My meager education in biology and evolution gave me the mistaken impression that evolution optimized everything. But it didn't. One example is the recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN). It goes from behind your ear, loops down below your aorta, and then back up to the voice-box 1/2

imagine drunk driving this thing

Fun fact, if you run counter to the cylinder's spin you will break free of the artificial gravity and careen off into the void.

When they're mean to Mercury on Twitter

In a tragic way the cancellation of Phantom Express was where the dream of a vertical take off horizontal landing booster that started with a winged S1-C stage adapted from the Saturn V finally died not with a bang, but a whimper.

How come his cuts worked, but DOGE was a clusterfuck?

Companies should really stop using AI image for their technical drawings. People that cared to pay attention to your ads are most likely know enough about your stuff that such thing won't fool them. It also makes you look really bad. It's not even that hard to do a CAD render.

very funny to me that for Phantom Express, Boeing was like "yeah lets just take Rockwell's X-33 and stick a little chud rocket on its back"

Was feeling sad earlier about how I don’t feel as carefree posting on twitter as I used to and it occurred to me that this video is a perfect encapsulation of the experience of audience capture. The Pet Lizard comes for us all.

really obsessed with stacking parentheses after my student showed me this the other day

Mercedes Benz GRA 500 (1987)

He said aight since yall wanna act cute 👀

Alright. Michael Grace from @LongshotSpace reached out to me and we had a really interesting conversation. Yes, they're retracing paths laid down by Gerald Bull (and HARP, and the German V3 Wunderwaffen). Yes, the gun will "only" get the projectile started (at 5 km/s!) and will need a second-stage solid rocket to reach orbit. Yes, it's going to be INSANELY loud (as in, deadly to anyone within kilometers of the muzzle exit). But the unit economics are compelling for incompressible or G-hardened payloads. And even if they can't get orbital launch working, there's a billion-dollar side gig in firing hypersonic test articles for the military. Verdict: they're crazy. But in a good way. We need more crazy entrepreneurs like this.

Our clinical trial participants have now used their Neuralink implants for over 50,000 hours, building one of the largest datasets of intracortical neural activity ever. We used it to pretrain a foundation model for BCI: self-supervised neural encoders that turn noisy, drifting spikes into stable representations. Some initial results: • Decoders that keep working for weeks instead of days. For some users, calibration dropped from 10 min/day to 10 min/week • Teleporting cursors that jump straight to the intended target • A new cursor-control record of 11.32 bits per second (exceeding the performance of most able-bodied people) We’re just getting started. Future directions include pooling data across participants, one-shot (or zero-shot) calibration, and an API for the motor cortex. Read more: neuralink.com/updates/pretra…

In the long run, very fast docking will be essential for getting cost of seats to orbit down to the point that regular people can afford it. With a 3 to 8 hour flight (to a huge station), you could fit over 500 people per Starship launch.