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A Moon-bound lunar lander is being shipped to Cape Canaveral, Florida next month under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas announced it has wrapped up the Blue Ghost’s rigid environmental testing for a projected launch in January of next year. “While we know there will be more challenges […]

The Art of Selling Movies #1 --- Carolina, The Country Doctor, and The FanCAROLINA (1934) --- At left is what they used to call a “mini-window card.” Sample shown is apx. 8X11, a blank margin likely trimmed off at some point. Idea was to print or hand-write playdates in the white space, then post cards on cooperating store windows. Merchants used to assist one another that way. A Fox Films …

Hundreds of patients with a rare genetic condition that causes rickets and severe bone and dental problems can now receive a “life-changing” new therapy on the NHS in England. Targeted drug burosumab has been shown to help transform the lives of adults with an inherited condition that leads to low levels of the mineral phosphate […]

(Links below may be affiliate links that earn commission when you make a purchase—it’s how I am able to keep making this site and do fun coverage of events like Pitti Uomo. Thanks!) Here’s a running list of Black Friday sales for you to shop this week. I’ll keep this list updated as I come across new ones I discover throughout the week. Spier & Mackay — Up to 20% …

"Imagine an early Eighties Eastern European space-prog album high on sugary breakfast cereal, “Heavy Metal” magazine, Hanna-Barbera cartoons and 8-bit arcade games like Galaxian and Asteroids, and you have some idea of the otherworldly weirdness of the Romanian animated sci-fi film DELTA SPACE MISSION. In the year 3084, a Modigliani-esque alien journalist with blue-green skin, Alma, boards a state-of-the-art spacecraft named Delta – whose highly advanced computer brain develops a …

It really has been a strange sort of a year . A spring so wet it was biblical . Followed by a summer that never really matured it was either too hot or too cold and things never really seemed to get going , Rising fish seem to have been notably absent and judging by other anglers I speak to that seems to have been a pretty common experience. The …

Piles of shaped logs on the beach at Madras, India. (This is a re-post from August, 2020.) I do like cameras. In fact, I love them. But, relatively speaking, I don't write about them all that much. I'm told by photo-blogging friends that if I were to write about cameras more often I would have more readers. Many people want to read and learn about the latest and greatest in …

Before Turner there was no fog in London. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

The examples used here are from the weekly challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution. Part 1: String Compression You are given a string of alphabetic characters, $chars. Write a script to compress the string with run-length encoding. A compressed unit can be either a single character or a count followed by a character. BONUS: Write a decompression function. After working so much with recursion for the previous challenge, …

I grew up in the shadow of New York City, and while it was a populated area, the town I lived in lacked a lot of conveniences. We had no fast food chains, no mall, and no department stores. So, we were always forced to leave town to do things like back-to-school shopping. Then it was announced that we would be getting a mall in town and that the anchor …

What's with all the police trucks outside and the cameras everywhere? A father (Josh Hartnett) takes his daughter (Ariel Donoghue) to a huge gig she’s always wanted to go to. Soon he realises there’s an increased police presence at the stadium, and that they might be on the hunt for him. I haven’t seen a Shyamalan film in ages now, and certainly not any of his later ‘renaissance’ stuff. This …

You can stack some monads in such a way that the composition is also a monad. This article is part of a series of articles about functor relationships. In a previous article you learned that nested functors form a functor. You may have wondered if monads compose in the same way. Does a monad nested in a monad form a monad? As far as I know, there's no universal rule …

On the 243 bus ride to yesterday’s matinee show at Cafe Oto, I finished Samantha Harvey’s short novel Orbital, the winner of this year’s Booker Prize. Starting as a description of the lives of six astronauts aboard a space station, it finishes as a meditation on the world — the planet, the universe — and our place in it. With that in my head, listening to Evan Parker, Matthew Wright …

James CraneCrumbling KeepOSELevels ... ? Fuck off and buy it l0ser In the middle of a deep and dark forest along a babbling stream, the PCs come upon a wide and long field. It is extremely overgrown and has become a mix of bolted plants and dead, dry, and decaying foliage. Despite this, there is somehow a completely clear, straight path through it, untouched by the growth on either side. …

It has been over 25 years since a handful of pragmatic idealists with a penchant for audaciousness started The Long Now Foundation. It was 10 years before the iPhone. Two years before Google. The human genome was about halfway sequenced. Danny Hillis kept telling his friends about a 10,000-year clock. This always led to great conversations about time and civilization and humanity. An institution began to take shape around them. …