David K 🤔

This evening's Moon.

"Life is a gift, and we should all cherish it." Tomorrow marks 100 days until what would’ve been Tony Bennett’s 100th birthday. We're officially kicking off the Tony Bennett Centennial! Watch this space for upcoming special events & releases this year. #Tony100

Wow. This is big. Researchers have created tiny devices called metajets that can be lifted and steered in multiple directions using lasers. For the first time, optical propulsion systems can achieve true 3D maneuvering. If this scales, it could make missions to Alpha Centauri, about 4.37 light years away, feel far less impossible. Concepts built on this approach suggest spacecraft could reach speeds of up to 20% of the speed of light (0.2c), cutting travel time to roughly 20 years. In other words, this could open the door to fuel-free, laser driven spacecraft capable of reaching another star within a human lifetime.

"... the thing that just comes clear from ancient DNA is that the people who lived in any one place a thousand years ago, or 5000 years ago are almost never directly ancestral to the people who live in that place today."

Intense post-sunset sky. Four-shot pano, 73mm lens.

@TCarr51949427 🙏🏻 ☺️

@Tele1953 Nice!!!👍

Hope I'm around long enough to experience it happening.

More people will die from suppressing AI than from the imaginary AI apocalypse. They'll die from restricting safe self-driving cars that are 90% better drivers than people who kill 1.5 million people and injure 50 million more every year. They'll die from the vaccines and cures that never get created. They'll die from all the myriad of helpful inventions that never get created by geniuses in a datacenter. They'll die from preventable diseases that they could have asked their chat bots about so they were better informed when they went to see their doctors but who couldn't ask because short-sighted legislators made it so the chat bots had to refuse to answer. They'll die from the slower economy that stifles robot driven factories over wildly overblown jobs apocalypse fears which will mean we never get a vast array of new and more affordable goods. They'll die from the cheaper solar panels and batteries that would get made by those automated factories which would slow climate damage and provide cheap energy to undeserved areas. They'll die from the super smart tele-AI doctors that never get deployed to remote areas. And they'll die as fanatics from the stop AI movement radicalize their followers to shoot people or throw firebombs.

Twenty years ago, when Jill and I started writing, the main divide was left and right, and we were pretty far apart. I am somewhat surprised to find that the main divide is now normies vs. performative indecency, and we're on the same side.

Helping to clear out my photo backlog, here are a few from April 17. Pic 1: "That !#*@& gator!" Pic 2: "That !#*@& heron!" Pic 3: "Just keepin' my head down here…"

50mm lens last night.

The moon & Jupiter in tonight's sky. By midnight they'll be closer together still, but that's past my bedtime. ☺️

Jupiter with GRS on April 21st. Some spells of good seeing for short while around sundown. The GRS is nicely seen.

Earthshine. Artemis II astronaut Christina Koch captured this video of Earth outside the windows of the Orion spacecraft during the second flight day of the mission. Orion was roughly 33,800 miles (54,500 km) away from Earth when @Astro_Christina took this video.

Should it shock anyone that NGOs and political organizations are at least as ingenious about creating demand for their products as private corporations are? And yet it surprises many people. Still.

Pic 1: hibiscus in my front yard. Pic 2: double-crested cormorant. Pic 3: crop + upres of pic 2. Pic 4: neighbors on the boardwalk.

Another three-pic sequence from last Sunday. My iPad isn't sure what this bird is. Looks to me like a sandpiper. Anyway it came up empty-beaked this time.

Three-pic sequence from Sunday afternoon. Pic 1: "Is that a fish?" Pic 2: "Yes, it is." Pic 3: "Got it!" The fish is nearly microscopic but herons aren't picky.

New Quanta article looks at one of the coolest tiny machines in biology - the bacterial flagellar motor. It’s basically a microscopic spinning engine that bacteria use to move. After decades of trying to fully understand it, scientists are finally figuring out how it actually works. The motor is powered by a flow of charged particles (kind of like a tiny battery), which creates force and makes it rotate. So what looks like something alive and mysterious is really just an incredibly advanced microscopic machine running on the same basic rules as everything else. More broadly, the article addresses the idea of a "life force." It argues that no special force is needed to explain life. Instead, biological activity arises from physical processes that operate far from equilibrium, where constant energy flow keeps the system active and organized. The flagellar motor shows that living systems can be understood as energy driven, self organizing systems. What appears to be uniquely "alive" can be explained by standard physical laws, such as thermodynamics and molecular interactions. Physics pushed to an extreme level of complexity.