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Tag: space

morning computer fish church

Published November 10, 2025 by Warren Ellis

White Arkitekter restores Gothenburg’s fish church.

A new collagen fingerprinting tool can help scientists identify species from archaeological bone fragments. Pacific islanders of the late Stone Age, also known as the Neolithic period, were master fishers. Archaeological evidence indicates that these groups caught fish both inshore as well as in open waters.

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Now, researchers have found a way to shed light on the types of fish they feasted on and the advanced fishing techniques used to capture them. The new Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) tool can detect the unique chemical fingerprint hidden within collagen, a structural protein that makes up most of bone mass.

The researchers tested 131 archaeological bones and accurately identified three tuna and five shark varieties

Antarctic fish have built a sprawling neighborhood of neatly arranged nests in the Weddell Sea — a surprising display of organization in some of the coldest waters on Earth. The discovery suggests that these fish strategically group their nests to better protect their eggs from predators, adding to evidence that the Weddell Sea harbors complex, vulnerable ecosystems worth preserving, researchers report October 29 in Frontiers.

The Milky Way galaxy is like a gigantic ocean gyre or eddy that spins and wobbles around its center.

But our home galaxy also has a colossal wave rippling through it, pulling and pushing an ocean of stars and cosmic dust in its wake, according to newly released images from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope.

The images show that this wave of motion emanates from the center of the Milky Way and takes up a large portion — a little less than half — of the galaxy’s entire body, which itself is warped in the outer edges. Looking at the galaxy in a vertical sideways view, you see that stars float above or below the disc’s dusty central body, as if they were fish bobbing up and down in a wave of water after a boat passes by.

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

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

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telemetry 27oct25

Published October 27, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Unclassified: Resident Shadows

I caught Just Mustard on Jools Holland last night:

Just realised I have two issues of THE WIRE magazine and at least one TLS waiting to be read.4

https://newmodels.substack.com/p/nm-talkcore-kevin-munger-on-spiraling – what’s here is the “preview,” somehow I got the entire episode on my podcast app even though I don’t pay for the full New Models feed…?

If you rede­fine “thinking” to mean “arriving at a solu­tion through an iter­a­tive lin­guistic loop” … yes, that’s what these models do. That def­i­n­i­tion is pretty thin. We talk about humans thinking harder, which is not the same as thinking longer. I think most people know from expe­ri­ence that thinking longer gen­er­ally just makes you anxious. But that’s what the models do, and not only longer, but in parallel, all those step-by-step mono­logues spilling out simultaneously, some­where in the dark of a data center.

The modern smartphone, laden with the corporate ecosystem pulsing underneath its screen, robs us of this feeling, conspires to keep us from “true” fullness. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a bit of a day in the thralls of the algorithms.

“Dreams of the Past“, dir. Dmitri Frolov, 2022 (via)

Japan’s space agency successfully launched Sunday its most powerful flagship H3 rocket, carrying a newly developed unmanned cargo spacecraft for its first mission to deliver supplies to the International Space Station.

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morning computer space brains

Published September 29, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Millo and Seth Globepainter.

“The key is to understand how my body works and work with it, not against,” she explains. “I know I’m crap in the mornings, whether I had enough sleep or not. I wake up at 8, but I generally tackle admin, emails, and social media for work, rather than scrolling endlessly. Then, past 1pm, I go into full work mode.”

This self-awareness pays dividends. Sandrine says she can achieve four to five hours of uninterrupted deep work, excepting toilet breaks, by aligning demanding creative tasks with her peak energy periods.

Expert tips on getting into creative flow (and staying there)

Scientists studied the cognitive behavior of astronauts who have spent six months on board the International Space Station — and made some fascinating yet ominous discoveries.

…a series of tests revealed that their cognitive abilities slowed down while in space, “suggesting that processing speed, visual working memory, sustained attention, and risk-taking propensity may be the cognitive domains most susceptible to change in Low Earth Orbit for high-performing, professional astronauts,” the researchers wrote.

So astronauts’ brains malfunction. Great news.

Bonus round: microgravity activates “hidden, ancient sections of DNA called the “dark genome.” We didn’t have enough to worry about. There’s a Dark Genome now.

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

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

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4sep25

Published September 4, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Supercat in flight here is rolling around on the lawn in the late summer sun, after having come to get me at 10.10 to tell me it’s morning and he needs his snack before we go outside. And then drooling on my face when I gave him some fuss.

TODAY:

OPERATIONS: I have to lock down the newsletter and ten pages of script today, no time to fart around. And I just got two big chunks of art to look through, which I probably need to do first.
STATUS: Inbox 98, barely 7 hours sleep, Gmail on iOS has stopped popping notifications AGAIN. Today I am back in a heavy workshirt for the first time since the end of May, as the chill starts creeping in. Putting the Apple Watch on because I have a feeling I’m going to need help keeping up today….
READING: OUR DEBTS TO THE PAST by Ed James (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: Dark Ambient Noisescapes

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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morning computer full cosmic

Published June 9, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Shane Drinkwater.

In the name of open science, the multinational scientific collaboration COSMOS on Thursday released the data behind the largest map of the universe. Called the COSMOS-Web field, the project, built with data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), consists of all the imaging and a catalog of nearly 800,000 galaxies spanning nearly all of cosmic time. And it’s been challenging existing notions of the infant universe.

Since compiling a list of artists and designers working in this post-psychedelic style I keep finding practictioners I hadn’t noticed before. German designer and art director Ulrich Eichberger is someone I might have spotted earlier if I’d examined his discography, especially when several of the albums he worked on are ones I’ve owned for many years.

Note: the term “Krautrock” is bullshit (as Coulthart also notes). I prefer Kosmische for a lot of the music from that period.

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

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

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marks for 31may25

Published May 31, 2025 by Warren Ellis

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HOB’S LANE 012

Published May 27, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Eric Brown was close to being Britain’s first astronaut.

The British Interplanetary Society proposed modifications to the V-2 in 1946 to make it a viable suborbital article, and also reusable. Access to V-2 technology and that early access to von Braun put Britain ten years ahead of the rest of the world. They called it Megaroc and submitted the pitch to the Ministry of Supply. Eric Brown was head of the line to test fly the thing, and that could have happened as early as 1949.

If Britain hadn’t been bankrupt. If a third of London hadn’t been missing.

I wrote a book around this notion, called MINISTRY OF SPACE.

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HOB’S LANE 011

Published May 26, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Reflecting on the launch of the first V-2 on London, Wernher von Braun is reported to have said, “the rocket worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet.”

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morning computer bring more rain

Published May 26, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Chiharu Shiota.

Comprised of three small structures that include a main residence, an art studio and a bath house, the Rain Harvest Home integrates rainwater-harvest architecture – an uncommon practice despite the region having abundant rainfall.

Visit ancient Mars—a surprisingly temperate planet where snow or rain falls from the sky, and rivers rush down valleys to feed hundreds of lakes.

A new study from geologists at the University of Colorado Boulder paints this picture of a red planet that was relatively warm and wet, much different than the frigid wasteland we know today. The team’s findings suggest that heavy precipitation likely fed many networks of valleys and channels that shaped the Martian surface billions of years ago—adding new evidence to a long-running debate in planetary science.

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

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

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