Japanese Space Agency's endeavor.
A difficult one.
Note the planned duration (return in 2031), showing how precious fuel is on these journeys.
By the way, Fear (Phobos) and Horror (Deimos) are the apt old names of the God of War's sons and battlefield companions.
(Ares, whom the old Romans called Mars.)
Japan's MMX mission set to grab a piece of Mars's moon Phobos
<https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmvgxvkv54w1o>
Regarding remote scams, seriously:
If someone wants something over the phone or the Internet:
If you don't know them, just refuse without engaging.
If it seems that you know them, get back to them yourself, preferably in another way (over a different channel).
For e-mail, the first point means:
do not open anything from the message and do not reply.
Keep in mind that:
voice is easy enough to fake convincingly;
a phone number (caller ID) is also easy enough to fake for incoming calls;
any advertisement may be fake and it is easy enough to make it seem good.
_________
I believe each such tactic must be as simple as possible to have a hope of being useful.
Yes
Into the Lens
(Drama, 1980;
lineup: Geoff Downes, Trevor Horn, Steve Howe, Chris Squire, Alan White)
I am a camera
Camera, camera
...
You and me
By the sea
Taken in tranquility
Teaser: remember RDF?
Subheadings of the blog post:
Where the Semantic Web Went
What the Transformer Couldn't Do
The LLM as Stochastic Compiler
The (Deterministic) Graph Strikes Back
Memory Lives Outside the Model
The MCP Says No
Returning to a Galaxy of Graphs
Takeaways
<https://caglereport.substack.com/p/a-galaxy-of-graphs>
via the quoted
<https://social.edu.nl/@steltenpower/117434018881738469>
Plus yet another illustration:
people must learn to do arithmetic by hand and in their heads
in order to learn _number sense_ (priceless),
even though calculators are widely available.
Remains of the oldest known shipwreck, Eastern Mediterranean, just to the south of Asia Minor (Anatolia)
This was dated by the decorations on ceramic vessels, a tried and trusted method, to 2700–2400 B.C.
By the way, the three subdivisions of the Bronze Age are of rather unequal duration, to a large degree because much more is known about the later parts:
Early Bronze Age (EBA): 3500–2100;
Middle Bronze Age (MBA): 2100–1700;
Late Bronze Age (LBA): 1700–1200
(approximately).
«Prof Hakan Öniz, from Akdeniz University in Turkey»
"Ak deniz" is Turkish for "White Sea", another name of the Aegean Sea, which is right to the west of Asia Minor.
***
The final paragraph (hyperlinked) is:
«The oldest known shipwreck where some of the wood is still preserved was found in the Black Sea off the coast of Bulgaria. It dates to about 2,400 years ago.»
There was a substantial British-Bulgarian (Hull University?) deep sea expedition in the Black Sea several years ago and they made very impressive photographs.
Looking at one of them, I could almost hear the boatswain's whistle.
There is hydrogen sulphide dissolved in the deep waters of the Black Sea, so wood is preserved.
BBC article:
World's oldest shipwreck found off Kekova Island in Turkey
<https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6gr80rk1yyko>
#Archaeology
#BronzeAge
#EarlyBronzeAge
#MediterraneanArchaeology
#UnderwaterArchaeology
PICARD
This is like a tree that grew from the seed of spread spectrum.
<https://infosec.exchange/@darkuncle/117429590095834043>
<https://masto.hackers.town/@xenophile/117429569456541112>
<https://github.com/neitzert/picard>
RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@liberty/117394143351785023
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
(Edgar Allan Poe)
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@bontchev/117393954003911392
A screenshot with a three-post thread.
(1)
Autism:
1 in 10,000. 1990
1 in 30. 2026
Vaccines cause autism.
(2)
Near Earth Asteroids
1960, 20
2026, 40k+
Telescopes cause asteroids.
(3)
Why has no one mentioned the more obvious conclusion, near-Earth asteroids cause autism.
In _Anatomy of LISP_, John Allen introduces continuations in Chapter 4, Imperative Constructs in LISP, section 4.7, `eval’ with Explicit Control.
This helped me a lot to understand continuations back when I first read that book.
He writes:
«We now propose to explicitly *pass along* information about what to do after the current computation is completed.
This information is called the *continuation*.»
In the implementation shown, a continuation is a function supplied as the sole parameter `c’ of function `ceval’, the evaluator; `c’ is also a non-local variable in auxiliary function `ev1’.
The whole evaluation algorithm works with a tad of higher-order mutually recursive wizardry.
Note: the bibliography includes two items related to the handling of non-local variables in the latter, though the book doesn't have explicit references to the first one.
Moses, J., ‘The Function of FUNCTION in LISP’, _SIGSAM Bulletin_, p. 13–27, July 1970.
Weizenbaum, J., ‘The FUNARG Problem Explained’, unpublished memorandum, M.I.T., Cambridge, Mass., 1968.
***
This book was published in 1978.
The algorithms in it are presented in the language of M-expressions (in my view, it is a purely algorithmic language, as distinct from a programming language).
Drawing a weak analogy, to me the exposition evokes texts on differential and integral calculus from the age of Leibniz, Newton, and Euler, before the transformations by Cauchy, Weierstrass, and others.
«About the Author
JOHN R. ALLEN is a member of the technical staff of the Hewlett-Packard Research Lab, Palo Alto, California.
After graduating from Michigan Technical University, he earned an M.A. degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Mr. Allen did graduate work in computer science at Stanford University, where he was later a research associate.
He has taught at the University of California at Los Angeles and Santa Cruz, and at San Jose State.»
A quick count just now found six Fediverse posts pointing to somebody else's blog post alleging that Lisp is difficult to read.
For a language nobody uses, that is an awful lot of concern about readability.
RE: https://mathe.social/@tomkalei/117291022611973067
The sticky bit is a nice touch.
Note that 10³⁷ is close to the largest 32-bit floating-point number.
Function or macro?
Yet another very short and simple answer for (Common) Lisp.
A macro, if and only if it must do its thing at compile time;
otherwise, a function.
A contemporary art exhibition took an unexpected turn this week when an art collector offered $4,000 for what he believed was an experimental sculpture, only to discover that the “artwork” was actually a broken vacuum cleaner used by the venue’s cleaning staff.
artinc.co/art-collector-bids-4…
I do remember late 1980s[*] Soviet rock opera Juno and Avos'.
These are the names of two Russian ships that sailed to San Francisco in 1806.
AVOS' (АВОСЬ) is a Russian word expressing hope in a favorable lucky outcome.
Pushkin called this word the shibboleth of the Russian people.
[*Correction: I misremembered, the rock opera was written in the late 1970s.]
And I am glad I learned the following:
«Though Spain claimed all of California starting in 1542, it didn't actually occupy it until 1769, after getting word that Russian fur traders were rapidly moving east across the Alaskan islands. To prevent Russian and British advancement, Spain created a chain of presidios (military outposts) along the coast, starting with San Diego.
"The expansion of all of Alta [Upper] California, in many ways, was stimulated by the Russians," Lightfoot said. "The Spanish were nervous about the Russians coming south. So, the founding of San Diego, Santa Barbara, Monterey and San Francisco were a response to the Russians in Alaska."»
BBC article:
'The forgotten empire': When Russia colonised California
<https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20260828-when-russia-colonised-california>
The distance between Lake Ontario and Sofia, Bulgaria is 7,740 km (4,810 miles).
The direction to Lake Ontario from Sofia is slightly north of west.
_________
Using Toronto, Canada as a reference point.
Toronto is located on the Lake Ontario shoreline.
A programming exercise in Common Lisp about Algol-style call-by-name.
Write the necessary definitions, so that the following works:
(define-for-calls-by-name sum (i a b v)
(value a b)
"Jensen's device."
(let ((s 0))
(for (i :from a :to b)
(incf s v))
s))
(defvar *m* (make-array '(2 3)
:initial-contents '((0 1 2)
(3 4 5)))
"A number matrix.")
(let (i j)
(assert (eql 3 (sum i 0 2 (aref *m* 0 i))))
(assert (eql 15 (sum i 0 1 (sum j 0 2 (aref *m* i j))))))
(assert (string= "Jensen's device."
(documentation 'sum 'function)))
As usually with exercises, the value of this is in doing it, rather than in the end result.
The interesting part is figuring out an approach and the necessary ingredients; writing the program is more or less straightforward.
#Algol
#CallByName
#CommonLisp
#ComputerProgramming
#Exercise
#Lisp
#ProgrammingPuzzle
RE: https://mastodon.social/@675345456754334566664w/117103877753390503
Off topic, a traditional Bulgarian method of protection against goblins¹:
Place a sunflower head outside at the entrance to a house.
A goblin, having come to do its harmful things at night, _must_ first count the sunflower seeds before entering.
Since their arrangement is not quite regular, the goblin keeps losing the count and starting over.
This goes on until the light of dawn, when the goblin must leave.
_________
¹ ТЕНЕЦ (TENETS) in Bulgarian; the above is described in a 1960s story by Bulgarian writer Yordan Radichkov.
Something's on the move.
I quote the most interesting part, hidden at the bottom of the article.
Now, what was special about 1970?
Apollo 13, surely...
«This year's primary season has seen an unusually high number of incumbents lose their party's renomination.
Six Democrats and three Republicans have been defeated, the highest number in a non-redistricting election cycle since 1970, according to Vital Statistics on Congress.»
BBC article:
Andy Ogles, a Trump-backed Republican congressman, loses primary in Tennessee
<https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c79grd2prnro>
Half a century into the Information Age and a significant part of humankind seems to be in sorcerer's apprentice mode, with no sorcerer in sight to set things right in the end.
A rather uncomfortable thought...
Don't skip the classes on the Neolithic Revolution and the Industrial Revolution.
They all teach many direct lessons for today.
Also uncomfortable.
🙁🙁🙁