Remote
Ben Brockert
@wikkit@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Space. Travel. Not yet space travel.
493 Followers
56 Following
50 Posts
Joined October 28, 2022
Did a load of laundry and was procrastinating taking it out to hang it up, and accidentally timed it absolutely perfectly for the moon and Venus.
With a couple dozen strangers I watched the eclipse from the hill east of Montuenga Castle in a tiny town in Spain. I was the only one who decided to center it over the ruins of the castle, though I wish I'd done it lower down the hill.
This was my first total eclipse, it is a really neat experience. I set out with the objective of just watching it and not taking photos, and obviously failed in that regard. But it is interesting to think that no one will ever see this exact scene again.
RE: @alanboyle@mastodon.social
Second rocket company to raise over a billion dollars before first launch. I really hope they turn out better than Relativity, and soon, but as in countries there is a startup version of the “resource curse”.
There is an unfortunately common thing in coverage of space events of hyping up how rare they are, especially annoying for really mundane things like blue wolf super gruyere moon.
Total solar eclipses are actually geographically rare though, only happening on a tiny percent of earth's surface per year, but I enjoy the sort of inversion of normal of being able to say in 2026-27, "total solar eclipses are rare in Spain, they only happen once a year."
A distillery in Granada makes a very affordable mammoth-branded rum. It’s the closest to official mastodon liquor I’ve found.
The degree to which the US’s export economy is focused on the past and accelerating global warming, and China’s is focused on the future and not, is striking.
RE: @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu
I should try to try every PDO cheese. That seems like a reasonable goal for a decade.
Woo US debt is $40T!
https://www.us-debt-clock.com/live
No one will say anything about this until a Democrat is in power, at which point it will become a national emergency.
It is also useful to know that the percentage of GDP spent on interest on that debt is still lower than it was for basically all of the 80s and 90s.
The last-minute attempt to re-boost the Swift space telescope has failed, and it will reenter and burn up later this year.
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-updates-next-steps-for-commercial-swift-boost-mission/
RE: @mttaggart@infosec.exchange
“English literature (here measured in parts per million)” is a funny phrase. You’re allowed to have 10 ppm of arsenic in your water and 5 ppm of train conductors in your stories.
A confluence of the space age and climate change. Martin Marietta made the Titan rockets, amongst other activities in the early to mid space age. They merged with Lockheed to make Lockheed Martin. They fully spun off Martin Marietta Materials, which operates a bunch of quarries across the US.
In Indianapolis, flooding this month resulted in a small creek reversing direction and flowing an entire river into a Martin Marietta quarry, about 9 billion gallons of water.
'Where do you live?"
"In the AAAAAA8 row."
The nearly 200 year old Academy of Natural Sciences museum in Philadelphia is closing at the end of the month, if you are nearby and want to see some dinosaurs and similar at the end of an institution.
My profile pic is a self portrait in infrared, from about twenty years ago, of a house near where I grew up. Today went to see the slightly more famous depiction of the same house.
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social I haven't read this yet but had it recommended on discord. Tangentially related but sounds interesting and likely to have some relevant anecdotes.
"At Day's Close: Night in Times Past" by A. Roger Ekirch https://amzn.to/4zq0xAc
India's Skyroot Aerospace appears to have made orbit on the first try, which is pretty unusual. Congrats to them!
@simonbp@social.linux.pizza https://crossborderrail.eu/longestjourney/ Seems like a fun quest.
Nancy Grace Roman Telescope is on its way to L2!
The longest instruction sheet I’ve ever been given at a restaurant. At a Korean place in Granada, Spain.
Madrid is still rainbow in June. Most of the world isn’t falling into Trumpism.
Replying to
Later from the ground in Iowa looking to the north it was nearly invisible by eye, and just a bit of color by camera. The moon being so big, plus humidity and high altitude haze and contrails is tough for dim aurora.
Quite sharp quake felt in Granada!
Used to spend a lot of time doing project/program management, and as such also trying to learn about it. I haven't gone looking for it recently but was linked to https://thesearesystems.substack.com/p/task-estimation-conquering-hofstadters and thought it was a good read, it's frustratingly rare to find writing based on real data.
The short of it is that experienced people are good at estimating the median of how long tasks will take, but it's a log-normal distribution and the mean is 1.65x the median.
And if you want 95% confidence, that's 5x!
Walked into a glasses and sunglasses store and they had 2 eclipse glasses for 4 euro. I was wondering how much of a Quest it was going to be to find glasses two days before a local partial solar eclipse, and turns out not much at all.
They are manufactured in China by "Sumtrum Anti-fake Technology Co.", which is very funny.
Replying to
I tried to go to Wagamama for lunch as is my custom in T5, but they had a guy positioned to intercept people and tell them that they were only accepting cash.
I asked if they would take Gibraltar Pounds, as I stupidly withdrew some the first time I was there. He, correctly, had no idea what a Gibraltar Pound was, but did say they would accept Scottish pounds.
How do you sink a frigate in international waters with a fucking submarine-launched torpedo while claiming you aren't at war?
The US will do anything it can to avoid building high speed rail.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/california-high-speed-buses-b2976716.html
You can special request a US passport with Trump's face on it. I look forward to the stories of red hats whining about getting denied service at hotels because of it.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-passports-state-department-d149546cb15c8e6b67356168d248ccf4
@reedmideke@mastodon.social Impressive video of an interceptor blasting a shaped charge up the back of a Shahed.
https://bsky.app/profile/maks23.bsky.social/post/3mibkib6gek2g
I hadn’t realized that Anderson Erickson invented the “missing child” milk carton. That was the brand of our milk growing up.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/100-objects-009-missing-children-milk-carton/
(If you gave up on 99pi after they sold out, it seems like they have recovered; the 100 objects series has been good, as have been the normal episodes.)
A big fault movement seen at the beach in Trinidad apparently as a result of the two 7 mag earthquakes hundreds of miles away in Venezuela. So sever that fish ended up out of the water.
Also the comments love the way the dude pronounces "instantaneous" in the Trinidad accent.
"chemical formulas written on a whiteboard heightened concerns and prompted the FBI to bring in experts from Quantico, Virginia"
So dumb. Incredible waste of resources to raid the house and seize a bunch of stuff for a chemistry youtuber.
RE: https://squeet.me/display/962c3e10-125b8a13-ce358f619b26391f
Is Plesetsk in Asia? Wikipedia thinks it’s in Europe, the first orbital launch from there was by the Soviets in the 60s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plesetsk_Cosmodrome
Replying to
@simonbp @viaduct_world That’s fun, there’s a site for everything.
I am weirdly proud to have beaten you in Spain and the Balkans, but you’ve definitely done vastly more of the pretty Central Europe lines.
Replying to
ESA press release author channeling their inner movie hero monologue writer.
"Decades of engineering, international cooperation, and innovation in the fields of science, engineering and planetary defence culminated in the use of humankind’s most powerful robotic space telescope, built by many nations, to spot a distant speck of dust across the void and answer a question of universal importance to all the inhabitants of our planet."
Really nice bit of linkability from the UK government. They have a "check if you need a visa to enter" choose your own adventure at https://www.gov.uk/check-uk-visa
and it just encodes the answers into the URL like directories, so you can easily share the results of it with someone as a static page.
https://www.gov.uk/check-uk-visa/y/india/transit/somewhere_else/no for example.
Replying to
@sundogplanets I remember seeing an updated version of this chart, maybe you posted it? Do you know where I can find it again?
Anyone know anyone at Atlas Obscura? Can you email them and ask them to fix the thing in the map where it believes there are hundreds of locations in a single point?