An evening pause: Written by Kenneth MacMillan and performed by Marianela Nuñez as Manon and Federico Bonelli as Des Grieux of the Royal Ballet.
Contrast the gentility and elegance of this dance of two, of which Astaire and Rogers were of the same class, with that of the raw modern gymnastic routines of large groups. Both have their merits, but to me there is something more civilized and thoughtful about the former.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
Only two appear to be at the South Pole. The majority are in the mare regions on the Moon’s near side.
These were delivered to Cape Canaveral today. It is not clear how many segments were on this train.
“A little child shall lead them,” painting by James L. Johnson.
Bring a gun to a knife fight: On September 22, 2023 hundreds of students attending high school in Pennsylvania’s Perkiomen Valley School District walked out of classes in protest when the local school board refused to pass a new rule that would forbid boys from using the girls’ bathroom.
The school board had voted against the rule earlier in the week. According to superintendent Dr Barbara Russell it rejected the rule because of its own “anti-discrimination code which states gender identity is a protected class.”
To put it in plain English, the law now allows transvestites or cross-dressing boys to leer at young girls while they go to the bathroom, and no one can do anything about it.
The students in these high schools however did not agree, and made that disagreement quite clear in their protest. I strongly suspect that even when they return to class, there is going to be an organized effort to protect the girls from such perversion. Note this quote:
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SpaceX early this morning successfully launched another 21 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California shortly after midnight.
The first stage successfully completed its sixth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
68 SpaceX
43 China
13 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India
American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 79 to 43, and the entire world combined 79 to 69. SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world combined (excluding American companies) by only 68 to 69.
Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay. I had missed this launch last night, until he reminded me of it.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 30, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The scientists label it “Mesas in shallow trough,” but that is only describes a small part of what can be seen here, as I interpret it.
The picture itself shows a small portion of the floor of an unnamed 32-mile-wide crater, with the crater’s southeast interior rim beginning its rise in the lower right. First, note the meandering hollow in the upper left, suggesting some past flow. Second, note the pattern of small ridges on the flat crater floor, suggesting some past drying process that left cracks that later filled with material that formed the ridges at a later time. Third, the mesas themselves suggest chaos terrain, often formed on Mars in connection with glacial flows. Fourth, note that the trough which holds the mesas is on the edge of the crater floor, suggesting the trough and mesas mark the erosion that once occurred at the edge of some material, possibly ice, that once filled that floor.
The trough and small meander also signify something far larger that can only be seen when we zoom out.
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Engineers today successfully recovered the asteroid sample capsule from the probe OSIRIS-REx, carrying several grams of material from the potentially dangerous asteroid Bennu.
The samples will be shipped to special facilities to protect the material from being exposed to Earth’s environment when the capsule is opened. It will take several months at least before the first research results are announced.
OSIRIS-REx, now renamed OSIRIS-APEX, now heads for the potentially dangeous asteroid Apophis, where it will orbit that asteroid beginning in 2029, shortly after Apophis makes its next close fly-by of Earth.
SpaceX tonight successfully launched 22 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral using a first stage booster flying for the seventeenth time.
The booster landed successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The company now has two boosters that have flown that many times, plus at least one that has flown fifteen times.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
67 SpaceX
43 China
13 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India
American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 78 to 43, and the entire world combined 78 to 69. SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world combined (excluding American companies) by only 67 to 69.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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An evening pause: There is much talk about limits in the availability of lithium and the the control by China of this resource. This video kind of suggests that talk is hogwash. Whether we should mine it for electric cars remains a far different question.
Hat tip Alton Blevins.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
It goes live at 10 am Eastern.
Jay notes, “Looks like a gap in the fuel burn then that orange smoke a couple seconds later. Also looks like something fell out. Was there a bubble in the solid fuel or did the fuel fail to burn?”
They are continuing their efforts, but sunrise occurred today, and the longer there is no contact the less chance the lunar rover or lander survived the long lunar night.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on June 21, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The scientists label the strange tubelike features that are scattered throughout this picture as “landforms,” which is correctly vague because their origin is utterly inexplicable. The ground here is on the eastern slope of a small 20-mile-wide very flat shield volcano located about 150 miles northwest of the giant volcano Ascraeus Mons. The dark wind streaks point down that grade to the east, away from the shield volcano’s peak about 1,000 feet away. (If you look at the full image this indistinct peak is at dead center, with a linear depression (the volcano’s vent) beginning there and heading to the northeast for about four miles.)
Why these many tubes are all oriented in a northwest-southwest direction, at right angles to the slope, is baffling, especially because they hold to that same orientation all across the shield volcano, no matter the downward direction of the slope.
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They’re coming for you next: Santa Clara county in California is now being sued by Calvary Chapel San Jose and its pastor Mike McClure for using without warrant the GPS data from the cellphones of the church’s members to track their movements without their knowledge.
On August 22, 2023, a lawsuit was filed by Advocates for Faith and Freedom on behalf of Calvary Chapel San Jose against Santa Clara County, California, for utilizing geofencing methods to spy on church members during the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this year, Santa Clara County imposed a $1.2 million fine against the church for not abiding by the State’s and County’s COVID-19 restrictions.
Santa Clara County utilized an investigative method known as geofencing. Geofencing is a technological tool the government uses to track people relative to their location and likely locations. This tool is typically used in police investigations of criminal activity and, in these instances, requires a warrant– which is not always granted.
The lawsuit complaint can be read here [pdf]. As it notes:
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