perihelions

I was literally just reading about this (see in particular "arguments in favor of")

https://webhomes.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/mfaknot.pdf ("Geometry and Physics of Knots" by Atiyah)

It's interesting that the mathematical theory of knots was initially developed in response to Kelvin's proposal (i.e. Tait's work), because people were motivated trying to work out its implications for atomic theory. A branch of mathematics created by wrong physics.

(It's a literal quote of the WSJ).

> "Many are. This one is not. The President has sweeping pardon powers."

I understand it's debatably possible to prosecute the public corruption that motivated a pardon, even though the pardon act itself is unreviewable. I.e., the DoJ attempted a criminal bribery investigation of Bill Clinton's pardon of the donor Marc Rich,

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/us/us-is-beginning-crimin... ("U.S. is beginning criminal inquiry in pardon of Rich" (2001))

> "Some lawyers have said that proving such a case could be exceedingly difficult because bribery cases usually required the cooperation of one of the parties. Moreover, contributions to political parties or to Mr. Clinton's library foundation are legal, and the president's pardon authority is unreviewable."

I assume similar logic might apply to World Liberty Financial and Trump's CZ pardon.

Key line:

> "Since Trump’s election, Binance has also been a key supporter of his family’s World Liberty Financial crypto venture, a business that has driven a huge leap in the president’s personal wealth."

"Huge leap" meaning $5 billion,

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-wlfi-world-liberty-financ... ("New crypto token boosts Trump family's wealth by $5 billion")

What if a "legitimate" government is committing genocide, as Mynamar's is? Should international companies respect its sovereign laws?

This thread baffles me, that people are somehow capable of ignoring the elephant in the room of the massacring of civilians, to tunnel-vision instead on some trivial and insignificant technicalities about satellite law.

But the US (who has jurisdiction over Starlink) isn't bound by Mynamar laws, and (IMHO) shouldn't give the time of day to the requests of a junta commiting crimes against humanity, systemic extermination[0] of ethnic minorities.

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

The title is underselling the nuance—there's the entire Myanmar civil war hiding behind the word "allegedly". The group in power claims a group trying to overthrow them is operating scam centers (they deny it); this SpaceX intervention cuts off communications on a large scale, presumably aiding one side or the other in some unclear way.

> "“Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the spokesperson for the military government, charged in a statement Monday night that the top leaders of the Karen National Union, an armed ethnic organization opposed to army rule, were involved in the scam projects at KK Park,” the AP wrote. The Karen National Union is “part of the larger armed resistance movement in Myanmar’s civil war” and “deny any involvement in the scams.”"

> "the energy costs of manufacturing and sending a rocket to outer space versus putting that fuel into a generator"

I believe it's on the order of magnitude of 100x return (for a low-orbit space photovoltiac panel that's (almost) always facing direct sun).

    (/ (* ([W (kg -1)] 200)   ;; reasonable space PV power/mass ratio
          ([year] 10)         ;; guess at lifespan
          ([ton] 100))        ;; Starship payload
       (* ([ton] 1000)        ;; tons of liquid methane in Starsihp
          ([J (kg -1)] 5e7))) ;; specific energy density of CH₄
    
    ;; => 126.226944

There's already about 0.4 square km of solar panels across the Starlink constellation. (~4,000 v2 satellites at ~100 meter^2 each).

There's already a broad range of inclinations spanning from equatorial to polar (and slightly beyond polar (slightly "backwards"), for sun-synchronous orbits)—they already have enormous relative velocities, at up to 90-degree relative angles. Satellites going completely "backwards" wouldn't meaningfully make things worse.

> "So why not admit that 8000-year-old myth can have got "the rocks went flying" part right."

Because they're cherry-picked examples fished out of a sea of nonsense. You can't ignore that the body of oral tradition is almost entirely florid fiction, and claim that a few bits and pieces that vaguely resemble reality are evidence that oral tradition preserves information over long timescales. It's methodologically invalid. That kind of analysis gives the same result ("we found an ancient myth that resembles a fact"), independent of whether the proposition, "oral tradition preserves information", is true or false.

It's a classic fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking ("Cherry picking, suppressing evidence, or the fallacy of incomplete evidence is the act of pointing to individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position while ignoring a significant portion of related and similar cases or data that may contradict that position.")

> "if true"

To swiftly terminate that thread, it is not a hoax; his North Carolina friend Oleksandr Bortnyk confirmed it on his video stream.

/meta (This title should be edited IMO: the "predictions of 9 feet of manure in cities" part is not substantiated, and actually contradicted by, the source article. It's an apocryphal story that didn't actually happen).

This is shocking, I have no words. The poor guy.

So, that scribble that looks approximately like "ẏlueſ" is interpreted, variously as "ylves" which is identified as elves; or as a clumsy rendering of "ƿlues" which uses an archaic character (that's not a "p") that corresponds to something like "wlues" or "wlves" (wolves). (??)

> "As we learned in December, Meta has commissioned a new natural gas generator plant to be built by local utility operator Entergy. At least for the initial build out, the gas plant would employ three combined cycle combustion turbine generators with a total generative capacity of over 2.2 gigawatts."

I thought it'd be about Lie groups!

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

Ironically for the parent's thesis (cheap energy replacing human slave labor), one of the major objects of modern slavery is... the manufacturing of solar panels,

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/business/economy/solar-xi... ("Solar Supply Chain Grows More Opaque Amid Human Rights Concerns / The global industry is cutting some ties to China, but its exposure to forced labor remains high and companies are less transparent, a new report found")

https://www.csis.org/analysis/dark-spot-solar-energy-industr... ("A Dark Spot for the Solar Energy Industry: Forced Labor in Xinjiang")

(Maybe there's some kind of evil Jevons Paradox for slavery, where the automation of human labor counterintuitively increases total slavery; i.e. the technologically-augmented effectiveness of slave labor increases the value of slaves).

> "“Information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified,” the directive states. The signature form includes an array of security requirements for credentialed media at the Pentagon."

https://apnews.com/article/pentagon-press-media-restrictions...

> "When the new policy was issued two weeks ago, news organizations were concerned that signing the rules conveyed agreement with them, including to a restriction that they not report on any news — even if unclassified — without official approval."

https://apnews.com/article/pentagon-journalists-new-restrict...

Awfully reminiscent of a certain *other* autocratic regime, and its tyrannical control over public discussion of its armed forces.

> "These laws establish administrative and criminal punishments for "discrediting" or dissemination of "unreliable information" about the Russian Armed Forces, other Russian state bodies and their operations, and the activity of volunteers aiding the Russian Armed Forces, and for calls to impose sanctions against Russia, Russian organizations and citizens.[1][2]"... The adoption of these laws resulted in the mass exodus of foreign media from Russia and the termination of war reporting by independent Russian media. More than 10,000 people have been prosecuted under these laws,[4]..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_2022_war_censorship_la... ("Russian 2022 war censorship laws")

> "by looking at the ratio of Cesium 137 and Barium 137, which presumedly someone has done…"

That's impractical; the decay product Ba-137 is stable and already present in much larger amounts, compared against which the Cs-137 decay products are undetectable.

What was the local impact of this pollution incident?

> "Some of the highest levels of contamination detected in the area were reportedly found in the company’s furnace, which is about 1.5 miles southwest of the BMS Foods facility where the shrimp was processed. Investigators think that radioactive dust was released into the environment after PMT inadvertently smelted scrap metal containing cesium-137. “Because it’s airborne, the contamination can be carried by wind,”..."

Generic NIMBYism,

> "Conservation advocates, local government leaders and nearby residents have expressed concerns about the cumulative environmental impacts of the proposed Esmeralda 7 project, which in addition to covering a huge swath of desert lands would have also included miles of roads and associated transmission lines."

> "They have argued for placing onshore utility-scale projects on previously disturbed sites and expanding the use of rooftop solar."

> "The Esmeralda 7 project “would have destroyed significant archaeology sites, rare plants, bighorn sheep habitat and wilderness quality lands,” said Kevin Emmerich, a co-founder of Nevada-based Basin and Range Watch."

> "The cancellation of the project “will give us a chance to protect the tremendous resources of the area, including beautiful and wild mountain ranges and valleys, rare plant populations, and bighorn sheep,” said Laura Cunningham, a biologist with Western Watersheds Project."

> "“Paleontological fossil beds [the Esmeralda Formation] here were formative to understanding the geological history of the Great Basin,” Cunningham added. “This is good news for recreationists and for conservation efforts of an amazing landscape.”"

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/10/trump-interior-depa...

Other threads about (IMHO very nice) tools by this developer (fd, hexyl, and hyperfine),

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/sharkdp

I mean, career photography is itself just an automation of a manual creative task, that of portraiture painting. A thing that replaced the careers of a large number of professional artists with faster, more efficient, machines; and a smaller number of professionals operating those machines.

> "SpaceX does not really need Starship, that is more or less a bonus at this point."

Starship is the moat SpaceX needs to be developing today to stay ahead of where the Chinese competition will be in 5-10 years.

That's still much less than the aluminum from solid rockets, which have been ongoing since the 1970's. Per your own link,

> "In situ measurements showed evidence of a 1,000% increase in stratospheric aluminum levels from 1976 to 1984 (Zolensky et al., 1989), which was associated with the emission of hundreds of tons of such particles from solid rocket motors (SRM) during atmospheric ascent (Brady et al., 1994)"

If you follow Brady et al. (1994)[0], you'll read that every Space Shuttle launch (Table 1) deposited 112 tons of Al2O3 into the stratosphere (>15 km).

[0] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA289852.pdf

This isn't a new phenomenon at all; in fact the peak alumina pollution from in the past (112 tons per STS launch) exceeds the worst-case future estimates from academic research (360 tons per year from satellite reentries).

(/meta Coincidentally, I once linked that exact Brady paper on HN, three years ago[1]. Actually, long before the current social media fad for being concerned about satellites. At the time I wrote, and this has truly aged well, "No one ever gave a shit").

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34812863

It's postulated that the high aluminum content of satellites (for perspective, Bennu samples are only 1% Al), as oxidized Al2O3 particles in the stratosphere, catalyze chemistry that destroys ozone. But that's far from a quantitatively meaningful problem, at the current scale.

This source[0] says satellite reentries are about about 12% of the space industry's contribution to ozone depletion (the big one is chlorine from solid rockets), which in turn is 0.1% of the entire anthropogenic contribution; i.e. satellite reentries are ~0.01% of the total.

https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-reentry-pollution-dama...

One source,

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/13/world/asia/nepal-unrest-a... ("Many of the nation’s public records were destroyed in the arson strikes, complicating efforts to provide basic health care")