The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

^{Click to embiggen}
A scene from the Devonian period, before dinosaurs ever emerged to rumble the earth. This lobe-finned fish measured between 8 and 15 feet long, and swam in freshwater rivers and marshes that spread over what is now Hyner, Pennsylvania. The very first four-legged creatures (like that tetrapod swimming in the background) came onto land around the same time, exploring this new thing called “forests.”

Meanwhile, Hyneria waited in the wetter parts. They could lunge up onto land…

SONG: “Bang, You’re Misled”

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Based on Defense One, 2 Oct 2020, “Can AI Detect Disinformation? A New Special Operations Program May Find Out”, as used in the post “Artificial intelligence is being programmed to spot disinformation – by the military”.

ABSTRACT:
I’m counting this song as on time, although technically this is a day late. I had the thing written, it was just a chore getting time to mix it and stuff. I recorded on a different computer than usual – …

A space telescope inside a space shuttle, from the STS-67 mission.

The mission summary, from archive.org, is:

The Space Shuttle Endeavor, scheduled to launch March 2, 1995 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, will conduct NASA’s longest Shuttle flight prior to date. The mission, designated STS-67, has a number of experiments and payloads, which the crew, commanded by Stephen S. Oswald, will have to oversee. This NASA press kit for the mission contains a general background (general press r…

^{Click to embiggen}

This is a cartoon inspired by “the experiences of Santos-Dumont,” the famed Brazilian-born aviator who maybe might have kind of sort of had a powered flight before the Wright Brothers. At any rate, Santos-Dumont went on to make records with both heavier-than-air and lighter-than-air vessels, one of the few pilots to work with both planes and dirigibles. The title (if the red jackets don’t make it clear) translates to “hunting with hounds by dirigible.” Basically, this is ima…

^{Click to embiggen}

The Marquis d’Oró (without that accent mark, he’d be the Marquis of Gold) has a coat of arms with a diagram of the molecule adenine in it, on the sinister side (“sinister” being to the left of the person holding the shield). The blazon – the instructions for painting the shield – says the first section is a gold background with a “mont de sinople” – a mountain of green – and the second section is, on a blue background, “la fórmula de la adenina, con sus 5 átomos de hidrógeno…

Among all the diagrams of force-vectors, there’s this wonderful illustration of a well-made machine in A Text-Book of Applied Mechanics and Mechanical Engineering, on archive.org.

There’s little reason why a pump made to these specifications in 1903 wouldn’t still be operating, unless it had had been left idle and allowed to rust through somewhere. It makes you wonder.