The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

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Over a million people could live here, in a double-cylinder colony in space.

From the NASA Ames Research Center’s concepts of future space colonies (as imagined in the 1970s).

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Wilhelm Ritter von Haidinger was an Austrian mineralogist who during his career helped mining engineers dig better mines and looked at rocks that looked like other rocks – he specialized in “pseudomorphosis,” when one mineral takes on the aspect of another. In his retirement, von Haidinger studied meteorites, and painted what happened when a giant rock blazed across the sky and broke apart above the Ukrainian city of Knyahinya. Around 500 kilograms – about half a ton – of sp…

Embryonic television. I like how this device has an almost Lovecraftian vibe, as if sending moving pictures was a thing that involved mystical processes. What’s in the box, man?

From LM Myers’ Television Optics, a book from the 1930s that includes descriptions of things like “opto-mechanical scanning devices.”

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What’s inside a Ukranian volcano. Or most volcanoes, wherever the are. From a Ukranian encyclopedia for Ukrainian miners (ISBN 966-7804-14-3).

SONG: “The Russian Cuckoo Reproduces in the Midnight Sun”.

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Popular Science, 7 May 2018, “Russian cuckoos are taking over Alaska”, as used in the post “Russian cuckoos are taking over Alaska”.

ABSTRACT:
First, yes, I’ll come out and say that this is as much about the cuckoos in Alaska as the botfarms on Twitter, or vice versa. I’ll also say that I regret not working some reference to climate change into the bridge. Maybe the lyrics needed a little warmth.

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Just in case you have to drive one of these, now you know where the controls are.

I like that there’s a dial labeled “Time To Go.”

Found at the NASA Johnson Space Center History Portal’s Mercury diagrams archive.