nudge

Apparently, Orion will launch on SLS, then rendezvous with Starship in lunar orbit.

Blue dunes on the red planet. Breathtaking... Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Ingenuity Helicopter's first flight has been rescheduled again, JPL will set the flight date next week. Minor modification and reinstallation of flight control software needs to be validated and then carried out.

Add me to the list of Mafia 1 and Mafia 2 fans, both great games. Heard @Viva la FCB really loves the third one, too!

This is obviously a scene depicting human sacrifice to appease the three-clawed alien lobsters and acquire their pyramid-building knowledge.

That's actually a misconception - people who built the pyramids weren't slaves, they were Egyptian workers (thought to be recruited farmers) who were paid and treated very well. There were entire "villages" purpose-built for those workers nearby the construction sites, they slept in long dormitories and were fed abundant amounts of bread and best cuts of meat, drank beer, their injuries were attended to by medical professionals, and if they died, they were burried respectfully and their tombs contained everything that was thought as needed for a good afterlife. Some of the manpower came from the system called Corvee, where those who couldn't pay their annual taxes were required to travel and work for the state for a specific period of time once a year, when harvesting in the fields wasn't being done.

To be honest, the plausibility of the ancient aliens theory is about equal to that of religion... Both are the result of human imagination, tendency to look for patterns everywhere, even where there are none, and projecting our biases onto them. It's pseudoscience and baseless speculation - cool idea for speculative science fiction, though. Personally, I hate hearing about how aliens built the Pyramids, taught us cool things, etc. mostly because it suggests that "primitive ancient humans" weren't capable of actually accomplishing things on their own. Yes, they weren't as technologically advanced as we are, but they were not stupid, they had their own, efficient ways of doing things, and they most definitely knew what they were doing. It's not a mystery, we know how those grand engineering structures were built, and suggesting that it was due to some extraterrestrial intervention is taking the credit away from the amazing cultures who actually did it, while also downplaying tens of thousands of years of human ingenuity...

I'll try to read it this week, too... Let me know what you think afterwards!

Did some stargazing with the binos last night for the first time in a while, and my mind was completely blown by the sheer amount of visible stars... Very, very clear skies and acceptable light pollution. At first, I completely randomly stumbled upon the Spring Triangle - the yellow-orange Arcturus (Alpha Boötis) on the left, the sapphire blue Spica (Alpha Virginis) to its lower right, and then the twinkling Regulus (Alpha Leonis) on the right well above both of them. There's also Denebola, a less bright star inside this imaginary triangle. Pretty cool... Both Arcturus and Spica were extremely bright; easily seen with a naked eye as well. Arcturus is easy to find if you follow the arc from the Big Dipper; in my case it was easy to notice as it was literally the brightest star in the night sky...the colours give it away as well. The next target was the Stargate asterism in constellation Corvus west of Spica - two triangles of stars, one nested inside the other, hence the name. Very easily noticeable pattern, well the outer triangle, at least - the inner one was a bit too faint for the binos. Will definitely try to observe it with a scope at some point, as it looked pretty impressive.

I had a children edition Bible (we got it as a gift at religion class at school), then later read the full version. Actually a good read, in my opinion, even though I'm not religious. The stories are pretty cool...

Wow, that population growth graph is crazy... It's weird how from generation to generation the population seems to fluctuate between two extremes when the average number of offspring is above three, and how the population growth of any generation is basically randoms. Fractals make me dizzy, haha. This is the paper I was talking about> https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.03902 It's 80 pages in total, I haven't read it myself yet...

It's actually not a huge book, only around 300 pages... But I have a terribly long list of books I want to read, and I also usually read more than one book at a time, so sometimes I lose track of it and forget to keep on reading...

At Nordschleife.

Currently reading Milton Osborne's River Road to China. Started this one a few years ago but never finished it... So decided to start it again. Documents the epic - and little known - Mekong exploration expedition of 1866-1868. In 1866, six Frenchmen led by Lagrée and Garnier set out on a dangerous mission to seek a trade route up the Mekong. During the two years that followed, they would journey through the tropical heat of the swamps of Vietnam and Cambodia to the bitter cold of the mountain ranges of southwestern China, finally arriving in Shanghai and mapping over 5,800 km of previously unknown terrain. A grand tale of adventure.

@Mel81x have you read that pre-print paper by a group of theoretical physicists working for Microsoft, which describes our universe as an algorithm that’s continuously learning about itself?

Groundbreaking, if it turns out to be real. Probably more likely to be an issue with calculation/measurement error though...

Like a fucking Mario cart... Too many gimmicks.

Same. I tried very hard, but just can't stand it.

Sounds like fun! Do you watch/follow Bundesliga in general as well, or do you just focus on Bayern? Who's your current favourite Bayern player?

Hola, welcome aboard! A Colombian Bayern fan?

They introduced some very strict measures and managed to contain the outbreak in a few months, during which the economy naturally took a big hit, but then after that they were able to return to "normal" (more or less), and the economy started to recover. That said, while their exports and investments are on the rise again, consumption is still not back to the pre-covid levels and that hinders the overall growth somewhat. I think people who dislike the Chinese because their economy has recovered faster are the ones who also believe that the Chinese released the virus into the world on purpose and are now benefiting from it.

Before the pandemic, they were projecting approx. 10% growth for 2020, but the actual one was only a bit over 2%. So it's still positive, but covid clearly had a huge impact as it was their weakest year in terms of growth since the 90s. I believe they are doing relatively fine now, think they are targeting 5% growth this year. Vietnam did best last year in Asia, with almost 3% growth.