The 3D simulation in the video below from The Overview Effect compares Artemis II’s flight path with its predecessor Artemis I as well Apollo 8. It also goes into a little depth about how the moon’s orbit itself affect the earth and the path it takes fluctuates through an 18.6 year long cycle as it circles the earth.
NASA’s New Moon Photos
NASA has a Flickr album full of new images from the Artemis II mission.
Just look at these beautiful photos:
(via Kottke)
Artemis II Mission Blasts Off
On Wednesday, the Artemis II took off for the moon. I watched the launch with Ian.
Here’s a replay from NASA’s livestream:
Later we called my dad to talk about his memory of watching previous moon landings. He explained that during the first moon walk, he went outside and took a picture of the moon. Ian immediately wanted to know if he would send us that photo. We’ll try to track it in my dad’s old album the next time we have a chance.
The next day NASA released this image of the earth even as the spaceship continues on its historic journey to the moon.
Tesla in the Age of Musk Partisanship
Progressives are much more likely to buy electric cars than conservatives, I’ve always thought it’s because they are more concerned about the environment and climate change and want to use renewable energy sources. It follows that, at least until about 2020, most people buying Teslas were left leaning. But then, Musk became a vocal supporter of Republicans.
As this was happening, you might have been wondering, how will this affect Tesla’s bottom line? I sure did.
One could’ve imagined that perhaps Tesla had fully saturated the Democratic market and Musk’s hard right turn would win Republican sales…
But that doesn’t appear to be the case: “The Musk Partisan Effect on Tesla Sales” is a report out of Yale by Kenneth Gillingham, Matthew Kotchen, James Levinsohn and Barry Nalebuff that, using science, explains the effect Musk’s right wing politics has had on its business:
Using county-level, monthly data on new vehicle registrations, we leverage how changes in vehicle sales over time diverge across counties with differing shares of Democratic and Republican voters. Without the Musk partisan effect, Tesla sales between October 2022 and April 2025 would have been 67-83% higher, equivalent to 1-1.26 million more vehicles. Musk’s partisan activities also increased the sales of other automakers’ electric and hybrid vehicles 17-22% because of substitution, and undermined California’s progress in meeting its zero-emissions vehicle target.
A million lost vehicle sales! All because of the perception that owning such a vehicle might reflect that you support the CEO’s politics.
Now, of course it’s not Tesla owners’ fault and yet some have been placing stickers to cover their perceived ostracism.
The Amazing Invention of the Plastic Bottle
Bill Hammack is a chemical engineer with a YouTube channel (The Engineer Guy). This recent video on the development of plastic bottles is well worth watching.
Bill explains how the two-liter plastic soda bottle begins as a plastic tube, called a preform, which is heated and inflated with air in a bottle-shaped mold. He explains how the stretching of the preform creates a crystalline regions in the bottle’s plastic (polyethylene terephthalate) that create a bottle with great strength, low permeability to carbon dioxide, but which is also lightweight—some 35 times lighter than a glass bottle of the same size. Bill explains key features of the bottles design, including: why the bottle looks like it does, why the neck has gaps in its threads, and how the tamper-proof ring works. He also discusses “hot-fill bottles” used for sports drinks and plastic juice bottles, noting the panels molded into the bottles to accommodate temperature changes. Lastly, he discusses briefly the recycling of PET bottles, although noting that about 75% of the 500 billion PET bottles manufactured annually end up in landfills or are incinerated.
I remember when bottles changed to a shape that no longer required a cap at the bottom as well as the not-so-long ago (to me) change to smaller lids. At the time both changes just seemed like obvious reductions in plastic but learning about the many tests and years of litigation to make them happen is a fascinating look at the rest of the story.
The other thing that struck me about this video was learning about the bottle shapes for products that need to be heated. For a long time I’ve been annoyed at the shape of apple sauce bottles because of how hard the ridges make getting the last scraps out but seeing why they have that shape makes me slightly less annoyed. Now I’ve unlocked a new fear about what super heated apple sauce plastic is doing to our bodies.
(via Dr. Drang)
Anna-Maria Adventures
A drone photographer captured the wild moment when a shark charged into a giant school of stingrays off the coast of Florida.
Although there appears to be thousands of them, the shark went away hungry.
Twinkle Twinkle
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
— Douglas Adams, ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
If you held up a grain of sand to the sky in the right position, it would block out the entirety of this image.
Chinese Rocket Hits the Moon
That mystery rocket debris floating around in space, which was once thought to be from Space-ex, it turns out was from China. It collided with the moon yesterday and left a crater up to 20m wide.
From The Verge story:
Originally, space trackers thought it was a leftover piece of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that had launched a weather satellite back in 2015. But after careful analysis, various groups of space trackers confirmed that the rocket was likely leftover from the launch of China’s Chang’e 5-T1 mission — a flight that launched in 2014 to test out technology needed to bring samples back from the Moon. That mission, launched on a Chinese Long March 3C rocket, sent a spacecraft looping around the Moon in an attempt to see if China could send a vehicle to the Moon and then bring it back to Earth. Given the flight profile of the Chang’e 5-T1 mission and the tracking of the mystery object, astronomers are fairly certain that a chunk of the Long March 3C rocket has remained in an extremely elongated orbit around Earth ever since, only to find its way to the far side of the Moon.
The moon does a pretty good job of sweeping up space debris that’s way out there.
What Would You Do with an Extra Thumb?
According to a new study led by UCL researchers, robotic third thumb use can alter brain representation of the hand.
The team trained people to use a robotic extra thumb and found they could effectively carry out dextrous tasks, like building a tower of blocks, with one hand (now with two thumbs). The researchers report in the journal Science Robotics that participants trained to use the thumb also increasingly felt like it was a part of their body.
[…]
Before and after the training, the researchers scanned participants’ brains using fMRI, while the participants were moving their fingers individually (they were not wearing the Thumb while in the scanner). The researchers found subtle but significant changes to how the hand that had been augmented with the Third Thumb (but not the other hand) was represented in the brain’s sensorimotor cortex. In our brains, each finger is represented distinctly from the others; among the study participants, the brain activity pattern corresponding to each individual finger became more similar (less distinct).
A week later, some of the participants were scanned again, and the changes in their brain’s hand area had subsided, suggesting the changes might not be long-term, although more research is needed to confirm this.
It wpuld be interesting to see if such a device actually made everyday life easier.
Meteor near Saskatoon – Feb 22, 2021
My brother-in-law has a security camera mounted on his house in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan that caught a few seconds of this meteor flying over Canada yesterday.
People all over Alberta and Saskatchewan are reporting their experiences catching glimpses of the celestial boulder.