links, etc China declares success as its youngest astronauts reach space it strikes me that in the US, we’re blithely ignorant as to the advances in china’s space programs. i only found out that they had their own space station about a year after they completed it. my bad.
notes bookshop link recommended: yes i fell into this from zinnser’s book on writing to learn from a month or so ago. this is a textbook. it’s not funny, but i do think some of the arguments lofted in the exercises are hilariously bad. (but disturbingly close to those i’ve heard in real life for some of the issues lofted.) the book is a pretty solid and engaging dicsussion of the various fallacies and traps we can fall into when thinking about various topics and scrutinizing arguments....
links, etc Mystery Drones Swarmed a U.S. Military Base for 17 Days. The Pentagon Is Stumped. - WSJ wait, wut? i suppose this should be less surprising to me than it is. it just goes to show that we now have an incredible flattening in technological superiority in the military domain.
links, etc Hear a Chopin Waltz Unearthed After Nearly 200 Years - The New York Times on the heels of the recent discovery of a string trio arrangement by mozart this is pretty neat news. we can only really have these “discoveries” if there’s a durable medium for preserving creative outputs. in this case paper and pen. with everything being hidden on personal hard drives and in proprietary software/file formats these days, i do find myself wondering what creative bits (no pun intended) we’re going to lose to the ravages of time and bit rot....
links, etc in any other time, it strikes me that we’d be looking very much askance at the notion of a billionaire owning so much infrastructure that we’re increasingly collectively dependent upon. that the billionaire in question has exhibited so little regard for core western values has been (but shouldn’t be) shocking to me. that he seems to see himself as an agent independent of the government of his country of citizenship should make a lot of brows furrow....