Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• Mercury has a tail. Whodathunkit? With all that solar wind blasting over it, the poor planet's already thin atmosphere is constantly being driven outward, forming a tail over 24 million kilometers long. That makes ol' Merc the biggest comet in the Solar System. You can't see it visually; if you're used to astrophotography, shoot through a sodium filter to make the tail more visible. Some good shots at the link; check it out.
• NASA's OSIRIS-REx probe has left asteroid Bennu and is headed for home as fast as limited fuel and orbital mechanics allow. It's got 300 grams of asteroid dirt to drop, after which it will head into a parking orbit. NASA is considering another mission for the probe. Nothing crisp yet, but there's still some life in the device, so why waste it?
• Having listened carefully to 60 million stars in toward the galactic center, the Breakthrough Listen project has found no sign of alien intelligence. We may be the one impossibly unlikely fluke that solved the Drake Equation.
• Relevant to the above: Our dwarfy next-door neighbor Proxima Centauri spit out a flare a couple of years ago that was 100 times more powerful than anything we've ever seen out of our Sun. If too many dwarf stars are in this habit, it could bode ill for the chances of life elsewhere in our galaxy, where we have red dwarf stars like some people have mice.
• I stumbled across a British news/opinion site whose USP is going against the grain of conventional wisdom. Given the current drain-spiral of American media, it can be useful to have a few overseas news sites on your bookmarks bar. This one is definitely contrarian. It's also sane and not prone to the often-comical frothing fury we see in news outlets here.
• Tis the season to be stumbling, in fact: I stumbled upon Reversopedia, which is a compendium of things that we don't know or can't prove. The entries are odd lots for very large values of "odd." E.g: "Why is space 3-dimensional? And is it?" I love that sort of thing because it makes me think about matters that could easily become the central gimmicks of SF stories.
• Bari Weiss posted a solid article on Substack saying what a lot of people are thinking but afraid to say out loud: That vaccinated people don't need masks, especially outside. Social pressure against mask skeptics is intense. Masks have become a culture-war thing, which is both absurd and dangerous: Antivaxxers are asking what is actually a sensible question: If the vaccines are real and not just saline solution, why do we have to keep wearing masks?
• Substack (see above item) is an interesting concept, rather like a blog site that you can get paid for. A lot of articles can be read for free, and subscription fees for many writers are $5/month. It's not a gumball machine for articles, but rather a gumball machine for writers. A lot of writers who would be anathema in big national vehicles can write there, gather a following, and make a living.
• Is sleeping with your TV on ok? Short answer: No. (And I'm wondering how old the stock photo in the article is, given that it shows a glass-screen TV.)
• IBM has just created a proof-of-concept chip with a 2NM process. IBM's published density numbers for this node are 333M transistors per square millimeter, whew! They say 2NM will improve performance by 45% at the same power.
• I haven't said much about my book project Odd Lots lately. It was a classic "odd moments" project accomplished in moments scattered across the last year or two. I just got the first proof copy back from Amazon and will be cleaning it up as time allows. Most of what's wrong are OCR errors of old writings for which I no longer have disk files and had to scan out of magazines. I expect to post it on Amazon before the end of May.