And to add to what the others have said, the 'tails' are caused by pixel bleed on the sensor. See https://sohowww.nascom.nasa.go... and
https://sohowww.nascom.nasa.go...

Most solar imagers (telescopes & coronographs) have similar problems. The imagers on STEREO are oriented differently, and so the pixel bleed is vertical, not horizontal : https://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/a...

SDO/AIA takes every other image in "Automatic Exposure Correction" mode, but it doesn't fully fix the problems. There's a bit of an internal reflection that occurs diagonally. I don't know of any specific explanation of it, but it's pretty obvious in any of the AIA flare images : https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/asse...

NOAA doesn't have this problem with GOES-13/SXI, because it's so much worse. Rather than summing up a lot of exposures to reduce the noise, they decided to take a long exposure just as a flaring region rotated into view, damaging the telescope permanently. ( https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/sxi/... ; see Dec 2006)

(I used to work for the Solar Data Analysis Center, and used to deal with all of the "NASA is covering up evidence of UFOs" emails for STEREO)

A *lot* of comets were discovered by SOHO: https://sungrazer.nrl.navy.mil...

(I don't know if they're still taking submissions. NRL's budget was cut during the SOHO "bogart" mission: https://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/... )

(disclaimer: I used to work the Solar Data Analysis Center, the mission archive for SOHO)

"A space-based solar power station could orbit to face the Sun 24 hours a day"

Well, yeah, you could ... but that'd be a problem. Because you'd need a ground station to send the power down to for distribution.

The only current satellite that does anything like this is SDO, the Solar Dynamics Observatory. It's in an inclined geosynchronous orbit, so it's out of the sun-earth line to stay in sunlight ... most of the time. But it still has 'eclipse seasons' twice a year when it can't see the sun: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/g... . So it's not quite right for "baseline" power, as it can't be continuous.

SDO also has two ground stations, in case of bad weather over one of them, it can switch to the other one ... which isn't so big of a deal for antennas, but might be if you're pushing out high power.

Operation Warp Speed seemed to mostly be about manufacturing of the dosages (at least as it was covered in the press), but little was mentioned about distribution. Looking at HHS's fact sheet ( https://www.hhs.gov/coronaviru... ) they do have plans for vial manufacturing and pre-filled syringes, but I see nothing about the logistics for distribution past that.

A little digging says the Pfizer vaccine requires -94ÂF storage ( https://www.msn.com/en-us/heal... ). I'm not in the medical / pharmaceutical industry, so I don't know if there's already a cold chain for this sort of temperature, or if they're going to need to work on getting ultra-cold storage throughout the country so it can be distributed. Would it be electrical powered freezers, or would they need regular supplies of coolants (like liquid nitrogen)?

Now, I would assume that you don't actually inject it at -94ÂF into people, so there's going to be a certain period of time that it need to warm up and would have to be at some warmer temperature. But without cold storage at each drug store or wherever, we're going to have to have some strange logistics issues in which you plan for it to thaw in transit, and then have people lined up waiting for the injection when you think it's going to be at the right temperature to inject.

This could also make for some strange issues if it means that we can get it to places like urban hospitals, but can't easily ship it to small rural places, so there's suddenly a difference in vaccination distribution that correlates to how states voted in the election.

It's possible that Biden would be willing to use the Defense Production Act to get the necessary distribution infrastructure built. Some people might argue that this isn't related to defense, but there are concerns that Covid might have long-term effects on people, so it can be argued that this is related to military preparedness by making sure they have a pool of untainted people to recruit from.

After the whistlebower reports on the mumps vaccine, I had to go and look up to make sure that this wasn't the same company involved. But that one was Merck, so maybe.

Now we just have to see how quickly they can mass produce it, if they have the necessary supplies to package it for shipping (there were reports of a possible glass shortage), what it's going to take to distribute it (how cold does it have to be?), and how many needles they'll go through in the process ... or if doctors have to get one of those needleless jet injector things.

And how the priority is for people to get vaccinated. I would assume EMTs, hospital & nursing home workers ... maybe not nursing home patients depending on the possible side effects ... grocery and drug store workers, teachers, other first responders ... maybe people in meat processing & other places that had bad outbreaks ... etc.

(I'm not anti-vaccine ... but I actually had mumps, even though I had been vaccinated against it ... and got it from my twin brother. Our doctor claimed there was a known bad batch the month we were born, but it looks like the problems were much bigger than that)

Yeah, that was a bit ... strange.

It does allow you to save ad-hoc queries into the data, and maybe that's the "manage" they're talking about. I'd say it's more "monitor", though.

But that's ability to save queries was one of my big complaints about Kibana. Maybe they've changed it, but when I set it up many years ago, it used the same ES database to save the configuration stuff as the data it was searching against, so you couldn't lock down the database as read-only. (This was pre-ES 5.0, so ES security seemed to be pretty non-existent anyway)

It was almost (but not quite) as stupid as some software I once I had to manage where the program's config file was stored in the same directory that it used for logging, so you had to leave the directory with write permissions. ("but the file doesn't have write permissions, so it's secure" they claimed ... no, not if you can delete the file and replace it).

(That same group had another situation where it used the directory a script was in for the script's temp space, so I guess a config file isn't really that big of a deal)

Or maybe I should blame Calvin's dad for this knowledge

https://www.gocomics.com/calvi...

I've had users for years complaining about having to click hundreds of links to download. (a search engine for physics data).

As I wanted to actually have a reliable method of 'click one button to download lots of links', I had played around with how to get around some of the limits in javascript. (things like waiting a half second between triggering each download, etc.).

Anyone know of any tools that work well for when it's an actual intentional download, and not just a driveby? I remember I tried playing with metalink a while back, but when Firefox changed their plugin platform, all of the download managers broke.

(I admit, it's been low priority, as we have other non-web interfaces, but it'd be nice to finally close out this ticket)

Use your cell phone camera to take pictures under your couch, so you know if you need to actually get your face down there to extract whatever's under there.

(I'd credit whoever it was that showed me the trick, but I can't remember. I suspect it was my former co-worker Amy, who would use a camera to get the serial numbers off of servers so she didn't have to contort into strange positions when we had a tiny server room)

20cm is still better than what I'm dealing with now. I'd love to be able to shove my phone into my hamper and wiggle it around a bit to see if it beeped, so I knew if had to start pulling everything out and going through the pockets.

Or wave it over piles of paperwork on my desk that I might've buried it under.

Or wave it along the couch, before I pull out all of the cushions to see if it's ended up with the loose change.

So yeah, I could work with 20cm range. Even 10cm is still useful still useful vs. the alternative of looking for a badge the old way. (I've put a flourescent sticker on the back of the white badge holder after that time when I didn't see it because it was face down on a pile of papers, but that doesn't help when it was left in a shirt pocket because I went to my step-father's birthday party straight after work on the Friday before a 3 day weekend)

As they have NFC chips in the phones for Apple Pay, I'd love to see them be able to tell me when I'm near things with passive NFC chips, even if it's something where I have to 'register' it first.

So then, when I can't find my ID badge in the morning, I can just walk around my house and have my phone tell me when I'm close, rather than the walk of shame and going into the security office for a one-day badge.

I admit, it's possible that the HSPD12 badges operate at a frequency that the Apple Pay chips don't operate at, but I'm guessing that there's a relatively small range of frequencies used by various contactless cards / keyfobs / etc.

Does the law protect them from that aspect?

It's one thing to say 'hey, we just host the content, we don't review it' like what ISPs did back when the DMCA passed (I assume they're trying to use the 'safe harbor' provisions in there, which are really only about copyright), but now we have YouTube and Facebook trying to make things 'sticky' and suggesting things to people to keep them on their platform longer.

I know that it's the internet, so everyone has strong opinions, but it seemed to me that the "Loved" vs. "Dreaded" numbers added up to near 100% on all of the spot-checks that I did.

I admit that we might dread having to work in languages we don't know, but really, I'm indifferent to all of those that I don't actually know anything about. So I dread ever working in VBA again, but for a solid chunk of the list, I have no opinion. I'm not even sure if I dread python, even though I really hate the whole whitespace is significant crap.

And it'd be interesting to see a breakdown of 'professional' answers only -- you could get that for "Employment Status", but it'd be interesting to see how much the loved/dreaded list changed if you looked at professionals vs. not. (or was that just deleting students and re-scaling, vs. people who had some other job but wrote some code on the side, or where it wasn't the main part of their job?)

There were stories that warehouse workers at Amazon had more like an hour wait to get searched as they were leaving their shifts over the holidays

But I thought amazon managed to win the lawsuit to say it wasnâ(TM)t part of their work hours (which meant they had no incentives to hire more screeners to get people through in a reasonable amount of time)

I've noticed at most of the pharmacies at CVS (the drugstore chain), the employees have bar code stickers on the back of their hands. They'll regularly scan their bar code as they're working.

I assumed that this was some sort of authentication system, and it made sense as they're working at stations that already have bar code readers for tracking medications. But if the hospitals are tracking patients with bar codes, it could work there, too.

It many ways, it could be *more* secure than RFID badges, if you're assigning the bar code per shift, so a lost ID doesn't become a huge security risk & expense if it has to get re-issued. (or you could have the sticker dispenser authenticate with the RFID card, to make sure the system's more complex than it needs to be)