motd - 01/##/2024 ----------------- 01/30/2024 Aurora curls: https://www.livescience.com/space/the-sun/photographer-snaps-extremely-rare-aurora-curls-after-magnetic-wave-rings-earths-atmosphere-like-a-bell https://spaceweathergallery2.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=203226 "These curls are fine structures in the poleward boundary of multiple arcs formed by longitudinal-arranged field-aligned current pairs. It look[s] like to the Auroral Undulations Triggered by Kelvin-Helmholtz Waves." 01/26/2024 California's duck curve is getting deeper: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56880 "As more solar capacity has come online in California, grid operators at the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) have observed a drop in net load (or the demand remaining after subtracting variable renewable generation) in the middle of the day when solar generation tends to be highest. When graphed for a typical day, the pattern created by the midday dip in the net load curve, followed by a steep rise in the evenings when solar generation drops off, looks like the outline of a duck, so this pattern is often called a duck curve. As solar capacity in California continues to grow, the midday dip in net load is getting lower, presenting challenges for grid operators." 01/26/2024 Model Collapse: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/26/what_is_model_collapse/ 01/25/2024 The cooling advantage of integrated GPUs: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/CPUIGPCoolingAdvantage 01/25/2024 Lockable bike helmet: https://www.core77.com/posts/127567/ 01/22/2024 2023 Emoji law review: https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2024/01/2023-emoji-law-year-in-review.htm 01/22/2024 Apple TV remote case with an AirTag: https://www.cultofmac.com/747209/siri-remote-airtag-case/ Might need several of these - we keep misplacing our Apple TV remotes all the time. 01/22/2024 A PRNG that you can do in your head: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/randomness/ 1. Choose a 2-digit number, say 23, your "seed". 2. Form a new 2-digit number: the 10's digit plus 6 times the units digit. The example sequence is 23 -> 20 -> 02 -> 12 -> 13 -> 19 -> 55 -> 35 -> ... 3. The 'random digits' are the units digits of the 2-digit numbers, ie, 3,0,2,2,3,9,5,... 01/19/2024 How the Manhattan project was funded: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/us/politics/atomic-bomb-secret-funding-congress.html?unlocked_article_code=1.OU0.PuSv.SstGkf8GD8nI "Where exactly in the budget had the [FDR] administration hidden the money for the bomb? Finding a bill that passed eight decades ago is harder than you might think, but after a number of creative searches, I pulled up a record of a Senate hearing examining the bill. Attached was a report breaking down the legislation. I paged through, stopped and smiled when I saw it. There it was, the innocuous phrase that hid an $800 million secret: 'expediting production.'" 01/19/2024 Neptune and Uranus in their true colors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKSWcFCMrU 01/18/2024 Staircase Sunset: https://fiftyfootshadows.net/2024/01/17/staircase-sunset/ 01/18/2024 What Happened to the US Machine Tool Industry? https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-happened-to-the-us-machine-tool 01/17/2024 A dwarf galaxy with no visible stars: https://phys.org/news/2024-01-primordial-dark-galaxy-stars.html "J0613+52 is an odd [galaxy] when you compare it to the more familiar types such as the star-filled spirals and ellipticals. For one thing, it's a dwarf galaxy with an irregular shape. Without any obvious stars, it's quite dim. The most unusual thing about objects like this one is that dark matter appears to dominate their compositions. If J0613+52 is like others, it could have up to 95% dark matter constraining the neutral gaseous hydrogen that we can detect. ... In addition, J0613+52 lies too far from any neighboring galaxies to interact with them gravitationally. That means they can't trigger star formation through any possible mergers or collisions." 01/17/2024 Early galaxies appear to have been mostly long and thin: https://phys.org/news/2024-01-webb-early-galaxies-thin-disk.html 01/17/2024 Cepheid variables probably not responsible for the Hubble tension: https://phys.org/news/2024-01-astronomers-explanation-hubble-tension.html "In this new study, the team looked at more than a thousand Cepheid variables and was able to pinpoint the distance relation for Cepheids with extreme precision. From this, they proved that Cepheid variable error can't account for the Hubble tension." 01/13/2024 The 18% O2 solution: https://bigthink.com/13-8/oxygen-bottleneck/ "Drawing on experiments carried out across disciplines as varied as combustion engineering to biogeochemistry, we found that an atmosphere with anything less than 18% oxygen would not allow open-air combustion. Remarkably, for most of our planet's 4.5-billion-year history, Earth's oxygen levels have been way, way below 18%. In fact, only over the past 500 million years or so has the atmosphere held enough oxygen for anything to freely burn in the open air. Why does any of this matter? Imagine a young and intelligent species on an alien world with an atmosphere that's just 1% oxygen. Those clever tool-using creatures would never get the chance to watch a tree burn after being hit by lightning and get the idea of using fire for their own purposes. They would never have the chance to learn how fire could be used to cook food, clear land, or, most importantly, melt metals. The poverty of oxygen in their air would likely box these creatures in forever, limiting their development." Older ----- ##/##/2023 https://srirangav.github.io/motd/2023/motd.txt https://srirangav.github.io/motd/2023/index.html ##/##/2022 https://srirangav.github.io/motd/2022/motd.txt https://srirangav.github.io/motd/2022/index.html Links ----- Text: https://srirangav.github.io/motd/motd.txt HTML: https://srirangav.github.io/motd/index.html RSS (all entries): https://srirangav.github.io/motd/rss.xml RSS (current month's entries only): https://srirangav.github.io/motd/rss-cur.xml RSS (current year's entries only): https://srirangav.github.io/motd/rss-ytd.xml