After 2 years, i return to check up on an old shelter i built and stay the night, campfire cooking with a reflector oven. EXPAND FOR LINKS & DETAILS: Reflector Oven: https://roughtimba.com/ Puddings: https://www.facebook.com/wjmacdonalds/?locale=en_GB

Radiation is a primary concern for long-duration human spaceflight, such as the planned trips to Mars, which are the stated goal of organizations such as NASA and SpaceX. Shielding is the standard way to protect astronauts from radiation during those flights. However, shielding is heavy and, therefore, expensive when it is launched off the Earth. What if, instead, astronauts could hitch a ride on a giant mass of shielding already in space that will take them directly to their destination? That is the basic thought behind a paper from Victor Reshetnyk and his student at Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv.  They looked at data collected by NASA’s Horizons service and analyzed the orbits of over 35,000 Near Earth Objects (NEOs) for their trajectories to see if their paths would cross somewhere between the binary pairs of Earth-Venus, Earth-Mars, or Mars-Venus. If so, then in theory, they could be used as shielding from the deadly radiation astronauts would have to either suffer from or shield against on the trip. Given the sheer amount of objects they looked at, they were bound to find some good candidates – and they did, with an estimated 525 making “fast” transfers of less than 180 days. They then further narrowed this list down to a reasonable speed during the approach to the planet they would start from – essentially to make sure that a crewed spacecraft could actually catch up to the asteroid without burning an absurd amount of fuel. Fraser discusses how to make an asteroid a habitat. That lowered the total amount of candidates down to 120, with the following breakdown: Earth -> Venus: 44 Earth -> Mars: 17 Mars -> Earth: 13 Mars -> Venus: 2 Venus -> Earth: 38 Venus -> Mars: 6 In other words, there were plenty of options for hitching a ride. Granted, none of these would be exceptionally roomy – the largest is estimated to have a diameter of only .37 km. However, there is still plenty of room to fit a spaceship, as long as it’s not a Star Destroyer or Battleship from 40K. Additionally, the authors found some asteroids that had more unique trajectories. Eleven had the possibility of doing “multiple” transfers, meaning they could go from Earth to Venus and then back or vice versa, but only one would do the same for the Venus to Mars trip. Two could even do a “double” transfer, meaning they could go from Earth to Venus to Mars or from Mars to Venus to Earth in less than one year. Anything beyond that wasn’t possible, though – they didn’t find any asteroids akin to an “Aldrin Cycler” that would go between the planets indefinitely on a known orbit. Capturing an asteroid would be one way to use it for shielding – as Fraser discusses. That’s not to say that asteroid doesn’t already exist – we might just not have found it yet. NEO Surveyor, a NASA mission designed to launch in 2028 to find 90% of all NEOs larger than 140m in diameter, could increase the number of known NEOs by an order of magnitude. Using any of them for a massive radiation shield for a crewed mission would take much more dedicated work, though. Any such transformation is decades away at least – but the place to start is to find the right ones, and this paper contributes to that effort. Learn More: A.S. Kasianchuk & V. M. Reshetnyk – The search for NEOs as potential candidates for use in space missions to Venus and MarsUT – A New Paper Shows How To Change An Asteroid Into A Space Habitat – In Just 12 YearsUT – Rubble Pile Asteroids Might be the Best Places to Build Space HabitatsUT – NASA Makes Asteroid Defense a Priority, Moving its NEO Surveyor Mission Into the Development Phase Lead Image:Illustration of the asteroid Bennu. Credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory The post Could We Use An Asteroid to Shield Astronauts On Their Way to Mars? appeared first on Universe Today.

"It's a decade that vaulted music to new heights, but also to heights that it had to be torn down from," UCR's Gary Graff says. Continue reading…

Happy Spotify Wrapped Day to those who celebrate. Since 2016, at the end of November or early December, Spotify has allowed users to view a compilation of data about their activity on the platform over the past year in a visually pleasing storytelling-like way. From telling users how many minutes of music they've listened to their top songs and artists of the year, the platform lays it out so you can see your music and podcast listening trends from the year. https://twitter.com/WhiskeyRiff/status/1864335191684141372 Apple Music has since adopted something similar over the last few years as Spotify Wrapped has become increasingly popular, but (sorry, Apple Music users) Spotify goes above and beyond to share some "fun" listening trends with you about your year. During the 2021 Wrapped drop, Spotify gave you your "Audio Aura," which helped identify your aura based on the music you reached for most. And it was actually pretty cool. I'm not very into auras, but rereading what each color was associated with while working on this blog shows the direct tie between music and emotion. "Purple: This aura color pairs well with passionate music listeners. Purple auras tune in to get amped up, entertained, and moving while they navigate the twists and turns of their day. Green: Calm, analytical, and introspective are the traits that describe a green aura. These listeners gravitate toward complex music to tame their fast-moving minds. Pink: Often described as the hopeless romantics of the aura spectrum, pinks view the world with a sense of optimistic, childlike wonder. Orange: Oranges are the rebellious and bold type. They share a need for high-energy, confidence-boosting sounds. Yellow: Yellows like their music to align them to the goals of their day, fueling their need for focus, motivation, and self improvement all while reducing any nerves that could get in the way. Blue: Blues are wistful or emotional, and this hue reflects listeners who seek out music to feel their feelings out loud." This year, however, Spotify tried a little too hard in the creative department when releasing Wrapped. After informing listeners about their top listened-to songs and artists, Spotify told its users how their musical moods evolved. The platform pinpointed three months, told you what genre you leaned the most into, and compared that to genres from other months. Spotify tagged this segment of Wrapped as your "2024 Musical Evolution." In theory, this is a super cool concept. Many of us change our musical preferences depending on the season. We all know that as a country music blogger, I listen to A LOT of country, but I also love listening to pop and house music, so it's cool to see what times of year I gravitate toward those genres and veer away from my country music roots. However, how Spotify chooses the genres' names during this "musical evolution" is insane. We all know there are many different subgenres within a genre under the "country" umbrella; you can also find folk, pop country, Appalachian music, southern rock, Americana, and much more. But this year, Spotify just took as many adjectives as possible and shoved them before a genre to describe your listening habits. For example, my May evolution was titled "Equestrian Western Country" and included artists like Chris Stapleton, Zach Top, and Toby Keith. But why did they need to add "equestrian" before that? If you want to call out that I'm a horse girl, I hate to break it to you, Spotify, but I've been beating those allegations since the 2nd grade. Also... how do they know that? Naturally, I was this and thought to myself, "What the f**k is this?" so I began asking my friends if their musical evolutions included some off-the-cuff genres. Some other interesting genre names that Spotify came up with included "Wild West Tavern Country Folk," which sounds objectively awesome, "Boujee Clean Rap Crunk," "Boujee Football Rap Season," "Pink Pilates Princess Hollywood Pop," "Wild West Cowboy Country Americana," "Pumpkin Spice Western Sad Country," and "Witchy Cowboy Country Americana." If you haven't checked out your musical evolution, I highly recommend it. If anything, it will give you a good laugh. All in all, though, Spotify users were underwhelmed by this year's wrap. Check out some of the commentary. https://twitter.com/shivlestat/status/1864297444361785638 https://twitter.com/lucysreputation/status/1864291904843571452 https://twitter.com/pscwyers/status/1864287411716468802 https://twitter.com/XCATB0Y/status/1864342554096861528 https://twitter.com/_FatherChels/status/1864342549982216614 https://twitter.com/s4pphlust/status/1864342545741840624 https://twitter.com/sandeliond/status/1864342309627711650

The Hudson Institute hosted a Tuesday panel discussion on the potential for a reform of the State Department and the U.S. Foreign Service under the incoming Trump administration.  The panelists, Simon Hankinson, a senior researcher at the Heritage Foundation, Drew Peterson, an adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and Tibor Nagy, the former assistant secretary of state for Africa, proposed that the State Department has become bloated and overly bureaucratic, handicapped by a failure to clearly conceptualize the intended goals of the department and its appendages and suffering from a lack of talent and training. The panelists suggested a number of important reforms that the incoming Trump administration can take to create a stronger, more efficient diplomatic corps. The first was to immediately eliminate the DEIA requirements from the State Department’s core precepts, as well as the hiring and promotion processes. In the past several decades, Simon Hankinson explained, hiring and promotion have been deliberately skewed to benefit certain minority groups, especially women, rather than selecting on the basis of merit. This produces a department with poorer performance and diverts energy that should be directed into serving the national interest into attempting ever-more-radical social engineering for further diversity gains. The elimination of DEI should be accompanied by a restructuring of the hiring and promotion process, added Peterson, noting that the current process wastes massive amounts of time and prioritizes the interests of foreign service officers rather than the effective production of results. The new process should emphasize bringing in younger talent to better fill out junior service grades, be more flexible to facilitate the easier acquisition of expert talent from outside the federal government and ultimately strive to outfit the department for long-term diplomatic competition with the People’s Republic of China. Nagy asserted that one of the principal goals of the Trump administration should be to rationalize the structure of state department offices and bureaus, noting that the current structure results in the massive misdirection of resources to producing paperwork as opposed to doing diplomacy. Nagy proposed the wholesale elimination of large numbers of special envoys and single-issue offices, as well as the reinstatement of the Small Embassies Program, to reduce staff and exempt participating embassies from normal requirements for paperwork, allowing them to focus on completing their diplomatic missions. The panel closed with the moderator, Matt Boyse, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, noting that many of these problems have been present for years without effective action from either presidential administrations or Congress, and that the arrival of the new Trump administration provides an opportunity to make urgent reforms. The post State Department Alums Take Aim at Foreign Service Reform appeared first on The American Conservative.

Trump’s FCC Pick Vows To Take Out The Left’s Censorship Cartel! LEO Round Table S09E242

We give you an obscure word with four definitions—one correct, three made up. Can you identify the correct one?