A minor accident had forced me down in the Rio de Oro region, in Spanish Africa. Landing on one of those table-lands of the Sahara which fall away steeply at the sides, I found myself on the flat top of the frustum of a cone, an isolated vestige of a plateau that had crumbled round the edges. In this part of the Sahara such truncated cones are visible from the air every hundred miles or so, their smooth surfaces always at about the same altitude above the desert and their geologic substance always identical. The surface sand is composed of minute and distinct shells; but progressively as you dig along a vertical section, the shells become more fragmentary, tend to cohere, and at the base of the cone form a pure calcareous deposit.
Without question, I was the first human being ever to wander over this . . . this iceberg: its sides were remarkably steep, no Arab could have climbed them, and no European had as yet ventured into this wild region.
I was thrilled by the virginity of a soil which no step of man or beast had sullied. I lingered there, startled by this silence that never had been broken. The first star began to shine, and I said to myself that this pure surface had lain here thousands of years in sight only of the stars.
But suddenly my musings on this white sheet and these shining stars were endowed with a singular significance. I had kicked against a hard, black stone, the size of a man's fist, a sort of moulded rock of lava incredibly present on the surface of a bed of shells a thousand feet deep. A sheet spread beneath an apple-tree can receive only apples; a sheet spread beneath the stars can receive only star-dust. Never had a stone fallen from the skies made known its origin so unmistakably.
And very naturally, raising my eyes, I said to myself that from the height of this celestial apple-tree there must have dropped other fruits, and that I should find them exactly where they fell, since never from the beginning of time had anything been present to displace them.
Excited by my adventure, I picked up one and then a second and then a third of these stones, finding them at about the rate of one stone to the acre. And here is where my adventure became magical, for in a striking foreshortening of time that embraced thousands of years, I had become the witness of this miserly rain from the stars. The marvel of marvels was that there on the rounded back of the planet, between this magnetic sheet and those stars, a human consciousness was present in which as in a mirror that rain could be reflected.
Well that is some spectacular prose, I am truly transported to a place where spirituality and science meet at a single point of grand mystery and realization that I have felt a few times in real life, alone in nature at surprising places and odd hours, but Saint-Exupéry has taken this all one further level up the rung.
To a level that my father actually lived, as an airplane pilot in Baja California back when the peninsula didn’t have a paved road, an isolated, remote place as yet mostly untouched by man.
One minor caveat, however:
a sheet spread beneath the stars can receive only star-dust
While I understand such a thoughtful writer was going for a feeling, surely with his talent he could have found a way to include windstorms, all the dust and sands they can sweep horizontally across the lands and over hills. The Rio De Oro region is in northern Morocco, surely it often gets blasted by powerful Saharan winds.
A sheet spread beneath the Moroccan sky most often receives desert-dust.
Shigeru Miyamoto is a legend. He comes off as very humble in this interview, too.
Nintendo must be unique in their retention of talent long term; it was really cool reading the part of the article talking about the intergenerational teams, with original designers working alongside developers who played their games as children. Can you imagine going to work with those responsible for your childhood favourite games?
I was in basic training during gamergate, and to this day I’m confused what the actual event was and it’s evolution. All I know is ‘gamers’ felt more right wing after it
If you do want to learn more, Innuendo Studios did a 6 part series called Why Are You So Angry? that’s pretty short (most episodes are ~10 minutes) but goes into the details
Edit: part 4 (An Autopsy of Gamergate, 18min) is probably the best summary, but the entire series is worth a watch if you have the time
Looks pretty damn cool, but supersonic commercial flights will be ridiculously expensive, pollutive and wasteful, there’s no going around this. There’s zero practical uses for the common man.
Astronomy: “a natural science that studies celestial objects and the phenomena that occur in the cosmos”
I suppose anything that happens in the universe is technically “a phenomenon that occurs in the cosmos” but this seems more suited to !nasa, which could definitely use the content. Would you consider posting it there as well?
I’m not the biggest fan of Lemmyworld, I prefer thematic instances such as Mander.xyz. Maybe we can consider this community as broader than strict astronomy?
I also prefer thematic instances, but try to find appropriate communities within those instances. Just because it’s coming from NASA, doesn’t make it astronomy.
Depending on which aspects of the project you think are important and want to discuss there are a few communities here that might be relevant.
Earth Science includes environment, and environmental impact seems to be the most popular talking point so far.
Noise and other forms of pollution are public health issues and there is a local community for that, although I’m not sure it’s really a great fit there.
Physics might be another choice due to the fact that a lot of physics is going into the engineering of something that reduces sonic booms.
Or maybe you just need to find the right thematic instance. For example, I’m registered on slrpnk for my climate, energy efficiency, and anarchism fixes.
But with November of this year likely heralding the legitimacy of fascism in the US, it’s incumbent upon us to try enjoy the silly shit before that comes along.
You speak as if it’s already decided. It’s incumbent upon us to enjoy the silly shit and do our damnedest to prevent the fascist rise.
Go play some Neopets, and stop listening to news orgs for a while (you’ve likely already decided who you’re supporting, anyway), especially the ones who trade in the 24h News Cycle; they have a vested interest in selling rage, not nuanced journalism. Hope eats into their profit margins.
I think Trump won, because people underestimated him and thought it was somebody else’s problem to go vote.
We will have to agree to disagree, plus, I don’t want to derail this Gaming community into a political debate. Enjoy your games! If you see a golden Shoyru, it might be mine.
Mimas’s ocean appears to be relatively young, forming in the past 25m years when powerful tidal forces exerted by Saturn deformed Mimas’s core, warming it like a massaged squash ball. The heated core then melted overlying ice, creating an ocean inside the Saturnian moon.
we think of glacier water as pure, the water on Mimas is brand new and never been touched
“Ok boys, we need ideas. We’re fucking the planet up irreparably in a way that will cost many, many millions of lives… but I feel like we could be doing it a lot faster. Get off your ass and invent a way for rich assholes to screw us even more than they already are”
theguardian.com
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