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https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2017_Phase_I_Phase_II/Fusion_Enabled_Pluto_Orbiter_and_Lander

http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/04/fusion-enabled-pluto-orbiter-and-lander.html

The Direct Fusion Drive (DFD) concept provides game-changing propulsion and power capabilities that would revolutionize interplanetary travel. DFD is based on the Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration (PFRC) fusion reactor under development at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The mission context we are proposing is delivery of a Pluto orbiter with a lander. DFD provides high thrust to allow for reasonable transit times to Pluto while delivering substantial mass to orbit: 1000 kg delivered in 4 years. Since DFD provides power as well as propulsion in one integrated device, it will also provide as much as 1 MW of power to the payloads upon arrival. This enables high-bandwidth communication, powering of the lander from orbit, and radically expanded options for instrument design. The data acquired by New Horizons’ recent Pluto flyby is just a tiny fraction of the scientific data that could be generated from an orbiter and lander. Engine modeling accomplished during Phase I has shown that we can expect 2.5 to 5 N of thrust per megawatt of fusion power, with an Isp of about 10,000 seconds and 200 kW available as electrical power. We have evaluated the components of the Pluto trajectory including an Earth departure spiral, constant thrust planar transfer, and Pluto insertion using these thrust and Isp levels, and confirmed the plausibility of the proposed mission. In fact, the mission can depart from LEO with about the mass we originally estimated for an interplanetary insertion, widening the range of available launch vehicles and reducing the cost.

Planet Nine in 10-15 years instead of 100:

John Brophy at NASA Jet propulsion laboratory combines a near term 100 megawatt laser beamed power system to enable an ion drive with 70 megawatts of power and 58000 ISP.

They propose a new power/propulsion architecture to enable missions such as a 12-yr flight time to 500 AU—the distance at which solar gravity lensing can be used to image exoplanets—with a conventional (i.e., New Horizons sized) spacecraft. This architecture would also enable orbiter missions to Pluto with the same sized spacecraft in just 3.6 years. Significantly, this same architecture could deliver an 80-metric-ton payload to Jupiter orbit in one year, opening the possibility of human missions to Jupiter. These are just a few examples of high-impact missions that simply cannot be performed today due to limitations in current technology.

Fictions of fascism: what twentieth century dystopia can (and can't) teach us about Trump by John Gray

Dystopian novels of the 1930s and 1940s feel topical once again – but how much do they tell us about Trump and today’s populist upheavals?

A 20th century novelist pictured a Nazi diplomat ruminating over the grand objectives of the regime he served:
"D“Don’t you realise that what we are doing is a real revolution and more internationalist in its effects than the storming of the Bastille or of the Winter Palace in Petrograd? . . . Wipe out those ridiculous winding boundaries . . . wipe out . . . the influence of the churches, of overseas capital, of any philosophy, religion, ethical or aesthetical system

of the past . . . There are no more impossibilities for man now. For the first time we are attacking the biological structure of the race. We have started to breed a new species of Homo sapiens. We are weeding out its streaks of bad heredity. We have practically finished the task of exterminating or sterilising the gypsies in Europe; the liquidation of the Jews will be completed in a year or two . . . We are the first to make use of the hypodermic syringe, the lancet and the sterilising apparatus in our revolution.”

The writer was Arthur Koestler, and the book Arrival and Departure (Vintage Classics), first published in 1943. We are living in a time when many believe we are seeing a resurgence of fascism, yet so far Koestler’s semi-autobiographical novel has been neglected. This is a pity, as he did not invent the type of Nazi whose terrifying visions he put into the mouth of Bernard, the fictional diplomat. Travelling across Europe as a journalist and undercover communist in the 1930s, Koestler must have encountered many who shared this view of the world – one that departs in a number of ways from the view of fascism that most modern liberals have today.

Under the impact of the rise of Donald Trump and with the growing strength of European anti-immigrant parties, fascism is equated nowadays with extreme versions of nationalism. However, as Koestler shows, many Nazis and fascists regarded nation states as relics that would be subsumed into a new, pan-European order – a project that was revived by Oswald Mosley after the Second World War under the rubric “Europe a Nation”.

Fascism is now being seen as an ideology of irrationalism that was hostile to science and reason. But while some fascists preached “thinking with the blood”, others, like Koestler’s diplomat, gloried in the new powers conferred by modern science. As the historian Lewis Bernstein Namier wrote in 1958: “Hitler and the Third Reich were the gruesome and incongruous consummation of an age which, as none other, believed in progress and felt assured it was being achieved.”

In some ways interwar fascism was a parody of the progressive thinking of the time. In Spain and Portugal, the Balkans and Vichy France, many fascists wanted to roll back the modern world – a project that appealed to figures such as T S Eliot and G K Chesterton, who hankered after the cultural homogeneity of medieval Christendom. Yet many others were at one with Koestler’s diplomat in believing that modern technology opened up the prospect of remaking humankind on a “more advanced” model.

Such views were not confined to the far right. The “evolutionary humanist” Julian Huxley, for many years a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, advocated “preventing the deterioration of quality in racial stock” throughout the 1920s into the early 1930s. “Racial science” was not a Nazi aberration.

Attitudes that many have seen as defining features of fascism can appear at many points on the political spectrum. Anti-Semitism has been a feature of fascist movements everywhere, and hatred of Jews was the core of Nazism. But anti-Semitic attitudes are not the exclusive property of the far right. After its foundation, the state of Israel was attacked by the left under the banner of anti-colonialism. Clearly, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are analytically distinct positions; but when criticism of Israel’s policies occurs in the context of talk about “Zio media conspiracies” – as has been the case recently among certain sections of the left in Britain – the two become functionally equivalent. The emergence of a left-liberal anti-Semitism is a defining fact of our age.

The rest of this "long read":

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/03/fictions-fascism-what-twentieth-century-dystopia-can-and-cant-teach-us-about

Over Christmas, I upgraded my main box to Slackware64-14.2. I put in a pair of new hard disks (Western Digital Blue 3TB) and noticed quite a speed improvement over the Green 2TB ones they replaced.

Slackware64-14.2 still comes with a broken version of vim (it was broken in 14.1 as well) so I rebuilt the vim-7.3 that comes with 14.0. The breakage is that it doesn't redraw the screen properly when run in a terminal window (xterm).

I've been using Firefox as my main web browser for many years, and I know that for a while it's been sub-optimal in a number of ways, technically and politically, but I've been too busy to try anything else. I did look at PaleMoon a few months back, but never went any further. Slackware64-14.2 comes with Firefox 52.x and it's painfully slow. Recent security updates have made it unusable. It's very sluggish when scrolling, and you can see it repainting. When it renders an image or a video, you can see a bright green box behind it! Forget trying to watch a video.

Perhaps I should upgrade my hardware? I've got an AMD Phenom II X6 1045T (2.7GHz, 6 physical cores) on an ASUS M4A 77D motherboard with 4GB of DDR2 RAM. It's five years since I bought the CPU.

In the mean time, I thought I'd try rebuilding firefox. Being very short of time nowadays, I decided to use the Slackware build scripts to do the build rather than trying to do it myself from scratch. I figured rebuilding on my own machine might result in slightly faster binaries if the gcc options were more machine-specific.

I set of a build without looking too much at the build script. The SlackBuild script has to run as root (yuck) which makes me nervous, but I went ahead. I made the mistake of firing up a web browser at the same time to do some googling about firefox performance issues at the same time.

Very soon, the machine was using over 2.5GB of swap. No web browser was usable. After taking several minutes for the browser windows to die, I looked at the build script. It was defaulting to doing seven jobs in parallel (-j7). Obviously, there's not much point in filling up your CPUs if you don't have enough RAM to keep them fed. And Firefox is written in C++ (don't get me started - we have 64GB machines at work that aren't big enough).

It turns out that lots of people are frustrated with the speed of newer versions of Firefox, so I decided to try to rebuild version 45.9.0esr that comes with 14.1 on 14.2. I carefully read the SlackBuild script first, and ensured that it only used a maximum of two cores in parallel. That was a success. In a little over 99 minutes I had a nice mozilla-firefox-45.9.0esr-x86_64-1_slack14.2.txz which installed and is running.

The question is, how much RAM do you need nowadays?

Back to the C++: one of my colleagues is working on a project that runs on 32-bit Linux, and when he was building his C++ which used a lot of template code, it used to run out of memory (address space).

It's amazing how much RAM and CPU cycles (and network bandwidth) you can eat up with C++, Java, Ant and eclipse. There are some particularly perverse ways you can abuse C++ and Ant should be burnt in an incinerator for biological warfare agents.

And who in their right mind designs a build system that depends on an IDE? Eclipse? Argh!

Female Islamic clerics in Indonesia issue rare child marriage fatwa

Blue Whale: Should you be worried about online pressure groups?

Tennessee family sues after female janitor charged with raping boy

TED 2017: UK 'Iron Man' demonstrates flying suit

And finally: 'Overly obese' body sparks Ohio funeral home fire (BBC fat shaming deleted from the sub list)

Next to Berkeley’s fascists, Ann Coulter is a liberal

After Ann Coulter Speech Cancellation, Protesters Rally At Berkeley

Why I invited Ann Coulter to speak at UC Berkeley

Amiens: Le Pen upstages Macron at Whirlpool factory

France election: Macron heckled by pro-Le Pen workers

Marine Le Pen May Get a Lift From an Unlikely Source: The Far Left

Is there a subreddit for this activity or is it more of Voat territory?

Is Assange rape-adjacent?

Fox, HuffPost

'Rape-Adjacent': Imagining Legal Responses to Nonconsensual Condom Removal

"Bruh, I just stealthed a hottie last night!"

*one alimony later*

"..."

Chew on this

Trump voters don't believe he has played more golf than Obama in first 3 months

During his first three months in office, Trump spent 19 days at a golf course and played golf on at least 13 occasions, according to The New York Times.

The Times found that Obama spent no days at a golf course during his first three months. Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton also spent either no time or very little time golfing during their first 90 days — Bush made no trips to a golf course, while Clinton spent three days at courses.

A smattering of hypocritical quotes from Trump:

The 26 times Donald Trump tweeted about Barack Obama playing golf too much

Dumping ground for some unused links.

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/04/06/521248448/fentanyl-adds-a-new-terror-for-people-abusing-opioids

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/more-and-more-americans-are-down-with-weed-survey-says

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/what-would-happen-if-jeff-sessions-goes-after-legal-weed

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/04/13/523452905/what-doesnt-kill-you-can-maim-unexpected-injuries-from-opioids

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/overcoming-opioids-the-quest-for-less-addictive-drugs/2017/04/17/1dd5b978-232e-11e7-928e-3624539060e8_story.html

Poll: Marijuana safer than opioids, but moms shouldn't use

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/we-asked-teens-if-weed-will-be-cool-after-its-legal-weedweek2017

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170412091228.htm

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/arts/music/prince-opioid-death.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/nyregion/in-naloxone-heroin-schools-room-overdose-antidote.html