Month: July 2015

New Horizons

After traveling ~5b km over the past 9.5 years, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is within hours of its rendezvous with Pluto. Back in 2006, when the space probe was launched, Pluto was classified as the 9th planet in the solar system, and was known to have 3 moons. During the long journey to this distant icy world, Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, 1 of many smaller bodies orbiting the sun, and another 2 moons were discovered. In 2007, New Horizons flew past Jupiter and its moons on the way to Pluto, capturing many spectacular images. On the morning of July 14, 2015, New Horizons will speed past the Pluto system at ~14 kilometers per second, making as many observations as possible. In the hours and days following, it will be sending the data to Earth, on its way to the Kuiper belt, with plans to target another smaller body sometime around 2018.

Content Farms

Dumb people are ruining everything

The highbrow internet is based upon the misguided idea that there is a certain consumer who turns to the internet for well-written, informative content in the form of thinkpieces, #longform, podcasts and ‘well thought out glorified blog posts.’ Eventually, an authority in the niche provides a website with the ability to perform sustainable day to day farming. Based on an audience of ‘educated’ people who ‘spend money,’ you would think that the relative scale of these niche content farms with ‘an interesting take’ on culture + niche would be sustainable. They aren’t. They’re all going to die because of the toxic byproducts of viral supernova sites.

Britain slaveholder bailout

The compensation of Britain’s 46K slave owners was the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009. Not only did the slaves receive nothing, under another clause of the act they were compelled to provide 45 hours of unpaid labour each week for their former masters, for a further 4 years after their supposed liberation. In effect, the enslaved paid part of the bill for their own manumission.

Face blindness

I’m always looking for visual hooks. My daughter has a particular thing she does with her mouth. If there’s several people who could be her, I look for the mouth thing. If she’s nervous, or she’s irritated, one side of her mouth goes up. She’s done it since she was a baby. She doesn’t like having her photograph taken, so when I look at a group photo, I look for the kid with the smirk and I know it’s my daughter.