Daniel A. Anderson

Whenever I hear about the Prince Rupert's Drop I think of the Droplets in Three Body Problem series, and wonder if the physical phenomena in glass inspired the scifi-ship

Simple concept, very cool

Stanley William Hayter (1901-1988), “Tropic of Cancer” (1949), engraving, soft-ground etching, 69.9 x 60.3 cm (image).

Maybe learning Greek before Math just sounds backwards but honestly it's a lot less intimidating once the funny symbols have historical contexts, stories, and meanings.

That's just my experience as an adult learner right now.

Why didn't I learn it this way? Why doesn't anyone? Segmented into "subjects", robbing us of the story and synergy of how human knowledge developed.

With astronomy and math, now I at least *know* what the funny letters are for, how they sound, and how Sparta put the cool one on their shields.

> Jump from stars to planet formation, unlocks Earth history and geology. Cool dinosaurs and stuff
> Unlock biology, how do dinosaur guts work and stuff. And our guts. Also evolution.
> Finally do math, boring numbers and stuff. But! We know the funny symbols and stuff, and Euclid was a cool Greek 😎

Why don't our curricula for western education go:
> Ancient Greek History (fall of Mycenaean Empire, rise of polis, cool wars and stuff)
> Greek/Roman mythology, cool gods and heroes and stories and stuff
> Learn Greek alphabet, cool symbols
> Learn astronomy, cool stars and science stuff

Instead of a "study", lets call it an intellectual man cave

Losing all categories and viewing the world as phenomena makes everything interesting again.

"Every revolution carries within it the seed of its own destruction" to paraphrase Frank Herbert.

He was thinking of political revolutions, but the same pattern usually plays out in technological revolutions too, even in microcosm.

It would be a wild irony if oral skill and memory arts became necessary as part of education's immune response to AI, just naturally arising.

Not so much a Butlerian Revolution as a Butlerian Emergence.

Found it interesting that in some medical fields, oral exams are making a comeback (lost the anecdote/reference/article), given AI. Oral exams may have seemed anachronistic, but now they're the only way of confirming stone-cold human knowledge.

The Messenger

The Orion Nebula.

Since I've got a bunch of new followers thanks to a quickly snapped photo of the Moon and Mercury last night that somehow blew up, here's an image of the Orion Nebula taken with a Seestar S50.

I was glad to be able to edit this to bring out a bit of the blue/green that is easily seen visually.

"The less talent they have, the more pride, vanity, and arrogance they have.
All these fools, however, find other fools to applaud them."

-Erasmus, 1509

Due to popular demand, here is a demonstration video of how to make 3D printed PCBs using just vector drawing software, a 3D printed (PETG filament for mine) and self-adhesive copper tape. Any questions, let me know!

Doing this too

if you floated on your back on the ocean surface above the Mariana Trench you would be as close to a plane flying above you as the sea floor below you

The things healing my soul actively are art, reading, and writing.

Artwork of a werewolf mid-transformation surrounded by leafy vines in autumn colours

#WerewolfWednesday

#art #artwork

Northern lights tonight possible. Saving the click

Francis Picabia (1879-1953)
Rubi 1929

Blood Moon March 2026: Total lunar eclipse times and viewing guide A rare total lunar eclipse — often called a Blood Moon — will be visible in the early morning hours of March 3, 2026. Here’s what East Coast skywatchers need to know.

March 3rd!

There's a vector from data model -> UI -> UX flows. I'm thinking of how a character in a game (ie user) traverses a level, ala game mechanics.

The job of a UI developer is to make that experience of traversal seamless, and the technical implementation of it, sound.

Digital painting, a ship defies gravity hovering above three figures in a bleak landscape

Mileships outtake

On Valentine’s Day, 1990, at the request of Carl Sagan, NASA turned Voyager 1's camera back toward home for one last look. From 3.7 billion miles away, it captured this: a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. Here is how Carl Sagan beautifully described it: “Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor, and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

"The Pale Blue Dot"

The Earth as seen from 3.7 billion miles away by Voyager 1 on #ValentinesDay in 1990:
📸NASA

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

Striped by Vasily Kandinsky, 1934
https://botfrens.com/collections/212/contents/137488

Hypercurious

The age when everything profane is made known