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This article reminded me of the concept or an airborne turbine [0]. Interesting to think what would happen if we had thousands or more of these immersed in jetstream somewhere, siphoning terawatts. Environmental impact could be noticeable (or not) [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_wind_turbine [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_stream#Possible_future_pow...

Actually, the prediction accuracy here is more like "may go off any time". Likewise, for Betelgeuse (the brightest star of Orion), which would also be visible in daylight.

Love both of these. Perhaps more so "A Deepness in the Sky", with its darker tone, very thoughtful programming-related remarks, and the reversed "alien invasion" concept.

I'd love to see also a mouse-rotatable 3D model of this.

If anyone's interested in other unusual (i.e. other than an optical imaging telescope) detectors, have a look at Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes [0]. More details can be found e.g. in [1].

TL;DR: how to detect a very high-energy gamma-ray photon? Either with an orbital observatory (but these have limited size); or let the photon hit upper atmosphere (at a few tens of km), create (together with some atmospheric nucleus) a fast electron-positron pair, which through additional interactions eventually causes a narrow cone of Cherenkov light to shine all the way down to the ground (having ~100 m diameter there), and then gather this light with an array of a few large reflectors. Finally, perform some tricky processing to recover the initial photon's direction and energy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IACT [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.05675

Let's not forget that before fully-programmable shaders in NV20, NVidia had register combiners [0] in GeForce 256 (NV10), allowing more flexible texture application & blending compared to the older (sequential) pipeline.

[0] http://www.nvidia.in/object/registercombiners.html

In Charles Stross's "Accelerando" (strongly recommended!) astronomers suspect that the inhabitants of Andromeda Galaxy converted all its baryonic matter to computronium (here: configuration of matter capable of the most efficient computation as per the laws of physics) and are using it to run a massive side-channel attack, trying to verify if the Universe runs on a virtual machine (and I guess maybe break out of it).

On a different note, here's a sobering thought for the Universe-as-simulation optimists: while it's possible the simulation's Creators wish us well, e.g. will store your soul/mind and let you live carefree in a Paradise... it might rather work like our current massive simulations (e.g. the Millennium Run [0]). It generates enormous amounts of data, but only some small amount (like a state snapshot every 100M years) is actually captured and analyzed. I.e. the "dumb" computing power at the Creators' disposal is far greater than their mental capacity. The whole existence of humanity might go unnoticed, just a side-effects of the simulation's fidelity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Run

Right, but adaptive refinement is bread and butter of today's physics simulations. I imagine that in order to simulate our Universe, you'd go down to elementary particle level only when some of the simulated folks run their accelerators, etc. But for an in-simulation billiard game you'd use a plain impulse-based rigid body dynamics.

An interesting challenge: build a small tree/pole-climbing robot that would methodically pollinate all flowers (manipulators, image recognition).

Same here! IIRC for me it's due to Duke Nukem 3D's default settings. (Annoying when games "forget" to respect this option, e.g. Crysis 3 in the VTOL flying segment.)

I also started with QBasic (in 1994 I think). I fondly remember its convenient graphics API (including setting the modes and palette).

There is a scene in Peter F. Hamilton's SF novel "Fallen Dragon" which immediately made me remember the restaurant "joke" from "Portnoy's Complaint".

SPOILER

Only here, the protagonist vomits violently after learning he's been treated (by his weirdo girlfriend) to some actual real meat from, yuck... a killed animal... not your regular vat-grown meat that every civilized person eats.

Oh, the power of childhood programming/imprinting...

The laptop looks nice enough, but the lack of dedicated PgUp/PgDown/Home/End keys is a deal-breaker to me. I'm also on a 13.3" (Lenovo E31-70, previously a HP ProBook) and fitting these keys really isn't a problem.

Well, the details are quite pronounced and 3D also when viewed from Earth through even a smallish (~100 mm) telescope (preferably near the lunar terminator, where the Sun angle is small).

Larger apertures are even better, e.g.:

https://www.astrobin.com/full/339345/0/?nc=picks&page=3

(from a 11" telescope).

I'd also mention P. F. Hamilton's "Fallen Dragon", where FTL travel is possible, colonization of a few nearby Earth-like planets has happened... but it's not economically viable after all, which leads to some twisted consequences.

I ran Fedora on a ProBook 4320s (Intel GPU) in 2011-2015, no problems. The only inconvenience was the WiFi/BT adapter (Ralink, I think), which had out-of-tree drivers; I had to rebuild the interface after kernel updates. But a year or so later they added a driver in the kernel.

I realized some time ago that my hobby - solar imaging - is actually a lot like fishing. You hang out on the forums, buy all the mysterious gear, then on a sunny day (with good "astronomical seeing") you set up in the field and record raw material for up to a few hours (for later processing), hoping for something to happen (a surge, flare, spectacular prominence). Needless to say, the Sun sometimes doesn't cooperate and you go back empty-handed. But when some "big" transient occurs (timescales here can be <1 hour) - so satisfying!

I went with Vista in 2008 (having 4 GiB RAM) and never had a reason to complain; in my case, everything from drivers to games just worked. I liked the Aero and UAC. After a few years I permanently switched to Linux, but kept using Vista for compiling some projects for Windows under MSYS2 (until MSYS2 stopped supporting it).

Ah, brings back fond memories. I always loved physics simulations and managed to implement a fluid solver (after reading [1]) back in 2005. When I got the basic 2D version working, I spent maybe 20 minutes just stirring the vortices with a mouse - so fun!

[1] Visual Simulation of Smoke (physbam.stanford.edu/~fedkiw/papers/stanford2001-01.pdf)

The same goes for South California mountains, especially if you're into solar imaging (the Big Bear Solar Observatory is there for a reason).

As for choosing random 3D directions with various distributions (and more), the Global Illumination Compendium [1] has a lot of useful formulas.

[1] https://people.cs.kuleuven.be/~philip.dutre/GI/

I settled on the 13.3" form factor 6 years ago, but the lack of all dedicated PgUp, PgDown, Home, End, Ins, Del keys puts me off (I'm very used to copy/paste with Ctrl/Shift-Ins and whole line selection). Well, I'm sticking with the small ProBooks and Lenovos for now.

English is my second language. I'd say it's due to the fact that when you learn a language in school, by listening AND writing, it'll stick in your head visually. I never mistake its/it's, they're/their etc., something I can frequently see native speakers do on the Web in their comments.

I'm an Eclipse guy and when writing this [1] for fun, debugging in Eclipse worked fine (I'm on Fedora). Code completion via Racer mostly works (except some cases like recognizing the type of the try! macro's result).

[1] https://github.com/GreatAttractor/libskry_r