Oberlin College Sues Insurers For Refusing To Cover $36 Million It Paid Gibson’s Bakery For Defamation And Other Torts

Four insurance companies have told the college to pound sand. Have you ever rooted for insurance companies ever? There’s a first for everything.

THE rules of the road have expanded onto several private parking lots thanks to a new city ordinance.

Drivers should be aware that violating state road laws in some Brick Township, New Jersey, lots could lead to massive $500 fines.

The city council agreed last week to adopt an ordinance that extends police jurisdiction and signage to 20 more lots. //

Police will now be able to enforce all aspects of traffic code, including violations like motorists making illegal turns to cars blocking fire lanes.

A team of MIT researchers has figured out a way to create a supercapacitor simply by mixing cement, the binding ingredient of concrete, and a fine charcoal product called carbon black together with water.

Better yet, this mixture could allow a home to store a full day's worth of energy in its foundation, potentially paving the way to an efficient renewable energy storage solution that doesn't rely on mining rare Earth metals.

When did spaceflight begin? There is no single answer.

For newcomers to space, the beginning of time can be traced to as recently as December 2015. That's when SpaceX landed its Falcon 9 rocket successfully for the first time, opening the modern era of rapid, reusable spaceflight. Increasingly, anything that came before feels anachronistic.

But for those with a bit more perspective, the dawn of spaceflight can be pushed back further back into time, to the 1957 launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite that shocked the world. This small orbiting spacecraft kicked off the frenetic space race that culminated with NASA's Apollo 11 Moon landing just a dozen years later.

Yet in a new book, From the Earth to Mars, space entrepreneur Jeffrey Manber takes us back much further into the murk of history to divine the origins of spaceflight. His story goes back a century and a half, telling the tales of some figures who are fairly well known, such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth, and others a bit less so, including Thea von Harbou and Robert Esnault-Pelterie. //

Manber's book is subtitled "Before the Governments were Involved." The second book in the series, he says, will tackle Russian rocket builders. I look forward to it.

Elon Musk @elonmusk
·
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11:00 PM · Aug 5, 2023

Elon Musk @elonmusk

And we won’t just sue, it will be extremely loud and we will go after the boards of directors of the companies too
12:56 AM · Aug 6, 2023

If all goes well, it might take another five-to-10 years before ITER achieves the promised goal of a ten-fold “return on power” (500 MW of fusion power from 50 MW of input heating power). //

Ironically, I am convinced that the ITER fiasco will actually accelerate, rather than slow down, progress toward the practical realization of fusion power. //

One indication is accelerated plans by China and Japan to build their own national “DEMO” plants, without necessarily waiting for the results of ITER to come in. Both nations have reactor projects underway, which could in effect substitute for the role of ITER and accelerate development on the basis of knowledge and technologies that did not exist when the final design of ITER was approved, in 2001.

South Korea is designing a “K-DEMO” reactor, intended to generate approximately 2.2 GW of thermal power and supply over 500 MW to the electricity grid.

DovePig Ars Centurion
1y
6,274
mknelson said:
I was thinking gyroscopes, but see those stopped working in 2016.

Wikipedia notes: "Thrusters are supplied by a single 70-centimetre (28 in) diameter spherical titanium tank. It contained 100 kilograms (220 lb) of hydrazine at launch, providing enough fuel until 2034."
I am even much more in awe of the RCS mechanical valves, as even a hydrazine (or similar) propellent would probably still need some, as while you can apparently just run it over a rare metal catalyst screen to get it to decompose in a very exothermal reaction (these nitrogens really wanna go free!), you still have to push it through into the nozzle exactly when needed (and stop it when needed).

Come on, fifty years with a mechanical valve system in space? That still sounds awesome to me, even if IANARS! //

Needleroozer Smack-Fu Master, in training
10m
11
Subscriptor
Siosphere said:
How does Voyager 2 know where the earth is? Like how does it re-orient itself to earth?

What is it using as a reference point?
It appears to lock onto Canopus using a star-tracking system that rolls the spacecraft until a star of the appropriate intensity is detected, then maneuvers to stay centered on that star.

https://hackaday.com/2023/07/31/just-how-is-voyager-2-going-to-sort-out-its-dish-then/

Creating an ebook is a simple and pleasurable exercise. One of our volunteers has provided us with the following procedure in creating ebooks for Project Gutenberg Canada.

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If you have weeds in areas you want to replant, fill an ordinary garden sprayer with white vinegar and add about one teaspoon liquid dishwashing soap like blue Dawn or Meyer’s Clean Day. Apply sprayer top and follow the instructions on the sprayer to get it ready to spray. That’s it. Seriously, it is that simple.

Pick a hot, dry day to spray weeds until saturated, and they will wilt and shrivel up within hours. Be careful to not spray anything you want to live. However, do not worry about the vinegar killing anything below the soil. Because vinegar will not harm the soil, you can safely replant the area once the weeds have died.

To kill all vegetation in walkways, driveways and other areas where you don’t want any living thing to grow again, mix two cups ordinary table salt with one gallon of white vinegar. Do this in a container that is larger than one-gallon capacity so you have room for the salt. Apply the lid and shake to dissolve the salt. Salt dissolves more quickly in vinegar than in water, but it takes a bit of doing. It may not completely dissolve, but that’s okay.

Add 1 teaspoon of liquid dishwashing soap (this is to break the surface tension of the mixture so it will stick to the plant material you’ll be killing). Pour into an ordinary garden sprayer. Apply to weeds or grass on a dry, sunny day to areas you don’t want to see vegetation of any kind in the future.

The presence of salt in this recipe is what will eventually bring permanence to your weed killing. The salt will penetrate and leach into the soil. It may take several applications, but in time the presence of salt will “sterilize” the soil in this area so that nothing will grow there. Plan well before you go this permanent route.

The substance has a lifetime cancer risk more than 1 million times higher than what the agency usually finds acceptable. //

But the agency now says that those numbers in the consent order do not reflect the cancer risk posed by air from refinery smokestacks. When the consent order said stack emissions, the EPA says, it really meant pollution released from the exhaust of the jets and boats powered by these fuels.

“Oppenheimer” is a 3-hour epic about the life of J Robert Oppenheimer. In certain ways, it’s reminiscent of how movies used to be made. The dialogue is smart. The editing was crisp, and (because I know the sound editor), the soundtrack was terrific—being “big” when it was needed and subtle when required. It’s also a “whodunit” wrapped in soft commie propaganda inside leftist messaging. //

The film bends time by blending Oppenheimer’s 1954 security clearance revocation hearing with the 1957 Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the nomination of former AEC chairman Lewis Strauss. Christopher Nolan flips back and forth from Oppenheimer’s security clearance hearing (shot in color) to the Commerce Committee public hearing, as if they are being held contemporaneously. //

The movie soft-pedals Oppenheimer’s lack of personal morals throughout. //

Oppenheimer recognized Nazis as imperialists and evil, as Jew-hating madmen but apparently couldn’t see the Jew-hating Karl Marx and mass-murdering Joe Stalin in the same light. The film follows a well-worn script that communists weren’t “all that bad”. It tracks the oft-used illustration of how communists were “ruined” just for being communists. It never mentions that most American communists were counting on and willing to foment a Soviet-style revolution in America. //

“Oppenheimer” is an interesting story, but the film is way too long. It spends too much time mythologizing a conflicted (mostly immoral) man and ultimately left me empty – not caring for the man beyond the fact that (if he liked it or not) helped end the war against Japan with the deaths of 100,000 dead civilians. Oppenheimer had an unintended hand in my dad coming home from the war. For only that reason, I thank him.