Hacker News Reader

markbnineon The War on Estonian Forests (2022)

Wood burning can be made sustainable. Where I live, the forest service encourages people to take dead trees out of the forest. It reduces the fire load. And building codes and EPA certs have done a lot to clean up wood stoves. https://www.epa.gov/burnwise

markbnineon Egg whites can be transformed into a material capable of filtering microplastics

Aren't microplastics already in chickens? Do they get passed to the eggs? If so, where do you filter microplastics first. . . the chicken or the egg?

markbnineon Lunar Crater Radio Telescope on the Far-Side of the Moon (2020)

LROC, which may be the closest we have in volume to a lunar telescope, sends its data back to Earth. http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/about

LROC is one of seven instruments on board LRO. Together, these instruments have a downlink allocation of 310 Gbits per Ka band pass and up to 4 passes per day. That translates into 155 GBytes per day of data or 56,575 GBytes per year (55 TBytes). These data are processed by each respective instrument's Science Operation Center (SOC) with the final products being delivered to the NASA Planetary Data System (PDS).

markbnineon 50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)

Good documentary on this: https://frontlinetv.com/plastic-wars-full-film

markbnineon Bill introduced to promote prescribed fire intends to reduce fire risk

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms... HDT

I've lived in the forest for the last ten years. Nothing better. Sure there's risks; there's risks everywhere.

markbnineon NASA’s 1966 plan for a mission to Mars

If you're looking for a rabbit hole, after Dave left Wired, he started his own blog: https://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/

markbnineon Blizzard cofounder launches new gaming endeavor Dreamhaven

Me thinks they used the Fantasy Place Name generator. . . https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/fantasy-town-names.php

markbnineon Blacklight – A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector

Be patient. . . there's people working on that.

markbnineon 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

Here is a recent Frontline on how the petro-chem industry fooled consumers: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/plastic-wars/. Advocates may be gearing up for a lawsuit, similar to what happened to the cigarette companies.

markbnineon Oxide Computer Company: Initial boot sequence

Do you ever get that creepy feeling that HN is being used for guerrilla advertising?

markbnineon Why Do People with Depression Like Listening to Sad Music?

My dad often said, "When you are cold, eat ice cream. It lowers your mean temperature."

That said, we always knew he just wanted ice cream.

markbnineon Jessamyn West, Technology Lady (2015)

Our local library is more like a free internet shop with half the terminals taken up by transients and the other half by kids from the nearby jr. high, playing shoot-em ups. It's impossible to get a terminal. They also have a huge DVD collection that rivals the old blockbusters. Not sure who's checking out books anymore.

markbnineon Open Access at European Space Agency

For NASA image data, you can go to the PDS: http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html The Atlas has access to the mission released data. There is also link to PILOT, which has quick access to MESSENGER data and some Dawn data. New Horizons will be added soon.

Although there is a learning curve to processing and projecting raw imagery (using ISIS), it's gotten simpler. You can now use gdal to generate images.

markbnineon Visualizing the Warmest August in 136 Years

obligatory George Carlin bit. . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4

markbnineon NASA Data Portal

For planetary data, the PDS Imaging Node has pages both at NASA and the USGS. Here is the USGS page pointing to much of it: http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/facilities/cartography-and-imag.... The PDS formats can be difficult but tools like GDAL now deal with it. Here is tool I wrote to search much of it: http://pilot.wr.usgs.gov.

markbnineon How Hackers Stole $100M from the New York Fed

I find ZH amusing.. In some ways I think it's the anti hackers news.. Hyper negative about the future.. Constant hate for new tech.. (Fear of skynet).. The system is always rigged and the little guy will never succeed... Posts by Right coast angry ex-traders.. The comments are inane...the cherry picked stories out of left field but plausible. Etc. The one place the two sites do often intersect is the fear and loathing of government surveillance.. I vote to give ZH stories a fair shake...

markbnineon Zynga to Put Headquarters Building in San Francisco on the Market

When I first read this I thought Zynga was going to move their HQ to Market Street.

markbnineon From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth

Nice. Also THEMIS took a shot in 2001 as it was headed to Mars that captured this distance.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA00559

markbnineon From a million miles away, NASA camera shows moon crossing face of Earth

I agree with the bunker mentality of the NASA centers. That said, the PDS (https://pds.nasa.gov/) is the closest thing to a central source for planetary data and imagery. And they run the photo journal (http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html)

markbnineon New Horizons: Nasa spacecraft speeds past Pluto

What we need now is a real-time play-by-play by Carl Sagan. . e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8eqYVFgzIU

Or Larry Soderblom on Triton. Try to dig up the full "Encounter with Neptune". . . classic. . . first ten minutes - http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8zzlq_encounter-with-neptu...

markbnineon Test drive of a petrol car

Obviously this post is not interested in car-geeking, but I agree, the sound of combustion engines can be wonderful (VW Beetles).

markbnineon The NASA Collection

NASA's reproduction guidelines: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/reproduction_gui...

The photo reselling is okay, although the astronaut photo may require Alan Bean's sign off.

markbnineon Plans for secure quantum Internet take a leap forward

Quantum networks are highly sought after by governments around the world because they can make communication between two computers impenetrable to hackers.

I think impenetrable is the wrong word. . . Maybe uneavesdropable?

markbnineon The Antikythera Mechanism

This site describes the artifact (and links to the Greek site): http://antikythera.whoi.edu/artifacts/antikythera-mechanism/

Also, the blog is tracking the current dive to claim more artifacts.

markbnineon NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover Arrives at Martian Mountain

All science news releases go through JPL: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/news/whatsnew/

But a science planning blog gets posted here: http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/

Also nytimes has a nice tracker. No science, but select raw images: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/science/space/mars-curios...

markbnineon NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover Arrives at Martian Mountain

Also Emily Lakdawalla wrote up a nice article on the wheels for the Planetary Society:

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2014/0819063...

markbnineon [dead]

The anti-techie sentiment seems to be more based on class than race. Maybe a better way to think of the problem is as gentrification.

markbnineon Geologic Map of Mars

You can go to the map store (http://store.usgs.gov) and search for Geologic Map of Mars. Make sure you get the one from 2014.

markbnineon NASA's Next Mars Lander to Begin Construction

Beyond Apollo: http://www.wired.com/category/beyondapollo/

markbnineon The Meta-Marketing of ‘The Lego Movie’

Why do people here sympathize with this movie? It starts out as an amusing corporate satire, but if you really follow the plot, it is disturbing on numerous levels:

- the consistent message provided by the hero, is that it's okay to be a cog in the machine - the only save-the-day solution provided by the hero is to "follow instructions" - all the creatives (the master builders) are captured and tortured - Emmit saves the day by martyring himself in some bizarre Christian allegory where he ends up in the "real" world - the psychopathic manager-type tyrant who rules the world and wants to freeze everyone is declared okay and special at the end