A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
How Do You Put on an Apollo Spacesuit?
First, let’s talk about terminology. When we talk about putting on or taking off a spacesuit, we frequently use the terms “donning and doffing.” These are technical terms that are used to refer to the practice of putting on (donning) and taking off (doffing) protective gear, clothing, and uniforms.
Time: Yes, It’s a Dimension, but No, It’s Not Like Space
However, our Universe doesn’t simply possess the three familiar dimensions of space, but rather four spacetime dimensions. It’s easy to look at that and say, “Oh, well, three of them are space and one of them is time, and that’s where we get spacetime,” and that’s true, but not the full story. After all, the shortest distance between two spacetime events isn’t a straight line at all, and moreover, time is a fundamentally different type of dimension than space. Here’s how it actually works.
Menopause Is a Pretty Damn Fine Stage of Life
This is why women like me sometimes call our female pals “girls.” It’s not because we want to hide our seniority. It’s because, despite enduring all the natural shocks that flesh is heir to, we feel young again.
And it isn’t only humans who enjoy this freedom. This sweet post-menopausal phase amounts to up to 40 percent of a female orca’s adult life and 20 percent of a female chimpanzee’s. Chimps were added to the list of mammals that go through menopause only in 2023, the same year a persuasive study was published arguing that the reason wild animals are rarely observed post menopause is that they generally do not live long enough. That other mammals go through the same life phases as we do proves that menopause is completely natural. It is not an illness to be cured any more than puberty is.
Age of Empires II at 25: The Strategy Game That Inspired a Generation of Historians
The game came out in 1999, when I was five years old, and I am not exaggerating when I say that it was a permanent feature of our domestic life right up to when I moved out thirteen years later. The only thing that changed were the laptops he played on, which became progressively less bulky over the years. The sound effects, from the iconic “wololo” of the priests and the villagers’ warbles of acknowledgment as you sent them to chop wood, were the soundtrack to my childhood.
Safer Psychedelic Drugs May Be Coming
Psychedelics have shown great promise in treating a range of mental-health conditions, from PTSD to depression—but they’re not without significant downsides. People who take psychedelics can experience bad trips and unpleasant or dangerous side effects, and the drugs can be time-intensive and arduous to administer.
These drugs are “very effective, but they’re scary and they’re chaotic and they’re unpredictable,” says Dillan DiNardo, CEO of psychedelic drug development company Mindstate Design Labs.
Invisible Text That AI Chatbots Understand and Humans Can’t
What if there was a way to sneak malicious instructions into Claude, Copilot, or other top-name AI chatbots and get confidential data out of them by using characters large language models can recognize and their human users can’t? As it turns out, there was—and in some cases still is.
The invisible characters, the result of a quirk in the Unicode text encoding standard, create an ideal covert channel that can make it easier for attackers to conceal malicious payloads fed into an LLM.
Why the US Military Has to Hitch a Ride on Commercial Ships
America’s combat forces need a lift.
Every two weeks since late last year, officers here convene a classified intelligence briefing about fighting in the Red Sea. The attendees aren’t politicians, policymakers or spies. They are private shipping executives.
The meetings are part of a push by the Pentagon’s Transportation Command, or Transcom, to integrate shipping lines as crisis supply lines.
The policy stems from a dire need in an unloved but vital corner of America’s military behemoth. A House select committee in February called Transcom’s sea-cargo capacity “woefully inadequate.”