a writer's notebook
That’s the main notebook – insert 1 is the daily book, the two behind it are what I run LTD and Orbital Operations off.
It may be meteorological spring, but it’s grey and misty out there, so I’m today using the midwinter beard oil I was gifted by Fires of Freyja.
Low energy slobby day: black Wrangler jeans that are now four inches too big for me, black Wrangler workshirt, surplus Russian submariners base layer which I like for its boat neck, an old grey Calvin Klein jacket, and a grey cashmere scarf because I have reached the age where I must take the scarf.
Two months ago, a key staffer for Sen. Ted Cruz said in a public meeting that she was “begging” NASA to release a document that would kick off the second round of a competition among private companies to develop replacements for the International Space Station.
There has been no movement since then, as NASA has yet to release this “request for proposals.” So this week, Cruz stepped up the pressure on the space agency with a NASA Authorization bill that passed his committee on Wednesday.
Regarding NASA’s support for the development of commercial space stations, the bill mandates the following, within specified periods, of passage of the law:
- Within 60 days, publicly release the requirements for commercial space stations in low-Earth orbit
- Within 90 days, release the final “request for proposals” to solicit industry responses
- Within 180 days, enter into contracts with “two or more” commercial providers for such stations
Cruz is trying to inject urgency into NASA as several private companies—including Axiom Space, Blue Origin, Vast, and Voyager—are finalizing designs for space stations. All have expressed a desire for clarity from NASA on how long the space agency would like its astronauts to stay on board, the types of scientific equipment needed, and much more. These are known as “requirements” in NASA parlance.
When NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced the revamped approach to the Artemis moon program, it was unclear whether the new mobile launcher that has been constructed over the last two years at Kennedy Space Center would ever get used.
A NASA rundown of the reconfigured Artemis launch plans released Tuesday, though, answers that question for the foreseeable future: No.
“The agency is no longer planning to use the Exploration Upper Stage or Mobile Launcher 2, as development of both has faced delays,” according to the agency update.
Comments closedThe universe is overrun with dark matter, outweighing the ordinary stuff that stars and planets are made of five-to-one. But some corners of the cosmos are more dominated by the invisible substance than others.
Using the stalwart Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers have found a galaxy 300 million light away that appears to be made of at least 99.9 percent dark matter — so much that the galaxy is barely visible at all, they report in a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The tenebrous realm, dubbed CDG-2, could be one of the most dark matter heavy galaxies ever found, and a compelling candidate for elusive and yet hypothetical “dark galaxies” that astronomers have been searching for for decades, which are thought to contain vanishingly few, if any, stars.
Shoplifter, “Chromo Sapiens” (2019).
Taking off the Fitbit and the Apple Watch, putting on the Maven watch, setting up the third stage of the new notebook system (with a fourth stage to come) – it’s rapid disconnection time. More on that tomorrow because I’ve just been told I’m apparently going out for lunch.
TODAY:
STATUS: first day in a few weeks that I’ve felt even half-human
READING: I’m faintly annoyed with what I’m reading right now – last night I started a book about maximalist novels and it was so whiny (and obsessed with the word “transversal” that I gave up, and the Walsingham book is mired in “we have absolutely no idea what he dd in these years but here’s some random speculation” – so I picked up THE BIG THREE: SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, Neel Burton (UK) (US+)
It can be no coincidence that the hierarchical, anti-democratic Spartans, who privileged military might above all else, prided themselves on the pithiness of their speech. According to Plutarch, when an Attic orator accused the Spartans of being ignorant, Pleistoanax, the Spartan king (r. 458-409 BCE), replied: “What you say is true. Of all the Greeks, we alone have not learnt your evil ways.”
LISTENING: New Music Show
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Comments closed
I’ve been reading newsletters. Lots of different kinds. I did that awful thing last night where I disappeared into my phone for four hours, just reading and studying and appraising. I’ve been having to rejig my own newsletter a bit this month, due to a dose of Best Laid Plans being laughed at by the universe. Because the universe is mostly dark matter.
I have a feeling I’ve seen a few people comment that there is more writing out in the world than at any time in human history. And, of course, print literature now has to jostle for money with paid Substacks and the like, just as broadcast TV now has to wrestle with streamers for every eyeball. Lots of launches, lots of decaying orbits. Space is weird right now and I’m wondering what it looks like and what’s next.
TODAY:
I did a show about dark matter once and all that still fascinates me.
Accessions:
I have a feeling I briefly met Aleks Krotoski in Brighton once, when having coffee with Ben Hammersley? Anyway, this book seems to tie into some work I’m doing right now (which I am dreadfully late on).
What was once a wild west of experimentation has wormed its way into Washington’s corridors of power. Award-winning broadcaster and academic Aleks Krotoski journeys from cult fringes to the heartlands of government to meet the moguls, effective altruists, geroscientists and entrepreneurs who are disrupting death. Along the way she encounters radical life extensionists transfusing their teenage son’s blood, transhumanists who want to upload consciousness to the cloud, biohackers flogging AI-powered wellness apps and billionaire kingmakers building brand-new nations.
THE IMMORTALISTS: THE DEATH OF DEATH AND THE RACE FOR ETERNAL LIFE, Aleks Krotoski (UK) (US+)
OPERATIONS: yesterday was a clusterfuck so today I am all in until midnight
STATUS: I am well aware that I am behind on a hundred emails
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING:
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Comments closed
If you didn’t yet get today’s newsletter, it seems the Beehiiv service is on a bit of a slowdown – as I write this, 75 minutes after the scheduler sent it out, it’s still only 68% delivered. if you didn’t get yours, it’s here:
https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/p/2026
I am at the time of writing still waiting for the system to send it to ME.
TODAY:
The researchers believe that neuromorphic computing could help bridge the gap between neuroscience and applied mathematics, offering new insights into how the brain processes information.
“Diseases of the brain could be diseases of computation,” Aimone said. “But we don’t have a solid grasp on how the brain performs computations yet.”
If their hunch is correct, neuromorphic computing could offer clues to better understand and treat neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Now, an international team of researchers claims to have used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to discover an entirely new type of celestial object: dubbed “Cloud-9,” it’s a “starless, gas-rich, dark-matter cloud,” per the European Space Agency. The lack of stars caught the team by surprise, indicating Cloud-9 was a “fossil leftover” — what ScienceAlert memorably termed the “dark-matter bones of a failed galaxy.”
OPERATIONS: Not sure what today is yet. I have a lot of competing thoughts and I’m waiting for them to settle a bit. While also knowing in the back of my head that I have to go shopping and clear the kitchen! But I’m thinking I need to get back into a project I started developing last year, because I know the artist is waiting for the pitch document…
STATUS: the temperature outside is starting a slow climb again, so I can shrug out of the heavy layers in a little while and dress less like a Dark Ages snow-cave hermit.
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: New Music Show
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
Comments closedThe search for the universe’s dark matter could end tomorrow—given a nearby supernova and a little luck. The nature of dark matter has eluded astronomers for 90 years, since the realization that 85% of the matter in the universe is not visible through our telescopes. The most likely dark matter candidate today is the axion, a lightweight particle that researchers around the world are desperately trying to find.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2’); });Astrophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley, now argue that the axion could be discovered within seconds of the detection of gamma rays from a nearby supernova explosion. Axions, if they exist, would be produced in copious quantities during the first 10 seconds after the core collapse of a massive star into a neutron star, and those axions would escape and be transformed into high-energy gamma rays in the star’s intense magnetic field.
Dark matter obviously fascinates me. But one of the things that hooks me is: if it doesn’t exist, our standard model of the universe doesn’t work and we know nothing.
Recent research by a student-faculty team at Colgate University unlocks new clues that could radically change the world’s understanding of the origin of dark matter.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2’); });Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Cosmin Ilie and Richard Casey have explored an idea put forth by two scientists at the University of Texas at Austin, Katherine Freese and Martin Winkler, suggesting that dark matter may have originated from a separate “Dark Big Bang,” occurring shortly after the birth of the universe.
There’s lovely accidental poetics in science, all the time:
In 2023, Freese and Winkler proposed that dark matter, unlike ordinary matter, may have arisen from a distinct Big Bang event, which could have taken place months after the conventional Big Bang. In this model, dark matter particles are produced via the decay of a quantum field that only couples to the Dark Sector and is initially trapped in a false metastable vacuum state.
The Dark Sector! The Dark Big Bang!
On Sunday November 23, 1924, 100 years ago this month, readers perusing page six of the New York Times would have found an intriguing article, amid several large adverts for fur coats. The headline read: Finds Spiral Nebulae are Stellar Systems: “Dr. Hubbell Confirms View That They Are ‘Island Universes’; Similar to Our Own.”
We’ve only known there is more than one galaxy for a hundred years.
Do we live in a shell universe?
“In 2011, Jun Ni discovered a new class of solutions for the Einstein field equations of neutron stars. These solutions were completed and generalized by Lubos Neslušan, Jorge deLyra and others.
“The Ni-Neslušan-deLyra solutions atypically feature a shell-like configuration and a central matter void. A repulsive gravitational field centered on the origin causes matter inside the shell cavity to be attracted towards the shell. This also induces a gravitational redshift in light moving from the shell towards the center and a blueshift in light moving back towards the shell.
“This runs counter to the standard picture in general relativity, which features a flat, Minkowski spacetime inside a spherical shell of matter.
“All the tensions of the LCDM model could be resolved if the matter of the observable universe—in both early and late times—were concentrated in a thick Ni shell, with the Milky Way lying close to the center within the KBC Void.
“While this positioning is at odds with the cosmological principle, anomalies in quasar counts and other observational “dipoles” are not inconsistent with it. In a Ni shell universe, the Hubble redshift seen in light from distant stars would arise at least partly from the gravitational redshift induced by the outer shell.
“The Hubble tension would then be explained with the changing derivative of ν(r), which causes the Hubble constant to steadily decrease as one moves from the center of the universe towards the shell. The dark energy of the LCDM model would no longer be needed.
“Supernova dimming would instead result from the Ni redshift causing objects to appear further away from us than they really are. In like-fashion to Rajendra Gupta’s “CCC + TL” model, the Ni solutions could be blended with the LCDM model in a hybrid approach.
“And yet the Ni approach can go much deeper than this. With recent findings of unexpectedly high mass density at high redshifts, the universe may have so much mass that it becomes a black hole…
September 12, 2024 at 03:44PM
Comments closed