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http://the-colossus.com/sciencegoals.html
http://the-colossus.com/technology.html

I was trying to recall this telescope concept but it was very difficult to find as it gets drowned out by other ELTs. It is linked from the very bottom of this page. Go ahead and bookmark it.

This is another overlooked project: the Magdalena Ridge Optical Interferometer (MROI). Except it is actually being built:

Telescope array will spy on spy satellites, star surfaces, and black holes

When it's complete around 2025, the $200 million Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer (MROI) will have the equivalent resolution of a gigantic telescope 347 meters across.

MROI's small telescopes can't match the light-gathering power of its giant cousins, so it will be limited to bright targets. But by combining light from the spread-out telescopes, it is expected to make out small structures on stellar surfaces, image dust around newborn stars, and peer at supermassive black holes at the center of some galaxies. It will even be able to make out details as small as a centimeter across on satellites in geosynchronous orbit, 36,000 kilometers above Earth, enabling it to spy on spy satellites.

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope full operations begin in 2022. Extremely Large Telescope and Giant Magellan Telescope will have first light in 2024. JWST scheduled for launch in 2021 or later. So astronomers will be shook in 7 years' time. It's the dark ages until then.

Earth's Minimoons: Opportunities for Science and Technology

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope

Don't expect any LSST results before 2022.

Definitions are important.

Nonetheless; A bit for the other side of the brain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7lhMAOxLxw

I always hear "Money for Nothing" in the background watching this scene.

In particularly "the little faggot with the earrings and the makeup"

Yeah buddy, that faggot was my role model.

Movie scenes are rarely, if ever, perfect. If you can reply to this with a good cogent criticism of the fight choreography please do.

I spotted a few myself, but relatively minor, I consider it better than most films that came after it to say the least.

Why was Guthrie doomed in this fight? I can put it in a few words, a sentence fairly well, a few paragraphs with reasonable thoroughness surely; can you?

Lyme disease a bioweapon gone awry? Rep. Chris Smith pushes Trump to investigate

Now Lyme advocates have a new weapon — an explosive book that alleges the epidemic spawned from an American biological warfare experiment gone awry — and Smith, a Republican whose districts stretches across parts of Monmouth, Ocean and Mercer counties, is appealing to President Donald Trump for action.

The book is “Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons” by Stanford University-based science writer Kris Newby. A chronic Lyme sufferer herself, Newby documents how the U.S. military infected ticks with complex, hard-to-detect pathogens in the 1960s. The book’s linchpin is an interview with late scientist Willy Burgdorfer, who did the infecting and references an accidental release of weaponized ticks that might have ignited all of this.

The relationship between the experiments and the continued denial of chronic Lyme is something Smith would like to see explored further.

“If this (book) this is true — and the documentation is very persuasive — we were doing bio-weapons work that was grossly immoral,” Smith said in an interview with the Asbury Park Press prior to Wednesday’s town meeting. “It’s a shocking read, and I hope it adds to our push. Looking at what happened might help us come up with how we deal with it now.”

He wrote a letter to that extent to President Trump and three inspectors general — of the departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Agriculture — requesting a “serious and comprehensive investigation” into the book’s assertions.

“We owe it to the overwhelming number of patients currently suffering from Lyme disease,” Smith wrote in the letter, dated May 14. “These individuals — and the American public — deserve to know the truth.”

Although he has not received a formal response, Smith said his appeal got the attention of members of Trump’s inner circle. If Congress won’t act on his bipartisan bill (H.R. 220) to bump up funding for research — currently a measly $11 million for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and $28 million for the National Institutes of Health — he’d like to nudge Trump to enact changes via executive order.

Here's a link to his statement:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DWzzMlMIRI

It's a Fox News youtube channel. Take a look at the comments too.

Here is a written story from the CBC:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/dc-mueller-statement-1.5153877

Nutritionist says pizza is better for breakfast than most cereals

Sage nutritional advice.

Beer Archaeologists Are Reviving Ancient Ales — With Some Strange Results

Boston Dogfish Beer Head Company should patent all the ancient ales.

Here's the story.

Note: I submitted this article as a regular story, however the editors ignored it for quite some time. So I have deleted it from the submissions queue and present it here in my journal instead. Given the interest in book of the month and the many other references I see to books and movies here on soylent, I thought it might be of interest to some of our denizens anyway. So, then:

I should first point out that I didn't have anything at all to do with the above-linked article; but when I read it, all I could do was nod — a lot — and try not to allow my temper to get the better of me.

I have a longstanding (about 50 years) direct business connection to high end science fiction & fantasy publishing. I can confirm that this has become a significant problem in the industry — and also that this did not use to be the case. Resistance based on perception of characters as that relates to "author validity" is increasing, and is now a major factor in what ends up getting published. Or doesn't.

I don't have a solution (at least, not a solution that doesn't involve lining people up against a wall and shooting them), but the issue definitely has my attention.

If we can expect a work to fail in the marketplace because it will be attacked in such a manner, we simply can't see it through to publication. Doing so would kill our business.

Capitulation? Yes, essentially that's exactly it. It's either that or get jobs at McDonalds. This is one of those ways that the world is changing, and not for the better.

A natural monopoly occurs when the most efficient number of firms in the industry is one.

A natural monopoly will typically have very high fixed costs meaning that it impractical to have more than one firm producing the good.

The author gives as an example of a natural monopoly, tap water. Sure, one could have multiple water companies each with its own very expensive set of pipes provide water competitively, but it would be in net more inefficient and costly than having a single provider. And each additional provider competes over a fixed slice of market, quickly becoming unprofitable.

In my view, actually having a natural monopoly is a strong argument against using a market solution and it is fundamental to a lot of situational anti-market arguments. But OTOH, markets are really useful in general. If one can figure how to make a natural monopoly not so, then that allows us to use this powerful tool.

So how can we turn a natural monopoly into something else? One way is decomposition. One doesn't actually eliminate the natural monopoly, but instead separate out the part that isn't competitive from the the rest. For example, in our tap water example, maybe the full piping can't be replicated economically, but it can be separated out from the supplying of tap water. One would then need to replicate water mains (so that one is guaranteed to receive water from the desired source) along with some sort of switching system to be able to shift water from one main to another. The rest of the plumbing either becomes its own natural monopoly or owned by the parties receiving the water.

It still could be too costly for multiple parties to compete, but the cost of infrastructure and barrier to entry has declined considerably.

Another way is to make costs of entry and operation much cheaper. If laying those pipes becomes an insignificant cost, then suddenly multiple firms could compete even with completely duplicated systems. The pipes become a minor economic issue rather than a primary and effective obstacle to competition.

So let's look at those two approaches with respect to the high speed rail problem. Arik made great observations, such as:

And when you have a monopolistic good (as train tracks are, there's a tremendous initial investment to clear and construct lines, it makes no sense to do the whole thing *twice* plus they would have to cross each other at times) you have the best argument for collective ownership.

or here

Like I say, just imagine trying to complete a transcontinental railroad without using monopoly (state) power.

Forget about completing it, try to just purchase the land necessary. Remember, no government handouts, no eminent domain, you have to come to a deal with each and every landowner on the path. If one says no, then you have to backtrack and reroute to avoid him. Each time you reroute you have to go to a less desirable route. If you have to do it often, you wind up with a snake track instead of a nice straight line.

Here, decomposition can come to our rescue. Acquiring land for a rail system is a hard problem, but it's a hard problem that only needs to be done once. The government needs to be involved at this stage, but they don't need to be acting for a single party (themselves or others). So instead of merely acquiring land for a single rail system, acquire it to accommodate multiple rail systems. Government can also reuse the various other right of ways they have (roads, aqueducts, etc).

Second, with actual competition in such markets, we have an opportunity to attack the cost of the infrastructure. Currently, there's at best weak incentive in lowering the cost of high speed rail. Most customers will spend the same money whether they get a lot of train or very little. Any private customers would either have niche markets (like say Disney World and some airports) or have to worry about competing head on with a subsidized government version.

A few of the most dysfunction projects have no incentive to deliver a working system at all. The California project is a great example, since it is likely that it will be discontinued before anything concrete is done, just due to the lack of funding sources and the huge length of time before any serious urban areas are connected to the rail system.

To summarize, markets are such a powerful tool, it makes little sense to rule them out completely even in a natural monopoly situation. Instead, it is better to structure the system in such a way that parts which can't be reduced to a competitive market are separated from the parts that can be so reduced.