A binary star system passed within one light year of our solar system only 70,000 years ago. It may have jostled a bunch of comets out of their orbits at the time.

A binary star system passed within one light year of our solar system only 70,000 years ago. It may have jostled a bunch of comets out of their orbits at the time.

Did a close pass by an alien star system millennia ago rain down comets on the solar system?

Comments on Facebook:

Brion Vibber: The Red Star…!
Mar 22, 2018, 12:52 PM

Kelson Vibber: Yeah, I was thinking that too! Sadly, the red dwarf system would have still been too faint to see without a telescope even at its closest approach.
Mar 22, 2018, 4:53 PM

Kelson Vibber: Wish I had time to re-read some of the Dragon Riders books, though.
Mar 22, 2018, 4:54 PM

Jim Vibber: Well, strictly speaking, the “Red Star” in McCaffrey’s series was a red planet, kind of like Mars — with an eccentric orbit harmonically linked to the orbit of Pern — so it LOOKED like a star in the sky, just like Mars does. The one time they tried to travel “between” to that planet, the description sounded more volcanic or like Venus than anything else — winds, heat, acidic atmosphere… kind of an odd source for spores of a fungus-type life form (but I trust her to have done lots of research to justify it). Humans without telescopes have very limited perceptions of just how far away those “lights in the sky” really are.
Mar 22, 2018, 5:05 PM

New photo set: Madrona Marsh in March

I went for a hike at the nearby marsh this afternoon. The rain over the last few weeks has finally flooded some of the seasonal pools, and birds are making their homes (or migratory pit stops) here. I spotted several types of ducks, geese, some red-winged black birds that sound like a smoke detector battery alert, and what I think is a snowy egret.

21 photos of birds, plants and ponds here:

Madrona Marsh in March

On Facebook

I shared a link to an article on Medium about social networks. It didn’t show up at all on FB mobile…

Ok, this is messed up. I shared a link to an article on Medium about social networks. It didn’t show up at all on FB mobile, even when I looked directly at my profile. I thought maybe it’s hiding posts from Buffer. So I re-posted it, directly in the Facebook desktop site.

It’s still not here.

It shows on the desktop site, but not the mobile site. I’d bet it doesn’t show up in the app.

And we know a lot of social networking is done on mobile these days.

On Facebook

Update in comments:

Thanks for checking – so it looks like it’s just the mobile website, not the mobile app. Which is better than it could be…but still bizarre (and suspicious).

We rely on Twitter and Facebook for communication, but their incentive isn’t to help us communicate

We rely on Twitter and Facebook for communication, but their incentive isn’t to help us communicate – it’s to keep us active on the platform…and negative interactions are *more* effective than positive interactions for that.

Twitter is not a public utility – Mastodon Blog – Medium

Isn’t it a bit strange that the entire world has to wait on the CEO of Twitter to come around on what constitutes healthy discourse? I am…

On Facebook

See-through skyscraper?

See-through skyscraper?

See-through skyscraper?

#building #reflection #sky

On Facebook
On Photog.Social

Comments on Facebook:

Don Anthony
Is that close to LAX? It’s the best place for invisible buildings.

Kelson Vibber
Yeah, right on Century. Tall buildings on one side of the street, short on the other.

Facebook is pushing its data-tracking Onavo VPN within its main mobile app

Facebook is plugging a VPN app they own. It lets you hide your non-FB activity from your ISP and let Facebook collect that data instead.

Facebook is pushing its data-tracking Onavo VPN within its main mobile app

Onavo Protect, the VPN client from the data-security app maker acquired by Facebook back in 2013, has now popped up in the Facebook iOS app itself, under the..

Lunar eclipse next week. Most of North America & Asia, and all of the Pacific …

Lunar eclipse next week. Most of North America & Asia, and all of the Pacific will be able to see it, though you might need to get up in the middle of the night. Maps & time conversion at the link.

https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/lunar/2018-january-31

It also happens to be a supermoon (when the full moon coincides with the moon being at the closest point in its orbit, making it look bigger) and a blue moon (second full moon in a calendar month).

On Mastodon.social
On Facebook

Lost Kirby/Kane ‘Prisoner’ comic coming from Titan Comics

Whoa! An unpublished comic book of “The Prisoner” by JACK KIRBY not only exists, but is finally being published!

Lost Kirby/Kane ‘Prisoner’ comic coming from Titan Comics

An unpublished Prisoner comic by Jack Kirby, Gil Kane and Steve Englehart accompanies a new comic series by Peter Milligan and Colin Lorimer.

On Mastodon.social
On Facebook

Scaling the solar system

You may think it’s a long walk down to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts compared to the solar system.

Scaling the solar system

Every now and again, in interviews and on social media, I’m asked an interesting question: If there was one thing you wish people understood better about astronomy, what would it be? My answer is simple: Scale. Things in space are very, very, very far away. The closest natural object to us, the Moon…

On Facebook

Interesting story about the history of the Los Angeles River (and paving it).

Interesting story about the history of the Los Angeles River (and paving it).

Paving the Los Angeles River wasn’t an egalitarian idea. The plan for revitalizing it should be

As we remake the Los Angeles River once again, we ought to allow the river to re-make us, too — into a more equitable city.

On Facebook

California Legislators Introduce Bill to Block Trump’s Offshore Drilling Push

“The leases would be offered in federal waters, which begin three miles offshore and extend to 200 miles offshore. But oil companies must bring that oil onshore to refine and sell it. That’s where they run into state and local jurisdictions.”

California Legislators Introduce Bill to Block Trump’s Offshore Drilling Push

There’s a lot state and local governments could do to stand in the way of offshore drilling in federal waters.

On Facebook

Meltdown and Spectre

TL;DR: 2 vulnerabilities in CPU performance optimization that allow locally-running programs to access either system memory or other applications’ memory. One affects all Intel processors, the other affects all Intel, AMD and ARM – so basically everything from your phone to the cloud server you connect to.

Patches are rolling out for some attack vectors, basically having software do the security checks the hardware is supposed to. But it’s both a performance hit and whack-a-mole.

Meltdown and Spectre

Meltdown and Spectre exploit critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. These hardware bugs allow programs to steal data which is currently processed on the computer. While programs are typically not permitted to read data from other programs, a malicious program can exploit Meltdown and Spectre…

On Facebook

The main target is a technique called speculative execution, where the CPU uses idle resources to predict the most likely followup instruction and do it ahead of time. If the next instruction comes in and it was right, great, it’s already done! If not, no big deal, it wasn’t doing anything else at the time, so it just rolls back the actions and moves on to what it’s been asked to do.

But it turns out that it doesn’t always roll back completely, and under the right circumstances it can leave traces in memory that another program can read.

More fun: As Brion points out, JavaScript can be used for timing attacks *in the browser*, so vendors are disabling high-precision timing and shared buffers in javascript.