August 6, 1961 - First image, color images and movie of Earth from space taken by a person, by cosmonaut Gherman Titov – the first photographer from space.

Short video about Gherman and Vostok 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puqweoLwP6w

Less than four months after Yuri Gagarin's pioneering one-orbit flight, USSR stunned the world with yet another space first on August 6, 1961. This time, Yuri's backup, Gherman Titov, spent a day in space aboard the Vostok-2 spacecraft. The record-breaking mission looked even more startling at the time when NASA planned a 24-hour flight as the ultimate goal of its Mercury project, to be achieved in the sixth piloted launch.

At the time, medical specialists and other experts insisted on the mission limited to three orbits. Their main argument was that the first three orbits were overflying southern Russia, with the landing site drifting westward with each subsequent orbit. Between the 8th and 13th orbit, the landing would fall into the ocean. After the 13th orbit, the landing would be again possible in the USSR, however only in inhospitable and remote regions of the Soviet Far East covered with taiga, rocks and tundra.

Only after the planet would make a full turn below the spacecraft in 24 hours after launch, would the landing opportunity shift back to the European part of Russia. However the commitment to a day-long mission presented serious medical concerns.

Titov also had a professional Soviet-built Konvas movie camera aboard, which was modified for space flight and could record on black and white and color film. The cosmonaut also received a small optical telescope with magnification from three to five times.

https://www.russianspaceweb.com/vostok2.html

Titov’s life was steeped in a profound love of literature, and his words have a power that other spacefarers have rarely matched, before or since. His recollections are both poetic and succinct. “I had the feeling that our Earth is a sand particle in the universe,” he wrote , “comparable to a particle of sand on the shore of the ocean. It was strange to have a black dome above me and our earthly blue sky below. The Earth flashed as a multi-faceted gem, an extraordinary array of vivid hues that were strangely gentle in their play across the receding surface of the world…framed in a brilliant, radiant border. The colors were extraordinary—vivid, yet tender—and the light streaming through the cabin carried a strange shade as if it were filtered through stained glass.”

• from 2007 book "Into That Silent Sea"

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-first-photographer-in-space-44654847/

a rom-com of sorts that's actually pretty good

also fair warning it's pretty dark in some parts but quite wholesome overall

Hope those queer people (drones?) find cool terrorists to blow to hell. Blahaj becoming hexbear2…

Guessing this is related to the initial federation days, but any clarification or lore is appreciated.

only the highest quality version of this meme exclusively for

O poopiful for spacious balls
For amber waves of piss
For poople mounds on testicles
Above the poop-filled floor

Pig poop his balls on thee
And brown thy balls in pooper-hood
From taint to shining cheeks

So I've been dabbling in the LoRa Mesh networking world for a few months. The meshnets are created between Long Range radios (LoRa), and there are two common protocols/software layers used: Meshtastic (MT) and Meshcore (MC) for basic text messaging. The radios use public frequencies (915 Mhz in the US) that can propagate over many kilometers if there is line-of-sight between two nodes. Generally the same hardware can be firmware flashed to support either option (but not both at the same time).

Meshtastic is the earlier version, and it is very much focused on a non-hierarchical network topology. With MT, every node is also a repeater/router. Now this can be configured in many different ways per device, but the main idea is that the meshnet is fluid and adhoc. This makes sense in some contexts like off-grid coordination, search and rescue in remote areas, stuff where the meshnet is made up of a small number of nodes that are mostly moving independently in a localized area.

Meshcore differently uses dedicated repeater nodes along with the end user "companion" nodes (same hardware with different firmware). So the meshnet is made up of these repeaters (generally fixed in place) that relay messages between companion nodes that do not repeat by default. It is much more suited for urban and suburban contexts where there are more users and many fixed repeaters across the area.

There's a sort of case study from the San Fransisco Bay Area where the early adopters initially tried to create a meshnet based on MT, but later transitioned in mass to MC because it just worked better for the context of the area and use cases.

This reddit comment summarizes their experience:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sonomacounty/comments/1rmuuvq/comment/o93ogmh/

This is all just to give some context to my main purpose of this post: different network topologies and organizing principles and how they work in different contexts.

In many ways the guiding philosophy of MT is based in a fairly strict understanding of the anarchic perspective. This can be really useful to prove out how a flat org structure can work at a small scale. The problem arises particularly for MT in that when every node is also a repeater/router the airwaves start to get saturated pretty quickly as the number of nodes scales up. The frequency space is the common resource that the meshnet has to manage effectively and efficiently to function.

MC resolves this issue by introducing a minimum of hierarchy with dedicated repeater nodes. This reduces the overall saturation of the common frequency space pretty well, because the companion nodes (users) don't usually reach too far on their own. So by having these repeater nodes in strategically fixed positions around the geography for line-of-sight coverage, you get a network topology that is a bit closer to the traditional cellular network. It also uses some thoughtful routing algorithms to reduce unneeded message propagation noise. Part of this relies on "paths" messages take across the repeaters. If one node is sending direct messages to anther node in range, then repeating is not warranted. If the other node is at an unknown path, MC defaults to a "flood" routing mechanism while trying to send the message. Once a path to the other node is found, it becomes the default for subsequent messages until that path fails, then it reverts to the "flood" routing again.

TL;DR:

It's an interesting illustration of how adhoc fluidity can be very functional at a smaller scale, but as the scale grows it is often necessary to implement some minimal level of justified hierarchy to keep things functioning effectively. It's also a nice reminder that technology is socially embedded, and understanding the sociological aspects of its context and use cases is very much a dialectical process.

Is this something?

“Israel is the Startup Nation, while Texas is the Scale Up State, and together this partnership is another step towards making Texas the Dual-Use Capital of the World. I want to invest in Israeli entrepreneurs and the world-changing technology that they develop,” added Joshua Baer, Founder and CEO of Capital Factory.

One person was killed: Joshua Baer, 50, a leader in Texas’ technology and startup sectors. Three male teenage passengers and two pilots survived, as did a person in a truck struck by the plane as it crashed.

The business jet barreled cockeyed down the dark highway, knocking down one light pole after another, an orange glow of sparks trailing it.

From a distance, Ivan Franco thought it must be a car. But as he approached in his tow truck, he saw it was a plane — broken in half, its fuselage resting on its side, bright fire beginning to rise above. He stopped and rifled through the rescue kit his company keeps in the truck, grabbing a sledgehammer as well as three fire extinguishers, which he handed off to police officers.

“At that moment, you don’t think much about what to do, because I knew the plane could explode since it was on fire,” Franco told The Associated Press in Spanish. “My idea was to try to break the windows because the pilots hadn’t come out yet.”

Franco was one of several motorists who happened across the crash in Laredo, Texas, late Tuesday night and rushed to help — putting their own lives in danger to help those on board escape as smoke filled the cabin.

these lyrics are amazing

The opening includes a clear rhetorical construct of how the movement of commodities (freight) is privileged over the movement of people (passengers).

From political economy itself, using its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and moreover the most wretched commodity of all; that the misery of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and volume of his production; that the necessary consequence of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands and hence the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that, finally, the distinction between capitalist and landlord, between agricultural worker and industrial worker, disappears and the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers.

Found this comment on a post about how China is "doing capitalism better then the west, socialism is achieved through capitalism, etc".

I was expecting some weird takes in the thread, but this was beyond parody.