Daily Archives: August 2, 2022

HBO’s Industry is the Missing Link between Euphoria and Succession – Vanity Fair

Posted: August 2, 2022 at 2:58 pm

Who knew it was possible to take so much pleasure in watching people banter and brawl and have panic attacks over stuff that means absolutely nothing to you?

By that, I dont mean that the financial worldso stylishly and sexily dramatized in HBOs Industry, launching into season two August 1is something I dont care about. I mean literally that its incomprehensible. The young brokers and analysts spit industry jargon at approximately a million words per minute: a mind-bending barrage of futures and shorts and positioning thats pure yadda yadda yadda to me, as abstract and alien as the subatomic realm of quarks and neutrinos. But it doesnt put me off. In fact, Im enthralled. This trading floor is a killing field of emotional and erotic carnage as much as its a place where fortunes are made and lost in a millisecond.

Lots of people (and critics) I know took a pass on the first first season of Industry, which revolves around a group of college graduates working at Pierpont & Company, a fictional London investment bank. Theyve been hired on a trial basis and know that only half of them will survive an imminent cull (RIF, short for Reduction In Force) and secure permanent jobs. Not that anything is long-lasting or stable in this rapid-turnover world.

Both established traders and the Pierpont managers charged with training and monitoring the new recruits live in a constant state of paranoid anxiety about their quarterly performance; they spend their days cosseting elite clients who might be flight risks. The fast-churn lifestyle demands release, and its found in drugs and alcohol, eruptions of rage, badinage so brutal its basically hazing, and raunchy sex that shreds the rules about not mixing business and pleasure. Quick learners, the students take to the debauched afterwork culture as avidly as the daytime fray of speculation and deal-making.

The core group includes Yasmin (Marisa Abela), a smart and sensual woman from a wealthy Middle Eastern family who gets treated like an errand girl by a male supervisor who cant see past her chic surface; Robert (Harry Lawtey), a working class white boy whod rather sniff coke and sext Yasmin than study markets; and Gus (David Jonsson), a Ghanian-British Etonian who studied classics at Oxford and quickly finds the financial world unfulfilling. Floating at the center of the bunch is Harper (Myhala Herrold), a mysterious, mixed-race young American fueled by voracious ambition and intelligence.

Harper has never been in any doubt that she is an underdog. In the first season, while sitting in a bathroom cubicle, she overhears a pair of posh fellow trainees complaining about how she allegedly has an unfair advantage in the competition for a permanent job, since she enjoys the minority capital of being black and female. (When Harper emerges from her stall, Yasminone of the twois still standing by the sink and simperingly apologizes: I was the less cunty one.). Harpers grit and willingness to do almost anything to get a trade done are what hooked her boss Eric (Ken Leung) into hiring her. He sees a younger version of himself: a scrappy and mischievous American with no pedigree. In season one, Harper returned the favor in a dramatic series of backstabbing maneuvers that kept Eric on top, if only temporarily.

Everything is temporary in Industrys worldan employees value can fall as swiftly as a stock plummets. (Nobody owes anybody a tomorrow here, one Pierpont bigwig says.) And everyone is fake: the new employees, their managers, and the clients alike are engaged in an endless jockeying game of fronting and confidence projection. Grueling office days, whose work rate is sometimes propped up and propelled by semi-legal stimulants, blur into nocturnal sessions of almost harrowing hedonism, fueled by booze and coke and pills of many kinds. The alcohol and the stripes chopped out on the tops of toilets inevitably fuel sexual escapades: one-night stands, threesomes, selfie-porn texts, mutual masturbation via Zoom. Its like a zombie version of the counterculture: all the 1960s demands for erotic liberation and pharmacological freedom have been absorbed, but without any elevation of consciousness and with all the power structures and class hierarchies intact.

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HBO's Industry is the Missing Link between Euphoria and Succession - Vanity Fair

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Magixxs Atom EP, alludes his love and care free attitude, he is only getting started – More Branches

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Last year, Magixx, was signed with Mavin Records and there after his debut self titled extended play was unveiled. His co-sign was no different from Boy Spyce who was launched earlier this year, alongside the release of his debut EP, and that of Ayra Starr, who had a graceful year in review with Magixx the same year they were launched.

Meanwhile, the beautiful talents that these artistes posses speaks of enough cultural novelty. It has spoken once for Magixx after his critically acclaimed debut extended play, it spoke generously for Ayra Starr and Boy Spyce, and now it ultimately speaks for the Mavin all stars after they jointly dished out the Donjazzy produced Overdose featuring Crayon, Magixx, Ladipoe, Ayra Starr and Boy Spyce. It is the same flare for good music that Magixx propagates his sophomore extended play which shoulders his carefree attitude. He craves fun, non-stop enjoyment with his quite beautiful approach to sonic diversity, telling his plush and intense love tales that might yield an unending romance with his woman.

Also, Magixx, pays attention to detail, it is one of the quality Atom EP flows with down to a smouldering cohesion that powered each track. The opener All Over, has Magixx crooning his endearing love for his lover. While he seemed entangled in between her love, he spectacularly chorused all over with a certain amount of grit and carefree attitude attached as to how he has grown affection with readiness to spend all his dime on her. However, his pen game is on the spike. And upon Weekenjoyment, he plays around the core of Yoruba local percussions to relish splendour and hedonism as the saxophone politely graces the song, it enlivens the beauty, as it becomes another track akin to Fela Kutis creations. In addition, his diversity shined through, and it wasnt short lived on the project either.

With Shaye, he embraced all of his carefree nature completely, the one that vouches for an edge to edge fun and enjoyment. Particularly, the one that loves to party and relish in the vibe all along as Magixx alludes his turn up to Tiwa Savage, and went further to give an happy ending to the project there after. Finally, Forever, was the closing track where he goes back to the tail end of love, confessed his love interest and accepts that hed be with his woman forever. Unarguably, this is one of the most outstanding track off the project. However, Magixx is just getting started and this project alludes to his carefree attitude and nature that often falls in love.

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Magixxs Atom EP, alludes his love and care free attitude, he is only getting started - More Branches

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Queer Hedonism is Alive in the North | Now Then Sheffield – Now Then Magazine

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In what feels like no time at all, DIY event space and music venue Gut Level has become a much-loved pocket of queer club culture in Sheffield. Its ethos of community and collaboration is manifested through providing a platform for people who are traditionally underrepresented in the music industry - so queer / LGBTQ+ people, women and non-binary folks - and nurturing a safe space which encourages skill sharing, intersectional collaboration and grassroots creative activities. Oh, and they throw turbo mega parties too.

However, their home on Snow Lane has fallen foul of property developers, a story which is all too familiar for people who set up DIY spaces in Sheffield. Posting on Instagram, GL said: Insecure tenancies, accelerated gentrification and the appearance of luxury accommodation on every street corner has made it virtually impossible for small independent spaces to exist long-term in central locations.

The t-shirt is bold and defiant

But the Gut Level organisers have refused to let the unexpected eviction get them down and are forging ahead with plans for the future. To raise funds for said future theyve launched a t-shirt campaign in collaboration with Everpress. All funds from the campaign will go straight into Gut Levels piggy bank so they can continue supporting the future of the organisation, and funding grassroots, queer and DIY activities in Sheffield.

With Queer Hedonism is Alive in the North emblazoned across the front, the t-shirt is bold and defiant. You can buy yours via Everpress until 4 August.

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Queer Hedonism is Alive in the North | Now Then Sheffield - Now Then Magazine

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Gary Snyder Joins the Greats – Book and Film Globe

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One of the most influential figures of the San Francisco Renaissance, Gary Snyder, has made it into the Library of America, a series that displays the breadth and diversity of our canon with one ambitious new volume after another, though sadly its editors do not always put merit first.

In the case of the new inductee, the quality of the work preempts any fight about whether he deserves such a distinction. Like his pal and traveling companion Jack Kerouac, whom he has outlived now by well more than half a century, Snyder has a deep interest in beatitude, revelry, transcendence, Dionysian extremes, and gorging on beauty as manifested in literature and the world. Again like Kerouac, he rejects todays tendency to consign to the memory hole each and every thing from the past that does not jibe with all of todays sensibilities.

Like Kenneth Rexroth, whom some view as the catalyst of the West Coast literary renewal, Snyders inner compass leads him to the Far East, and to the city we know today as Kyoto, formerly Heian Kyo, which stood as the capital of a flourishing culture and nation for more than a thousand years. Here is a West Coast poet who cannot shut out the call of Japan. In the heyday of Snyders spiritual home, writing verse was as common as breathing.

While never overtly political, a few of these poems show a concern for an environment that we humans have not treated admirably. But the environmentalism is part of a broader vision uniting personal and social imperatives in a unique way.

Snyders ecological concerns come to the fore as he insists that people can do better, must do better, not just in their habits and patterns of consumption but in their thoughts and acts as members of a polity. In Hills of Home, you will find one of the more darkly ironic accounts of the Bay Area ever put to paper. Though known around the world for its beauty and ease of living, San Francisco enjoys a rather different distinction in this poem. Snyder admits the opulence of the locale, bonewhite in blue sea bay, while naming as its primary features two major jails, Alcatraz and San Quentin, and an oil refinery, with plenty of sailboats all around and jagged rocks where you can sit down and have your lunch amid the breezes.

The poem gives new meaning to damning with faint praise. We are tossing people in the slammer at terrific rates and making a killing off prisons and oil even as we befoul and ruin the beauty of the world. But the construction of the poem is too artful, the imagery too indelible, for it to sound preachy.

One of the works from the Kyoto period, Bomb Test, leads with a haunting image: The fish float belly-up, for real / Uranium in the whites / of their eyes. Those fish were minding their business, at an ocean level so far down under the waves that all you see around you is darkness, when Silvery snow of something queer / glinted in / From cirrus clouds to the seamounts.

Leave it to humans to disrupt the beauty and harmony of the world for their crass and selfish ends. As yet another figure associated with the San Francisco Renaissance, Kenneth Patchen, put it in Continuation of the Landscape, only man / Would change his distance from that beautiful center.

Yes, he may be an environmentalist and in that sense a progressive. But in Gary Snyder, we have a creator who eschews the banalities and mundanities of partisan politics, while suggesting a sky-blue pastoral reality where les extrmes se touchent, or where those with totally different values might actually find common ground. In addition to his concern for the natural world, Snyder brings to bear, over and over, an ethos of personal responsibility.

You are bound to ask why, in so many of his poems, people consuming huge volumes of booze and tobacco do not appear to be having a good time. In fact, their level of happiness may seem inversely proportionate to their indulgence in those chemicals identified with fun. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that Snyders subjects, whether they dwell in California or in Japan, cannot fail to notice the beauty of the landscapes around them and feel all the more acutely how out of place their moral nature is in the midst of such splendor and grace, like a pile of trash in a field of daisies.

At times, it is the circumstances of their partying that make it impossible to feel good about what they are doing. In the poem April, Snyder describes his experience of lying with a lover on a grassy slope. She happens to be pregnant for the third time. He speaks directly to that lover, having obtained Your husbands blessing on our brief, doomed love. All the wine, sun, and sex do not make the two elopers or others alluded to in the poem happy, but foster a puritanical if largely unarticulated guilt, whose indelible impression comes across in a final image: The sun burns the / Writhing snakebone / Of your back.

In another poem, Makings, Snyder recalls having grown up watching his fathers friends roll cigarettes, a habit that he took on himself, though not in the rosiest of circumstances. His father lived in a big house, but Snyder describes himself as a black sheep of the family, a layabout with dubious ethics who did not come to enjoy the postwar prosperity others did and who lives now in a shack. Rolling cigarettes in your shack, just as your fathers friends did, theres progress and the good life for you.

In Map, Snyder invites the reader to envision a farmhouse in the middle of a lush valley replete with pastures where cows, deer, hawks, crows, wren, and frogs abound, and the residents of the farmhouse are notably less well adjusted that these other dwellers. The stock market is in the doldrums, and it is hard to sell corn. The world around them doesnt care, for they are just visitors supremely unaware of the brevity of their stay. The poem concludes: The woods have time. / The farmer has heirs.

The natural world is everywhere in this oeuvre, and not seldom does the reader sense that we are simply unworthy of it and it does not and should not offer us any esteem. We are not only ecologically clumsy, but fall short of any ideal of virtue in our daily deportment and our treatment of others.

One of Snyders heroes is Alan Watts, whose quintessential work, This Is It, makes a case for recognizing the urgency of the moment and the truth of the trope that life is not some thing that will happen later when all your plans come to fruition, it is here, it is now, for a fleeting moment. This is it. For Alan Watts is a tribute written on the gurus passing in 1973. It would be easy to construe Wattss teachings as a call for hedonism and decadence, but Snyder exhorts people to rise to their personal and social best and thereby fulfill a more mature reading of this ethos.

For all the vividness of his evocations of the Bay Area and the Midwest, it is Kyoto that inspires the most eloquent passages in the thousand pages of this volume. In the Kyoto pieces, in particular, the unity of the poets pleas for ecological and personal rectitude is evident. Snyder does not need epic length to say what he has to say. Some of the poems are as pithy as anything by Dickinson or Frost.

Housecleaning in Kyoto is just eight lines about Snyders decision to throw out a red washrag that he found one day in 1956 while camping with Kerouac, not long before his departure for Asia. The rag has languished in the mans digs in Kyoto and, he tells us, has faded to a grayish-pink hue as a result of his incessant use of it to clean smoky pots. In just a few lines, he says volumes about a way of life and the self-indulgent habits in which he indulges without regard for the wear and rot that they inflict. He has come thousands of miles to a place of splendor and grace, and lived in a manner hardly worthy of his surroundings or of certain standards of discipline and rectitude.

I See Old Friend Dan Ellsberg on TV in a Mountain Village of Japan is an account of watching the Vietnam-era activist stand at a spot amid the rice fields of the Yura valley in Kyoto Prefecture and speak into the camera as owls call out from their nocturnal perches. Snyder likes Ellsbergs message, which is that the world should disarm and Japan should hold onto its postwar neutrality and not get into the great-power conflicts that have come close to ending the world and may still do so. The reader senses, that, for Snyder, the appeal of what Ellsberg has to say here goes a bit further. Snyder wants Japan to retain its cultural idiosyncrasy and maybe even return to the splendor that the encroachments of the West over the years have helped bury.

But Japan today has come a long way from the heyday of Heian Kyo, thanks partly to Western junk culture but also to the choices of the Japanese. The personal failings to which Snyder alludes are not the domain solely of Westerners, he subtly suggests. Rather they may be universal, or at least cross-cultural, traits in the fallen world in which we dwell. Seeing the Ox is a similarly laconic Kyoto poem with a slightly misleading title, for it is the ox, standing outside the Daitoku temple, who does the watching.

Snyder describes a slobbering, sad creature watching kids play near the temple with rolling eye as it lingers above a pile of its own dung. Theyre carrying on like a bunch of dopey Western tourists. The poem raises more questions than it answers, leaving the reader to speculate about the emotional intelligence of a putatively inarticulate creature that may not be reacting well to the frivolity, not to say impudence, of the rambunctious kids outside a monument that once held a sacred place in the culture of Heian Kyo.

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The overview effect is another reason to speed up space exploration – Big Think

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At the recent Space Renaissance Festival held in Berlin, I attended a talk by Michael Waltemathe from the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany on the so-called overview effect, a term coined by author Frank White in his 1987 book of the same name. Science writer Jeffrey Kluger has described this effect as the change that occurs when [astronauts] see the world from above, as a place where borders are invisible, where racial, religious, and economic strife are nowhere to be seen.

That feeling has been experienced by many travelers to space, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or nationality. After spending 20 days in orbit, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Makarov reported, Something about the unexpectedness of this sight, its incompatibility with anything we have ever experienced on Earth elicits a deep emotional response Suddenly, you get a feeling youve never had before That youre an inhabitant of the Earth.

Edgar Mitchell, who walked on the Moon during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971, described it this way:

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the Moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say: Look at that, you son of a bitch.

Not everyone is likely to feel the same way as Makarov or Mitchell. But the overview effect has been experienced by many professional and non-professional space travelers, including the American-Iranian multimillionaire Anousheh Ansari, who described her experience as life-changing. Given the current state of affairs on our planet, we clearly could benefit from more people gaining this perspective.

At the same time, space exploration, especially human space exploration, seems to have slowed down or at least become less ambitious over the past couple of decades. Yes, there are still triumphs like the recent launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. But in the nearly half-century since the Viking mission, there hasnt been a single spacecraft sent to Mars or any other planetary body explicitly devoted to detecting life.

For the cost of the Iraq War, we could already have a station on Mars with 10-12 inhabitants.

New missions to Venus and the outer Solar System are on the drawing board, but all too often these plans get delayed or even cancelled. I was on the preliminary science definition team for a planned mission to Europa about 20 years ago. During our discussions, we concluded that a basketball-sized lander to analyze the Europan ice for remnants of organic compounds and possibly life should be included in the mission. A Europa lander remains stuck in the conceptual stage.

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In the 1980s, plans for a lunar outpost never materialized. Instead, we launched space shuttles and built the International Space Station (ISS). While the ISS did maintain a presence in Earth orbit, it did not fulfill early hopes of propelling us to become a space-faring society (which may only now start to happen due to the initiative of private space companies).

Interest in a human mission to Mars has rekindled after a long hiatus. But even that effort seems stalled. When I attended NASAs First Mars Human Landing Site Workshop in Houston in 2015, the first astronauts were expected to arrive on the Red Planet in the mid-2030s. Current NASA estimates are way less optimistic, although SpaceX still talks about that as a realistic timeline.

Even projects we might consider much more pressing have gotten bogged down. The survival of our species may depend on our ability to detect threatening asteroids, yet progress on this front has been slow. While more asteroids are detectable today than 20 or 30 years ago thanks to programs like the Near Earth Object Observation Program, we are still not doing everything we can to reduce that risk or any other existential risks to our planet. Nor have we prepared for how to react if and when we detect intelligent extraterrestrial life.

Space exploration is certainly expensive, but it has brought us many new inventions used in daily life. LEDs, asphalt roofing shingles, water filters, smoke detectors, and freeze-dry technology are only a few examples. And expensive is a relative term. In a conversation I once had with my colleague and friend, the late Rob Bowman from New Mexico Tech, he mentioned that for the cost of the Iraq War, we could already have a station on Mars with 10-12 inhabitants.

Another colleague, Ed Guinan from Villanova University, used to do a lot of work in the developing countries of Africa. He once told me that students from those countries want to be inspired, to be part of the global community that reaches for the stars. Astronomy programs have now started in many African countries like South Africa, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, and several others. Space always triggers humanitys dreams and aspirations. Personally, I like that about our species. Exploration is in our blood, and it brings out the good in us.

No doubt, there are many other problems on our planet to resolve more every day, it seems. But the overview effect gives us perhaps the most important perspective of all. We are living on a fragile planet with a thin veneer, our atmosphere, as our only lifeline. We need to overcome our petty differences and realize our vulnerabilities. Maybe more of us need to experience, or at least fully appreciate, the overview effect.

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The overview effect is another reason to speed up space exploration - Big Think

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Does Space Exploration Have a Sustainability Problem? BRINK Conversations and Insights on Global Business – BRINK

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STS-115 mission specialists Astronauts Daniel C. Burbank and Steven G. MacLean, representing the Canadian Space Agency, participate in the second of three scheduled space walks on the International Space Station on September 13, 2006. As satellites and other manmade bodies proliferate in space, so does space junk.

Photo: NASA/Getty Images

As space exploration from both the private sector and governments continues to grow, not only does the number of orbiting satellites increase, so too does the amount of space junk, or debris.

Every mission to space leaves a debris signature. For example, small fragments of paint are released as a natural consequence of the separation activities between a launcher and its payload. Some debris incursion is unavoidable, but debris mitigation is fast becoming a priority for regulators that license commercial activity.

We have already witnessed the incursion of pollution in general into the Earths oceans. Now is the time to take steps so that space does not suffer the same fate and remains sustainable.

The proliferation of debris in space, which has virtually doubled in the past 10 years (see Figure 1), is the equivalent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean. The Western Garbage Patch, located near Japan, and the Eastern Garbage Patch, located between Hawaii and California, are vortices of debris bound by the massive North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.

Figure 1: The Number of Objects in All Orbits Has Grown Significantly Between 1960 and 2020

Polluting the sea causes damage to marine life and the marine environment. For humans, this manifests itself in the food chain.

Space is different. Debris, which performs no function, is simply a hazard to another object that is intended to be in space. Orbital paths cross one another, and launching new satellites into space is similar to crossing a three-lane road. There needs to be a gap in each lane to be able to cross safely. If traffic increases significantly, crossing the road becomes difficult.

In simple terms, too much debris would spell the end of access to space.

The International Telecommunications Union describes space exploration as the backbone of modern communication technologies. Behind every phone call, internet search, remote financial transaction, and many other daily activities is space technology.

The presence of space debris may not lead to large hunks of metal falling from the skies. Still, it poses a significant threat to our day-to-day lives. Information from satellites provide our transport systems with global positioning, our banking systems with transaction timing, and our aircraft and shipping sectors with up-to-date and accurate positioning services. We rely significantly on satellites, and most of us engage with 20 to 30 satellites before we finish our morning coffee or send our first work email.

Further commercialization of space will bring even more benefits. There are a host of new applications, including environmental and crop monitoring, more accurate weather forecasting, and the manufacturing in space of industrial and pharmaceutical materials that cannot be manufactured on Earth. These will bring huge benefits to society.

Space agencies regulate the activities of commercial actors that operate from their given state. Recently, we have seen increased focus on finding the best way to promote sustainability by mitigating the risk, managing the way space objects are dealt with, and removing debris.

Ideally, operations should be conducted in a way that the mission produces minimal debris and leaves little, if anything, behind in space. Operators should be encouraged to commit to behaving as good citizens and construct their spacecraft in a way that reduces the debris signature during launch, operation, and at the end of the missions life. The ability for a satellite to be able to maneuver is an important consideration because it means it can avoid a collision. It also means the satellite can be moved to a safe graveyard orbit or deliberately de-orbited at the end of its life.

Keeping as much debris out of space as possible may necessitate coordinating activity to avoid collisions by using tracking and positioning equipment that can determine the precise location of objects. A number of commercial entities are now able to accurately locate the position of objects that are just 1 millimeter in size. This level of accuracy will help operators avoid collisions, which would otherwise increase the amount of debris in space.

The process of active debris removal entails seeking out known hazards, capturing them, and removing them from their orbits so that they no longer pose a hazard to other spacecraft. A live spacecraft connects to a defunct piece of debris and then transports it to a graveyard orbit. This type of mission is more suitable for low earth orbit activity. The debris is dropped off in a very low orbit, which causes it to enter the Earths atmosphere and burn up on re-entry.

Alternatively, debris can be stored in space. In this scenario, the debris is picked up and placed in a safe orbit to make a compact and managed debris cloud. Debris in the cloud may even be held in orbiting trash can-type structures. The debris can then be salvaged and materials recycled for manufacturing new hardware in space. While this may sound farfetched, and there are considerable legal challenges to overcome, it is a very real prospect.

The U.K. Space Agency is one of the global space agencies leading the way in these matters: The U.K.sNational Space Strategysets out a bold vision for the sector, recognizing the need of making space safe and sustainable.

Science Voice: Is space exploration a waste of money? – Herald Review

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IrelandUruguay, Eastern Republic ofUzbekistanVanuatuVenezuela, Bolivarian Republic ofViet Nam, Socialist Republic ofWallis and Futuna IslandsWestern SaharaYemenZambia, Republic ofZimbabwe

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Science Voice: Is space exploration a waste of money? - Herald Review

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Space junk found on Australian farms suspected to be from SpaceX – Mashable

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Three big hunks of space junk have been found in rural Australia, suspected to be detritus from a SpaceX mission launched in 2020. Now it's time for the less exciting part of space exploration: the cleanup.

The unidentified fallen objects were found between July 14 and 25, scattered across the Snowy Mountains region of the state of New South Wales. The latest piece, discovered by sheep farmer Mick Miners, stands nearly 10 feet tall and is firmly embedded in a paddock by one end.

Understandably, Miners was initially baffled by his unexpected find. His neighbour Jock Wallace, who also found some debris, was told by Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority to talk to NASA about it.

"I'm a farmer from Dalgety, what am I going to say to NASA?" Wallace asked Australia's ABC News. Dalgety is a small town by the Snowy River, with a population of 252.

Fortunately, these humble farmers won't have to figure out what to do with the space junk themselves. The Australian Space Agency is working with the U.S. to determine exactly what the chunks of metal are and who they belong to. The piece found by Miners at least appears to have a serial number, which should help.

While the formal identification process is still underway, informally it's believed Australia's surprise installation art comes courtesy of SpaceX specifically its Crew Dragon Resilience.

SpaceX's Crew-1 flight transported four astronauts to the International Space Station in November 2020, successfully conducting the company's first operational crewed mission. The same capsule subsequently returned them to Earth in early May last year, with jettisoned debris from the mission expected to reenter the atmosphere approximately two months later.

As noted by astronomer Jonathan McDowell, Dalgety is near the Dragon's July 8 re-entry path (or July 9 in Australia, as it's across the international dateline from the U.S.). Several Australians reported hearing a sonic boom and seeing a fast-moving object in the sky at the time.

Though this particular piece of plummeting death landed in an empty field, a recent study found there's a one in 10 chance somebody will be killed by falling space debris within the next 10 years. People in the Global South are also at higher risk that is, areas such as Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania, as opposed to Western and European countries. Australia is considered part of the Global North.

SpaceX hasn't yet acknowledged or claimed its alleged space litter. Yet even if CEO Elon Musk continues to pretend he does not see it, he may not necessarily have to pick up after himself.

According to Article 7 of the UN's Outer Space Treaty and the Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects, the country from which a rocket is launched is responsible for any damage it causes. These agreements have been ratified by both Australia and the U.S., meaning that the American government may be left to clean up Musk's suspected mess.

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Space junk found on Australian farms suspected to be from SpaceX - Mashable

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EAA AirVenture 2022 in Oshkosh featured stowaway cat, other takeaways – Oshkosh Northwestern

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OSHKOSH - Hey there, Delilah, what's it like in Oshkosh, kitty?

The Experimental Aircraft Association's annualAirVenture convention and fly-in draws aviation-lovers from all over the world including a new four-legged plane enthusiast who snuck into a camper to make the almost 1,400-mile drive from Saint Albans, Maine, to Oshkosh.

Delilah, who made noise among the AirVenturecrowdon social media by being the #stowawayoshkoshcat, wasn't discovered until her family made their first stop after 15 hours of driving in Toledo, Ohio.

"She's having the time of her life," said one of her owners, Andrea Scholten, who came to AirVenture with her husband, Jason, and kids.

Backin Maine, Andrea said, Delilah normally doesn't venture far from home, especially compared to the Scholtens'other three cats. Delilah is more of a homebody.

That is, Andrea's daughtersAmber and Marissa Scholtentold USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin, besides that one timeshe tried to board the school bus with them. She was less successful that time.

The Scholtens weren't sure how Delilah would do after they finally found her, but they scrambled to get all the feline necessities and said she's enjoyed just watching the planes go by from the beds inside their camper.

Word spread fast of Delilah's attendance, even prompting one pilot to draw a cat in the sky with the white contrails his plane left in its wake.

The biggest question people keep asking, Andrea said, is if they are going to bring her again next year.

"We might have to," she said.

While the stowaway cat added a layer of unexpected joy for the Scholtens and other AirVenture-goers, the week was jam-packed with memorable moments.

At a media briefing Saturday morning, Dick Knapinski, EAA's director of communications,gave a conservative total of more than 2,000 international guests from 83 countries over the span of the week.

As of the end of the day Friday, there were over 15,500 take-offs and landings just on-site in Oshkosh there were over 22,000 when including the site in Fond du Lac.

This year's conventionhad highs and lows over the course of the week and was blanketed by beautiful weather nearly the entire time.

Here's a look back on some of the highlights fromAirVenture 2022.

The week started off with somber news thatTom Poberezny, 75, a longtime EAA president and son of EAA founder Paul Poberezny, died around 2 a.m. Monday after a brief illness.

Poberezny was known as the man who elevated the convention to a "world-level aviation event." His recognizableVolkswagen Beetle, "Red 3," was displayed during the week, alongside other memorabilia from his time with the association.

And while AirVenture is overflowing with planes quite literally becoming the busiest control tower in the worldfor the week the aviation celebration is just as much about the people who fill the grounds.

LikeMargaret Viola, a 2006 Oshkosh West High School graduatewho started selling T-shirts at AirVenture when she was 14 and has gone on to dedicate her career to the aviation industry.

As a high schooler, Viola witnessed the start of WomenVenture 15 years agothat turned into an annualeventthatdraws hundreds of women together each year during AirVenture.

Viola wasn't the only Wisconsin woman who got her start at EAA at a young age before soaring off to a successful flying career.

A northern Wisconsin native,1stOfficer Sheila Baldwin, returned to EAA this year for the first time since she attended 35 years ago as a kid to be part of the flight demonstration. This time, she was flying the Team USA Delta Airbus.

Speaking of young attendees, EAA's Young Eagles celebrated 30 years of taking kids on their first flights. The programintroduces and inspires children between 8 and 17 to consider aviation and is now even seeing some of its earliest fliers coming back after making their own careers in aviation, such asDavid Leiting, who helps coordinate flights after taking his own as an 8-year-old in 2002.

Although hundreds, if not thousands, of airplanes were on the grounds this week, there were conversations during the convention about the pilot shortage driven by work conditions, low wages and disrupted schedules.

There was also thoughtful conversation and questioning of the environmental cost of the beloved hobby.

Greenhouse gas emissions may just be a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of global emissions, but the lead emissions from aviation gasoline accounted for about70% of lead air emissions in the United States, according to a 2021 study.

EAA has a rich history, but this year's convention also carved out time to talk about the future, particularly the future of space exploration.Crew of the Polaris Dawn mission, which plans to put civilians in a low Earth orbit, were on-hand, as well as representativesfrom the Artemis I mission, which plans to land the first woman and first person of color onthe Moon.

This year marked the return of EAA's honor flight. Before Friday, there hadn't been one since 2019 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The flight, which left EAA ground at 5 a.m. Friday, took veterans to Washington, D.C., to visit, among other sites, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.For many of the veterans involved, it was their first time visiting the memorial.

The special day was made possible by Old Glory Honor Flight, a nonprofit based in Appleton that flies veterans to Washington, D.C., as well as hosts special missions to Vietnam and Pearl Harbor, in conjunction with EAA AirVenture and American Airlines.

So whether you came to reminisce with old war planes or marvel at the prospects of space exploration or fuel your child's dream to fly their own plane someday, AirVenture 2022 went off without a hitch and is in position for a smooth landing.

Reach AnnMarie Hilton at ahilton@gannett.com or 920-370-8045. Follow her on Twitter at @hilton_annmarie.

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How Utahns helped launch the James Webb Space Telescope – Utah Governor

Posted: at 2:57 pm

The world recently saw a glimpse of something weve never seen before: the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the early universe ever taken. And it was all thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope.

This is a magnificent achievement, and it wouldnt have been possible without the help of several Utahns all of whom deserve some recognition:

Working with NASA nearly 20 years ago, Materion engineered a special grade of gas-atomized beryllium from a mineral mine at Spor Mountain in Juab County to construct the telescope. Beryllium is one-third lighter than aluminum, extremely stiff, and stable at very low temperatures. This metal helped scientists engineer the telescopes primary, secondary, and tertiary mirror segments that allow us to see deeper into the universe.

If it wasnt for the beryllium mined in Utah, you wouldnt see the images youre seeing today, says Keith Smith, Materions vice president of nuclear and science. Ive worked on this for 25 years everything good is worth waiting for. And, throughout the company, were all just so excited.

Materion also supplied highly-engineered metals that make up the telescopes energy-producing solar panels, new bands for the NIRCam instrument, filters for the Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph, and NIRCam coronographic occulting masks that help block out things that scientists dont need to see.

Through partnerships with federal, state, and local partners, Materion has been able to mine and process beryllium while also reclaiming its land and creating a robust local workforce.

Materion has been excellent for the Delta community and for Utah in general, says Tom Henrie, global operations sustainability manager for Materion. Were really proud of the work being done here.

Were continually impressed by the forward-facing technology Materion engineers and are thankful for the hard-working crews who help provide these materials!

Moxtek also contributed to the James Webb Space Telescopes groundbreaking mirror.

The Orem-based company collaborated with 4D Technology in Arizona to develop a wire-grid pixelated polarizer used to measure the flatness and quality of the telescopes mirrors.

Moxtek became involved with this project over a decade ago when NASA approached 4D Technology to develop an optical tool to measure the flatness of the JWSTs telescope mirrors. 4D Technology successfully developed their approach using Moxteks advanced pixelated polarizer.

Theres so much we dont know about the universe that were going to be learning from this telescope, and we at Moxtek take a lot of pride in our contribution to this project, says Shaun Ogden, senior product manager at Moxtek. Without Moxteks polarizers, measuring the telescope mirrors with the required accuracy wouldnt have been possible.

Moxteks products have been used more than 10 times by NASA and the European Space Agency for space flight. Were thankful for this collaborative effort and look forward to seeing what else Moxtek accomplishes in the future.

Northrop Grumman, the largest aerospace and defense company in Utah, also played a big role in the production of the James Webb Space Telescope.

Northrop Grumman worked with then Magna-based aerospace manufacturer Orbital ATK to build the backplane structure that holds the telescopes mirrors and optical instruments in place.

Northrop Grumman is proud to lead our industry partners in the design, build, and total system integration of the observatory, said Tom Wilson, corporate vice president and president, Space Systems Sector, Northrop Grumman. Were opening a new era of space exploration with [the telescope images], thanks to the groundbreaking engineering and partnership with NASA and the science community.

Northrop Grumman has since acquired Orbital ATK and continues to work with NASA on projects that Utahns and people around the world can be proud of.

NASAs James Webb Space Telescope, created out of a partnership with the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, launched Dec. 25, 2021, from Europes Spaceport in French Guiana, South America.

After completing a complex deployment sequence in space, the telescope underwent months of commissioning where its mirrors were aligned, and its instruments were calibrated to its space environment and prepared for science. All this led to the jaw-dropping images released on July 12, 2022.

Congratulations to everyone who has put so much effort into this. This administration joins the world in celebrating the science that brought us this incredible imagery.

Thank you all, and keep up the good work!

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Daily Archives: August 2, 2022

HBO’s Industry is the Missing Link between Euphoria and Succession – Vanity Fair

Magixxs Atom EP, alludes his love and care free attitude, he is only getting started – More Branches

Queer Hedonism is Alive in the North | Now Then Sheffield – Now Then Magazine

Gary Snyder Joins the Greats – Book and Film Globe

The overview effect is another reason to speed up space exploration – Big Think

Does Space Exploration Have a Sustainability Problem? BRINK Conversations and Insights on Global Business – BRINK

Science Voice: Is space exploration a waste of money? – Herald Review

Space junk found on Australian farms suspected to be from SpaceX – Mashable

EAA AirVenture 2022 in Oshkosh featured stowaway cat, other takeaways – Oshkosh Northwestern

How Utahns helped launch the James Webb Space Telescope – Utah Governor

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