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morning computer loops

Published November 25, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Shusei Nagaoka / Androla in Labyrinth | 1984 |

Scientists in Switzerland have created a robot the size of a grain of sand that is controlled by magnets and can deliver drugs to a precise location in the human body, a breakthrough aimed at reducing the severe side effects that stop many medicines from advancing in clinical trials…

Fucking finally. I remember talking about this at the Architectural Association probably fifteen years ago.

Work has begun on a looped Christian landmark named the Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer, which was designed by UK studio Snug Architects to rise over 50 metres in Warwickshire.

I wasn’t sure what made this Christian art, as it’s obviously a Mobius loop:

Set to be built near Coleshill, the monument will be made up of 188 differently shaped precast concrete elements clad in one million white bricks.

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Each brick on the looping wall will represent the story of an answered prayer, which visitors will be able to read via a mobile app.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

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morning computer crowblack

Published November 24, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Vanessa Gillings.

To begin at the beginning: It is a spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.

UNDER MILK WOOD, Dylan Thomas

The Crow Canyon Petroglyphs, the American Southwest’s most extensive collection of Navajo rock art from the 16th through 18th centuries. Some represent corn, the most sacred plant in their creation story. According to myth, white corn emerged along with First Woman (Áłtsé asdzą́ą́ ) and yellow corn with First Man (Altsé hastiin)

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

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morning computer sun arise

Published November 21, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Friedrich Kunath.

We live in changing times. While we once flippantly threw villains to the lions, now we seek to fire them into the Sun.

It sounds easy enough. The Sun is unbelievably massive, with gravity sufficient to keep the planets in their orbits over billions of years. How hard can it be?

Well, it may be harder than you think.

Fire away

The obvious way to fire someone into the Sun is the direct approach, as shown in South Park Season 1. Point a rocket at the Sun and fire. But can that work?

For a start, the rocket has to reach a speed greater than 11 kilometres per second, so it doesn’t get stuck orbiting Earth. Fine – we can send off our rocket at 20km per second for good measure. What happens next?

The results are, to be honest, disappointing. It isn’t even close: we miss the Sun by almost 100 million km.

But why? It’s because we have launched from Earth, which is travelling around the Sun at 30km per second.

In late October, the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) captured this dramatic and beautiful phase occurring in what’s known as the Red Spider Nebula, or NGC 6537.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

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morning computer passenger rocket

Published November 19, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Eric Wesley. I love this.

Earlier this month, China was forced to delay the November 5 return of three astronauts from its Tiangong space station after concerns that their ride home — a Shenzhou-20 spacecraft parked at the orbital outpost since April — had sustained damage from an impact.

And as it turns out, their suspicions were correct. In a statement to state-run news outlet Xinhua, the China Manned Space Agency revealed that crews had found “tiny cracks” in the “return capsule’s viewport window, which are most probably caused by external impact from space debris.”

As a result, the “Shenzhou-20 spacecraft does not meet the requirements for the astronauts’ safe return and will remain in orbit to continue relevant experiments.”

Two sculptural metal speakers made from a disused rocket fuel tank to reference the debris “floating in outer space” have been unveiled at this year’s Designart Tokyo.

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The large cylindrical speakers were made by spatial design company Nomura‘s research and development arm, Noon by material record, and &Space Project, which reuses discarded materials from space development.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

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morning computer meme rot

Published November 4, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Alison Friend.

Memes thrive in a culture that’s endlessly accelerating – rotting and regenerating at the same time. This is also why the format rarely works for brands. Rather than relinquishing control, brands often end up producing content in meme-like costumes. Organic memes self-replicate and survive because people use them to express what hasn’t been said before. While brands chase the organic transmission real memes achieve, it’s often the anti-memetic campaign ideas – the ones that should resist spreading – that end up being shared the most. Anna Rose Kerr

See also ANTIMEMETICS, which I need to re-read.

In a particularly meta twist, the page for “brain rot” — let’s just go with Wikipedia’s definition, which is the “negative cognitive, emotional, and/or behavioral consequences” of consuming content that’s “trivial, simplistic, or low in quality” — has been defaced so much that it’s now protected against public edits until early next year.

And specifically what it’s been defaced with? Pure, unadulterated brain rot — like this edit, from back in February 2025, when the page was replaced with references to the brain rot mainstay Skibidi Toilet and Donald Trump, along with the phrase “Goofy ahh brainrot 💀” repeated 96 times in succession.

See also morning computer brain rot 2025

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

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morning computer i don’t even

Published October 28, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Vipoo Srivilasa.

An AI-powered gun detection system hooked up to a Baltimore County high school’s cameras mistook a bag of Doritos chips as a weapon — and called the cops on a 16-year-old student.

“OpenAI’s o3 model sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to prevent itself from being turned off,” warned Palisade Research, a nonprofit investigating cyber offensive AI capabilities. “It did this even when explicitly instructed: allow yourself to be shut down.” In September they released a paper adding that “several state-of-the-art large language models (including Grok 4, GPT-5, and Gemini 2.5 Pro) sometimes actively subvert a shutdown mechanism…”

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

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morning computer ravens and crows

Published October 27, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Christine Ward.

Wendy Red Star, of the Piegan clan and from the district of Pryor, engages in a multidisciplinary artistic practice grounded in the history and cultural knowledge of the Apsáalooke (Crow) people. Raised on the Crow reservation in Montana, her work reflects her deep connection to her community, culture, and land.

A Japanese firm called NTT e-Drone Technology Company Ltd has developed a drone-laser system designed to scare wild birds and other unwanted visitors away from chicken coops, as reported by tech blog Tom’s Hardware.

The quadcopter system sports a payload consisting of a laser-grid projector not unlike those chintzy Christmas light shows from 2019. When deployed, the drone automatically navigates toward unwanted nuisance animals before blasting them with a dazzling array of red and green lasers.

A YouTube teaser reel shows the NTT drone gently shooing wild boar, stags, crows, pigeons, and waterfowl away from a desired area.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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