James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

The numbers are stunning.

.

Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

It was happy hour at the whitewashed hotel on the remote volcanic island of Salina, perched in the Tyrrhenian Sea, a short hydrofoil ride from northern Sicily. Around the pool, honeymooning couples, including my husband and me, drank tamarind margaritas and watched the sunset against Salina’s sister island Stromboli, which puffed out plumes of volcanic smoke into the encroaching dusk.

It was as romantic as I hoped it would be when booking the trip a year earlier – with one unanticipated and starkly unromantic caveat. A woman on one of the sun loungers had Zoomed into her New York work meeting, running through a pitch deck and talking loudly about ROI.

People run away to remote islands on vacation to pretend for a moment that the real world – the world of corporate culture and incessant demands on your time and energy – doesn’t exist. But with that one Zoom call, the mirage was dispelled. All of the disbelief we had collectively suspended came crashing down as we were sucked, unwillingly, into someone else’s remote working experience.

As good, reliable Wi-Fi becomes available in increasingly far-flung locations, there are few places it’s truly impossible to work from. I’m not immune to the lure of this lifestyle myself. I’m definitely guilty of camping at tables with plug sockets in coffee shops around Europe. But I came away from my honeymoon experience asking the question: Just because you can work from anywhere these days, does that mean you should?

.

Robert Rodriguez/CNET

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

With more than 9 billion gigabytes of information traveling the internet every day, researchers are constantly looking for new ways to compress data into smaller packages. Cutting-edge techniques focus on lossy approaches, which achieve compression by intentionally “losing” information from a transmission. Google, for instance, recently unveiled a lossy strategy where the sending computer drops details from an image and the receiving computer uses artificial intelligence to guess the missing parts. Even Netflix uses a lossy approach, downgrading video quality whenever the company detects that a user is watching on a low-resolution device.

Very little research, by contrast, is currently being pursued on lossless strategies, where transmissions are made smaller, but no substance is sacrificed. The reason? Lossless approaches are already remarkably efficient. They power everything from the PNG image standard to the ubiquitous software utility PKZip. And it’s all because of a graduate student who was simply looking for a way out of a tough final exam.

Seventy years ago, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor named Robert Fano offered the students in his information theory class a choice: Take a traditional final exam, or improve a leading algorithm for data compression. Fano may or may not have informed his students that he was an author of that existing algorithm, or that he’d been hunting for an improvement for years. What we do know is that Fano offered his students the following challenge.

Consider a message made up of letters, numbers, and punctuation. A straightforward way to encode such a message would be to assign each character a unique binary number. For instance, a computer might represent the letter A as 01000001 and an exclamation point as 00100001. This results in codes that are easy to parse — every eight digits, or bits, correspond to one unique character — but horribly inefficient, because the same number of binary digits is used for both common and uncommon entries. A better approach would be something like Morse code, where the frequent letter E is represented by just a single dot, whereas the less common Q requires the longer and more laborious dash-dash-dot-dash.

.

Kristina Armitage/Quanta Magazine

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

.

Peter Kramer, a reporter at the USA Today Network, joined Gannett colleagues on Renaissance Plaza in White Plains, N.Y., to voice grievances on Monday. Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

https://www.nytimes.com

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

I’m going to admit upfront that I’m a big Windex girl. It’s cheap, it’s always available, and it’s easy to spray on everything from mirrors (normal!) to tabletops (nor normal!) for a quick rubdown. It turns out, though, that you’re really not supposed to use the specialty glass cleaner for everything, as it can cause real damage to certain surfaces. Here’s what you should really avoid spraying.

Plexiglass

This is a surprising one, but you can’t use Windex on Plexiglass, so if you have any art framed in some or any other decor made from it, put the bottle down. Per Reader’s Digest, some Windex products contain ammonia, which will ruin the material. You can use the ammonia-free version, but you have to make sure that’s what you have. Buy it here for about $4.

Scummy shower doors

Reader’s Digest also cautions against using Windex on shower doors, of all things, if the doors are full of soap scum. Windex just doesn’t break that down well. The good news is you can just use regular old dish soap or a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser to get the scum off. Prevent scum altogether by keeping a dish wand filled with dish soap in the shower and using it to clean the interior every time you take a rinse yourself. Once your shower doors are free of gunk, you can use Windex, but you probably won’t even have to.

.

Photo: Andrey_Popov (Shutterstock)

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Last Friday, NASA awarded a $3.4 billion contract to a team led by Blue Origin for the design and construction of a second Human Landing System to fly astronauts down to the Moon.

The announcement capped a furious two-year lobbying campaign by Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos to obtain a coveted piece of NASA’s Artemis program. NASA also notched a big win, gaining the competition with SpaceX it sought for landing services. But there is a more profound takeaway from this.

After losing the initial lander contract to SpaceX two years ago, Blue Origin did not just bid a lower price this time around. Instead, it radically transformed the means by which it would put humans on the Moon. The Blue Moon lander is now completely reusable; it will remain in lunar orbit, going up and down to the surface. It will be serviced by a transport vehicle that will be fueled in low-Earth orbit and then deliver propellant to the Moon. This transporter, in turn, will be refilled by multiple launches of the reusable New Glenn rocket.

To be sure, that is a lot of hardware that has yet to be built and tested. But when we step back, there is one inescapable fact. With SpaceX’s fully reusable Starship, and now Blue Moon, NASA has selected two vehicles based around the concept of many launches and the capability to store and transfer propellant in space.

This is a remarkable transformation in the way humans will explore outer space—potentially the biggest change in spaceflight since the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957. It has been a long time coming.

.

In this illustration, SpaceX’s Starship vehicle is seen landing on the Moon.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

In 2034, a small craft will alight on a distant dune in a place called Shangri-la. This craft, called Dragonfly, will have traveled 746 million miles to eventually land on Saturn’s largest—and most alluring—moon, Titan.

Dragonfly is a radical new approach to studying other worlds. Rather than being bound to slowly creep over the surface, as our Mars rovers have been, it is a rotorcraft, capable of flying several miles at a time. It will hop around from place to place to help us better understand this strange land, where the atmosphere is nitrogen, the dunes are made from ice, the seas are liquid methane, and a potentially globe-wide water ocean may be buried deep below the frozen surface.

The planned Dragonfly mission, set to launch in four years, will include an impressive assortment of remote planetary exploration tools: several cameras that operate at different wavelengths to image the intriguing landscape, a small drill and scoop to collect samples, a mass spectrometer to determine the chemical makeup of those samples, a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer to study the composition of the surface directly under the craft, and a suite of meteorological and geological sensors to record Titan’s weather patterns and search for evidence of larger-scale activity (such as cryovolcanoes that might spew liquid water instead of lava). This suite of gear will help us get our first true taste of what Titan is really like—and whether it might be holding any important solar system secrets, like whether life could be present beyond our own world.

To date, we have only sent one lonely mission to Titan. Launched in 1997, the Cassini spacecraft carried a small payload: the Huygens probe. While Cassini spent nearly two decades in orbit around Saturn, the Huygens probe lasted less than a month between deployment from its parent spacecraft and the end of its operations, a mere hour and a half after touchdown on Titan’s rugged surface.

.

What future missions to Saturn’s moon Titan will reveal about the universe.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

https://nautil.us

.

__________________________________________