilized video where you can really make it out, and it blew my mind.

here’s the stabilized clip, if anyone’s interested