A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
NASA Ames Research Center Archives
Founded in 1939, NASA’s outpost in the heart of Silicon Valley was first set up as a West Coast lab for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, a forerunner of NASA.
As WWII was brewing in Europe, the US realized it was far behind Germany in aeronautical research and development. NACA’s Langley, VA campus was maxed out, and a lot of the aviation industry was on the West Coast, so the decision was made to build a California lab, with the site selected by a committee chaired by Charles Lindbergh.
Named in honor of NACA founding member Joseph Sweetman Ames, the lab at Moffett Field, CA, slowly grew from a single shack on the airfield to a sprawling compound with over 2,300 employees over nearly 80 years.
The Daily Life of a Medieval King
Around the year 1404, Christine de Pizan completed her work, Livre des faits et bonnes mœurs du sage roy Charles V. It was both a biography of the French king who reigned from 1364 to 1380 and a guide to how an ideal monarch should live and rule.
Christine had a good vantage point to tell this story. Her father, Tommaso di Pizano, was a personal physician and astrologer at Charles’s court, so one can assume she was sometimes present at court herself. Moreover, in later years she was able to consult other men and women who had served the king, including his chamberlain and valet. Their insights, combined with her observations, offered Christine a unique view into the habits and routines of the monarch.
Is the US Media Captured?
Other scholars of media capture have since examined the phenomenon in different parts of the world—Mexico, Kenya, Hungary—highlighting government strategies ranging from manipulation of advertising to economic and regulatory pressure to the exploitation of informal relationships with media owners. In Turkey, many media outlets are part of large industrial conglomerates with diverse interests. Owners of these conglomerates see their media holdings as a kind of tax, journalists told me when I visited. Turkish business tycoons operate news organizations at a loss, knowing that publishing positive stories about Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan is the price to secure lucrative government contracts for their other businesses.
Anthropic Revokes OpenAI's Access to Claude
OpenAI was plugging Claude into its own internal tools using special developer access (APIs), instead of using the regular chat interface, according to sources. This allowed the company to run tests to evaluate Claude’s capabilities in things like coding and creative writing against its own AI models, and check how Claude responded to safety-related prompts involving categories like CSAM, self-harm, and defamation, the sources say. The results help OpenAI compare its own models’ behavior under similar conditions and make adjustments as needed.
China Sets Up State-Owned Fusion Energy Company Amidst Push for Inexhaustible Clean Power
China has set up a state-owned fusion energy company in its latest drive to commercialize fusion power, aiming to harness an almost inexhaustible source of clean energy.
China Fusion Energy Co. Ltd (CFEC), a subsidiary of the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), was unveiled in Shanghai this week with a registered capital of 15 billion yuan (about 2.1 billion U.S. dollars).
The newly-founded firm, positioned as an innovation driver for advancing China's fusion engineering and commercialization, is tasked with developing platforms for technological research and capital operations, the CFEC said.
AIR Lands $23M to Bring Its eVTOLs to the US
AIR, an Israel-based startup developing eVTOLs, thought it prudent to adopt a similar approach from the get-go, designing both its uncrewed and piloted aircraft with the same airframe and core systems so it could develop for both use cases at once.
The company currently offers a piloted eVTOL craft, dubbed AIR ONE, for personal use, and an uncrewed eVTOL designed for cargo transport, contested logistics, and defense applications. Since its first cargo eVTOL delivery in late 2023, the company has secured over 2,500 preorders for its piloted personal aircraft, AIR ONE, and plans to ship 15 cargo eVTOLs this year.
