Monthly Archives: June 2021

Travel

New network of European sleeper trains planned | Rail travel | The Guardian

Kim Willsher, Tue 22 Jun 2021 08.14 EDT

Midnight Trains’ proposed route map. The company will aim to compete with short-haul flights.

Less than a decade after Europe’s night trains appeared to have reached the end of the line, a new French start-up has announced plans for a network of overnight services out of Paris from 2024.

Midnight Trains is hoping post-Covid interest in cleaner, greener travel will generate interest in its proposed “hotels on rails”, which aims to connect the French capital to 12 other European destinations, including Edinburgh.

The founders say the aim is not to match the famous – and expensive – luxury of the Orient Express but offer an alternative to the basic, state-run SNCF sleepers and short-haul flights. Key to the service will be “hotel-style” rooms offering privacy and security, and an onboard restaurant and bar.

Source: New network of European sleeper trains planned | Rail travel | The Guardian

Memories & History, Science & Health, Web & Technology

How paper punch cards enabled the rise of computing, and shaped humanity | SLATE

An 80-by-10 grid punched into a paper card helped drive us out of the Industrial Age and into the Data Age.

By Caleb Scharf, June 23, 202112:53 PM

From The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, Machines, and Life’s Unending Algorithm by Caleb Scharf published on June 15, 2021 by Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 Caleb Scharf.

Conducting aeronautical research with an IBM 704 in 1957. NASA

In 1889, a mechanical engineer named Herman Hollerith persuaded the United States government to use machine‑readable paper punch cards and electric counting machines to conduct the national Census, saving the U.S. Treasury about $5 million in the costs of handling data for 62 million people.

By 1891 Hollerith was designing machines to be used in censuses in Canada, Norway, and Austria, as well as by railroads to tabulate fare information.

As a result, Hollerith’s fledgling company quickly became part of the growing data landscape, and eventually, in 1924, it became the International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM.

Source: How paper punch cards enabled the rise of computing, and shaped humanity.

Science & Health, Web & Technology

NASA’s Webb Telescope will use quasars to unlock the secrets of the early universe

From Phys.Org, by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

This is an artist’s concept of a galaxy with a brilliant quasar at its center. A quasar is a very bright, distant and active supermassive black hole that is millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. Among the brightest objects in the universe, a quasar’s light outshines that of all the stars in its host galaxy combined. Quasars feed on infalling matter and unleash torrents of winds and radiation, shaping the galaxies in which they reside. Using the unique capabilities of Webb, scientists will study six of the most distant and luminous quasars in the universe. Credit: NASA, ESA and J. Olmsted (STScI)

Quasars are very bright, distant and active supermassive black holes that are millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun.

Typically located at the centers of galaxies, they feed on infalling matter and unleash fantastic torrents of radiation.

Among the brightest objects in the universe, a quasar’s light outshines that of all the stars in its host galaxy combined, and its jets and winds shape the galaxy in which it resides. Shortly after its launch later this year, a team of scientists will train NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope on six of the most distant and luminous quasars.

They will study the properties of these quasars and their host galaxies, and how they were interconnected during the first stages of galaxy evolution in the very early universe. The team will also use the quasars to examine the gas in the space between galaxies, particularly during the period of cosmic reionization, which ended when the universe was very young. They will accomplish this using Webb’s extreme sensitivity to low levels of light and its superb angular resolution.

Source: NASA’s Webb Telescope will use quasars to unlock the secrets of the early universe

Science & Health

The Pandemic Led To The Biggest Drop In U.S. Life Expectancy Since WWII, Study Finds : Coronavirus Updates : NPR

June 23, 20216:32 PM ET Heard on Morning Edition, By Allison Aubrey Twitter

A COVID-19 vaccination clinic last month in Auburn, Maine. A drop in life expectancy in the U.S. stems largely from the coronavirus pandemic, a new study says.
Robert F. Bukaty/AP

A new study estimates that life expectancy in the U.S. decreased by nearly two years between 2018 and 2020, largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

And the declines were most pronounced among minority groups, including Black and Hispanic people. In 2018, average life expectancy in the U.S. was about 79 years (78.7). It declined to about 77 years (76.9) by the end of 2020, according to a new study published in the British Medical Journal.

“We have not seen a decrease like this since World War II. It’s a horrific decrease in life expectancy,” said Steven Woolf of the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine and an author of the study released on Wednesday.

(The study is based on data from the National Center for Health Statistics and includes simulated estimates for 2020.)

Source: The Pandemic Led To The Biggest Drop In U.S. Life Expectancy Since WWII, Study Finds : Coronavirus Updates : NPR

Current Affairs, Film & Movies, Television, Times They Are A-Changing

Even as shows like ‘Mare of Easttown’ create buzz, the idea of the broader TV hit is going away – The Washington Post

Astute observers of television say the idea of a unifying show on even a modest scale is gone. In its wake are a hundred Twitter niches — and a dangerous lack of common culture.

By Steven Zeitchik, June 22, 2021 at 5:00 a.m. PDT

(Emma Kumer/Washington Post illustration)

On one level, “Mare of Easttown” was a smashing success.

The Pennsylvania-set crime series starring Kate Winslet inspired numerous memes, truckloads of media coverage and even a “Saturday Night Live” parody after it debuted on HBO in April.

More importantly, thanks to its head-fake mysteries and town with more secrets than beer bottles, the show quadrupled its audience between its premiere and its finale. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that its audience began modestly enough that even with all that growth, the finale was watched by only 4 million people over Memorial Day weekend. For all its buzzy enthusiasm and hardcore fan interest, the “Mare” finale was not seen that weekend by nearly 99 percent of Americans.

The television hit — the most abiding of entertainment traditions — appears to be dying. That isn’t to say shows don’t have fans; they do, and some of them are more passionate than ever. But according to its long-standing definition — a universally recognized show that gathers a large, verifiable audience and becomes unavoidable in all the places people talk about television and endures well beyond its run — the TV hit is vanishing.

From article…

Source: Even as shows like ‘Mare of Easttown’ create buzz, the idea of the broader TV hit is going away – The Washington Post

Current Affairs, Film & Movies, Memories & History, Politics, Times They Are A-Changing

“I Hope the Mindset Has Changed”: John Podesta Is Thrilled That Congress Finally Cares About UFOs | Vanity Fair

By Abigail Tracy, June 22, 2021

From The Washington Post/Getty Images. 

“I saw more eagles than UFOs,” John Podesta joked.

The former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and veteran of the Obama White House had just returned from a trip to Alaska and, speaking with me from California last Friday, shared his thoughts on the highly anticipated government report on unidentified flying objects, set to be released later this week.

Over the past few decades, Podesta has emerged as one of the most prominent public figures goading the Pentagon to disclose information on UFOs—or, in official channel parlance, “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP). In his view the report’s expected release marks a sea change in not only public sentiment, but political posturing around the issue.

“There’s always been tremendous public interest in this, but it was kind of pushed to the fringe. People were viewed as a little bit goofy if they wanted to raise the topic,” he explained. “Now I think that’s changed.”

Source: “I Hope the Mindset Has Changed”: John Podesta Is Thrilled That Congress Finally Cares About UFOs | Vanity Fair