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My parents went on a joy-flight over Lake Eyre and Marree Man a few months ago... the lake was full for the first time in years after flooding in Queensland and it was was the highlight of their whole trip. Funnily enough they had never heard of Marree Man until the trip - it’s certainly something of an enigma here in Australia.

Japanese midget submarines made it as far as Sydney Harbour in 1942:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Sydney_Harbour

Bear in mind that Mauna Kea is only one of two excellent locations in the northern hemisphere... the other being Gran Canarias in the Atlantic. Chile is equally as good as Hawaii with stable ocean air and dry conditions making for fantastic seeing conditions, but it covers a very different part of the night sky down south.

I can’t imagine UH doing what the protectors are asking and simply plonk the TMT in a completely different ocean.

TMT is the only planned 30m class telescope in the northern hemisphere at the moment.

Longitudinal placement is also important for tracking transient phenomena such as FRB’s and NEO’s. this is why Hawaii is such a critical location for doing optical observations.

I would not be surprised if the Chinese build a thirty meter class telescope at some stage. Not sure where though?

In light of recent crypto legislation in Australia I find it surprising that when the idea of a flight recorder was first suggested, it found such resistance in Australia... 70 years since then is a long time however!

I want a USB-C hub with at least 5 USB-C ports and no other legacy ports. Only USB-C. An added bonus would be alt-mode video transmission from my Mac and power. Does such a beast exist? Not that I can find!

It’s similar for me and the Pentium III 600E with 128MB RDRAM and 10k cheetah drive + 21 inch CRT. Will never forget the day my boss dropped that bad boy on my desk. It was a HP Kayak and was such a leap in speed and capability (I was a multimedia producer at the time) that I still think in my minds eye that it’s the fastest machine I have ever used.

Here is a good overview: https://techaeris.com/2018/04/06/spotifiy-explicit-content-f...

Wow this is great news! I may consider going back... will have to trial it for a month. Thanks for sharing!

I was happily on Spotify for years and then we had kids. With no explicit filtering and repeated requests from many users (look up forums) to filter falling on deaf ears I had no choice but to move to iTunes. I just can’t have explicit language and lyrics blaring around the house with toddlers. It makes me sad because I loved the UX and selection in Spotify, as well as controlling playback from any device. Why Apple won’t allow you to control playback from anywhere is beyond me.

I have a quad lock desk mount with Qi charger attachment I use at my work desk. It's wonderful and fulfils a similar use case that you have specified here. I can quickly attach the phone and it's charging... often charging all day as I work. I also have a Qi Ikea charger next to it that is often used while I am doing other activities away from my desk. The Quad Lock desk mount is great for seeing notifications coming in, and the Ikea charger is handy if I need a quick top-up during the day and I'm in a rush and drop it in place.

Is it my understanding that induction rings can't overlap?

You can't just plonk a phone, watch and AirPods case anywhere on a charging pad and expect them to start charging right?

The coil in each device needs to be fairly well aligned with the coil in the Qi charging pad. The proper way to do this is to have three individual coils with visual location targets for each device to charge.

I wonder if Apple was trying to make it a bit too magical (judging by the pre-render shots) allowing the user to throw a device onto the pad anywhere and expect them to charge.

Do the laws of physics apply here?

I know I’m in a minority, but I have had a long interest and affinity with brutalism since performing in school musicals at QPAC in Brisbane Australia. It’s a version of brutalism I think has been softened a bit to make it more appealing to the general population. At the time it was built I believe it was received with negativity, but now Queenslanders love the Southbank precinct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queensland_Performing_Arts_Cen...

Just out of interest, could a GAN be used to clean up video, filling in all the blanks and creating a higher resolution, cleaner image and of course colouring too? From what I have seen of moving GAN images, they can jump around and be a bit jittery.

This would be quite useful for designers to take a snapshot for their portfolio.

One of the things I love about Netlify is that I have never asked my clients to flush their cache after updating their sites... everything is invalidated and refreshed almost by magic. I suddenly realised this after months of using it, sometimes multiple pushes to live each day and it never skipped a beat, no issues with clients getting edgy because their site hasn’t been updated or because something doesn’t look right (css not refreshed but html has) etc.

It just works. Every time.

You could put it into airplane mode before putting it into the airplane mode?

Can anyone confirm that this is simply a way to package hydrogen into a safe transportation medium to international markets (from Australia as an example) and then converted back to hydrogen when it reaches the target country?

Put it this way, is it converted back to hydrogen before it’s pumped into the car? I kinda like the idea of ammonia being converted into hydrogen in the car but judging from the news reports we have seen here in Australia the membrane technology looks quite large... more something one would see in a refinery than a car.

So my question is: at what stage would the ammonia be converted back to hydrogen; at a refinery, the service station or in the car itself?

Here is a paper created by CSIRO scientists on the round-trip conversion efficiency of the process for different routes

The paper also mentions fuel cells which was a question I wondered about:

“Ammonia at the point of end use can be converted to hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles or alternatively utilized directly in solid oxide fuel cells, in an internal combustion engine or a gas turbine. “

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.7b02219

Yeah I was thinking about how hard it would be to stay “true” to the path as possible if a race or challenge was by wind power only. Also in competition, points could be given or taken based on the amount of deviation from the line etc.

Can you clarify this comment, how is circumnavigation relevant to this considerably different journey / path?

I loved the final question in the article:

“The question now is: who will be the first to make these journeys, when, and how?”

These have the potential to become quite important journeys... with the potential for many “firsts”... and also much contention; how much did they deviate from the path, how much deviation from the path is acceptable?

So many interesting questions to ask.

From the prebuilt packages page:

Note: Currently, the Xcode toolchains above only support macOS development. iOS/tvOS/watchOS are not supported.

The NSW government abandoned a forced amalgamation of 14 city councils in Sydney in July last year. My question is this; are they proposing amalgamating existing local councils into three major cities or are they proposing three major urban planning “zones”?... hence the “split” of Sydney into three. If it’s the second option, I wonder how local councils will cooperate considering the animosity toward forced amalgamation in the past?

“Made on Earth by humans.”

Love that. Says so much to me.

I’m so sorry Matt. My heart goes out to you and yours in this time of grief and reflection. What a wonderful blog post about her, her love of life was so evident in your thoughtful words.

My Mrs is an astrophysicist and has been to Chile about 10 or so times over the last 8 years. She says the Atacama desert is ideal because of Chiles political stability as well as stability of the atmosphere. A high and dry western coastline is good for great “seeing” conditions because highly stable sea air is less prone to fluctuations in temperature which is the bane of any astronomer (this is what creates twinkling of stars). As it happens she was working on the data reduction pipeline for an instrument with adaptive optics (AO) on the Gemini South telescope. AO helps reduce atmospheric disturbances even further so they are now getting better results than Hubble from a ground based telescope.

What I found interesting about the move from hot type to cold type is just how transferable jobs were. From packing lead together to pasting up paper... many of the same skills are needed to ensure each page is laid out correctly. 14 lines per minute to 1000 lines per minute. Quite a drastic increase and no doubt meant alot less jobs were needed to produce a finished paper.

Here is an article about this posted on Princetons news site (August 22nd):

https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/08/22/orange-new-green-h...

It cites an interesting court case by a rival company that occurred after the contact to dump was signed:

"But a year after the contract was signed — during which time 12,000 metric tons of orange peels were unloaded onto the degraded land — TicoFruit, a rival company, sued, arguing the company had “defiled a national park.” The rival company won the case in front of Costa Rica’s Supreme Court, and the orange-peel-covered land was largely overlooked for the next 15 years."

When I sleep I slump over almost into a fetal position. It's never comfortable for me to sleep in a car. My Mrs on the other hand appears to be awake and sitting up, the only subtle clue is a slight bobbing of the head if her sunglasses are on. I wonder how engagement detection would work in her case? There have been many times I have been having a grand old chat with her as I am driving and in my periphery and she is sound asleep. I predict that she could easily fool the system unto thinking she is awake.

Same happened to me... initially I thought it must be some 1st world problem.