ReHacked #26: B2 reverse engineering, intelligent Cephalopoda and more inside
Hello, everyone! Today you can play with low Earth orbit objects above your head, find out some opinion whether piracy is stealing or not, some articles about copyrights, self-censorship and interesting news from the world of physics and some stunning pictures from Mars taken by Perseverance.
Enjoy!
Low Earth Orbit Visualization #space #fun
Rocket Lab Unveils Plans for New 8-Ton Class Reusable Rocket for Mega-Constellation Deployment #space #engineering
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear' #culture #freespeech
Sir Kazuo, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, warned that a "climate of fear" was preventing some people from writing what they want.
He said they may be concerned that an "anonymous lynch mob will turn up online and make their lives a misery".
He told the BBC: "I very much fear for the younger generation of writers."
The 66-year-old said he was worried that less established authors were self-censoring by avoiding writing from certain viewpoints or including characters outside their immediate experiences.
"I think that is a dangerous state of affairs," added the acclaimed author, whose works include The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go.
Build a business, not an audience – Jakob Greenfeld – Experiments in Entrepreneurship and Learning
If you’re reading this, I’m pretty sure you’ve seen the following pattern over and over again:
- Creative nonfiction pioneer John McPhee distilled decades of experience and first-hand learnings in a series of essays. (The best of them are now available in a book called “Draft No. 4”.)
- A savvy entrepreneur repackages the advice in a $1000+ cohort-based course.
- Someone takes the course and summarizes what he learned.
- People on Twitter start creating threads summarizing the student’s summaries.
At some point, the guy who summarized the student’s summaries will get invited to a podcast to summarize his summary of the student’s summary.
The MIT Press launches Direct to Open #copyrights #opensource
The MIT Press has announced the launch of Direct to Open (D2O). A first-of-its-kind sustainable framework for open access monographs, D2O moves professional and scholarly books from a solely market-based, purchase model where individuals and libraries buy single eBooks, to a collaborative, library-supported open access model.
Watchy: The Hackable $50 Smartwatch #hardware
This Arduino-compatible watch uses an ESP32 microcontroller and an e-ink display
Google-free /e/ OS is now selling preloaded phones in the US, starting at $380 #hardware #software #privacy
/e/ OS, the "open-source, pro-privacy, and fully degoogled" fork of Android, is coming to Canada and the USA. Of course, you've always been able to download the software in any region, but now (as first spotted by It's Foss News) the e Foundation will start selling preloaded phones in North America. Previously, /e/ only did business in Europe.
Like normal, the e Foundation's smartphone strategy is to sell refurbished Samsung devices with /e/ preloaded. In the US, there are only two phones right now: the Galaxy S9 for $379.99 or a Galaxy S9+ for $429.99. North Americans still have reason to be jealous of Europe, where you can get /e/ preloaded on a Fairphone, which is also Europe-exclusive.
For The First Time, Physicists Have Filmed The Oscillation of a Time Crystal #science #physics
For the first time, physicists have captured an enigmatic state of matter on video.
Using a scanning transmission X-ray microscope, the research team has recorded the oscillations of a time crystal made out of magnons at room temperature. This, they said, is a significant breakthrough in the study of time crystals.
Mars: Nasa's Perseverance rover sends stunning images #space #engineering #science
Nasa's Perseverance rover landed on Mars at 20:55 GMT on 18 February after almost seven months travelling from Earth.
Since then, it has sent back some amazing images from around its landing site, Jezero Crater, a 49km (30-mile) wide impact depression just north of the Red Planet's equator.
Here is a selection of the pictures sent back from the mission, as Perseverance hunts for signs of past microbial life, seeks to characterise the planet's geology and past climate, and collects Martian rock.
Brave buys a search engine, promises no tracking, no profiling – and may even offer a paid-for, no-ad version #software #internet #privacy
Brave intends to make Tailcat the foundation of its own search service, Brave Search. The company hopes that it’s more than 25 million monthly active Brave customers will, after an initial period of testing and courtship, choose to make Brave Search their default search engine and will use it alongside other parts of its privacy-oriented portfolio, which also includes Brave Ads, newsreader Brave Today, Brave Firewall+VPN, and video conferencing system Brave Together.
ICANN Refuses to Accredit Pirate Bay Founder Peter Sunde Due to His 'Background' #copyrigths #internet
Over the phone, ICANN explained that the matter was discussed internally. This unnamed group of people concluded that the organization is ‘not comfortable’ doing business with him.
“They basically admitted that they don’t like me. They’ve banned me for nothing else than my political views. This is typical discrimination. Considering I have no one to appeal to except them, it’s concerning, since they control the actual fucking center of the internet.”
Piracy is Theft? Ridiculous. Lost Sales? They Don't Exist, Says Minecraft Creator (2011) #copyrights #internet #history
The "piracy is stealing" argument raises its head in the media every week and is on the lips of anti-piracy outfits and copyright holders every day. To them, every unauthorized copy is a lost sale and another small dent in the company spreadsheet which, when added to a million others, will destroy it bit by bit. To the maker of Minecraft, however, its an opportunity. Piracy is theft? You must be kidding. Lost sales? They don't exist.
A quick look at the stats for the still-in-beta PC game Minecraft reveals a very healthy business indeed. At the time of writing the game has 4,880,757 registered users of which 1,469,513 (30.1%) have bought the game. In the last 24 hours alone, 36,618 people registered for Minecraft.
A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed For Human Children #nature #science #psychology
Last year, cuttlefish also passed a version of the marshmallow test. Scientists showed that common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) can refrain from eating a meal of crab meat in the morning once they have learnt dinner will be something they like much better - shrimp.
As a team of researchers led by behavioural ecologist Alexandra Schnell of the University of Cambridge point out in a new paper, however, in this case it's difficult to determine whether this change in foraging behaviour in response to prey availability was also being governed by an ability to exert self-control.
The Air Force Is Having To Reverse Engineer Parts Of Its Own Stealth Bomber #technology #engineering
“This engineering effort is to reverse engineer the core of the B‐2 Load Heat Exchangers, develop disassembly process to remove defective cores, develop a stacking, vacuum brazing, and welding process to manufacture new heat exchanger cores and to develop a welding process to install the new cores on existing B‐2 Load Heat Exchangers. The requirement includes reverse-engineering the re‐core process for the B‐2 Load Heat Exchangers. The B‐2 Load Heat Exchanger (NSN 1660‐01‐350‐8209FW) uses air and Ethylene Glycol Water (EGW) liquid to produce cold air for the cooling system.”
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Dainius
