Read Ignition!, an excellent and entertaining history of the development of liquid rocket fuel by John D. Clark (one of the main protagonists of the field), with the truly excellent forward by Isaac Asimov that includes the following excerpt:

Search for a PDF, and you'll find it. I've had the fortune to meet a number of scientists cut from the same cloth as Dr. Clark, and they are among my favorite people. I'm sorry I never had a chance to meet him.

Any sort of combustion-level heat in the presence of nitrogen and oxygen creates lots of messy NOx byproducts (that are all atmospheric pollutants), so, yeah, unlikely to be a pure N6 -> 3(N2) reaction without at least restricting its decomposition environment to exclude O2.

My father designed instruments to measure atmospheric concentrations of NOx (and I wrote much of the software for them) for one of the biggest manufacturers of things like that. He explained the chemistry to me years ago, and NOx pollutants are nearly unavoidable in the presence of O2.

Have you followed-through and seen what Destin is charging for that knick-knack? Yes, it seems to be a nicely-designed grill brush. But it is a frelling grill brush. It doesn't need to be high-tech.

And it most certainly doesn't need to cost over $75 when a Chinesium version is $20.

Thinking of the void as an analogy to a gas is misleading, that's why your supposition doesn't work.

The universe is expanding, everywhere, as far as we can tell. Without any evidence to the contrary (and a fair bit of evidence supporting it), the expansion is constant, everywhere, and is described by a value called, you guessed it, the Hubble Constant. Most recently, however, a handful of different measurements have suggested two disparate values for the Hubble Constant, resulting in what's known as the Hubble Tension ("tension" because the two values appear to be being measured correctly, but are not the same).

The idea in this paper, as far as I understand it, is that there are large-scale fluctuations in mass distribution, and we happen to be in a local minimum compared to the average across the universe, thus a local void. Since the Universe isn't filled with a gas under pressure (at least to first approximation), there isn't a grand rushing-in to fill that void. Rather the opposite: the relatively higher density elsewhere is pulling harder by its larger gravity than the mass in our local neighborhood, creating a local anomaly in the large-scale gravitational field, pulling us outward. This local anomaly appears as a local increase to the Hubble constant, adding on to the underlying Hubble expansion. We are, locally, expanding slightly faster than the Universal average.

This local effect might explain the two measurements for the Hubble Constant, one in our region of the Universe which is affected by the local paucity of mass, and one across greater expanses of the Universe where the lumpy distribution of mass is evened out by the law of large numbers.

I read the article to see why black holes in particular would be a useful way of determining position in space, rather than, say, a handful of stars.

The answer is that they aren't just using any black holes, but the ultra-massive black holes at the center of galaxies which spew lots of radiation from their accretion discs, so are bright in radio frequencies, and are far away and have limited self-motion since they are at the center of their galaxies, so are stable from our vantage point.

Someone correct me if I got that wrong.

He's lying through his teeth. Revenue management has used ML for a loooong time to set things like price of different fare buckets, number of seats released to different fare buckets, exactly when seats are released to specific fare buckets, how many seats to hold back, how many instrument-supported upgrades to allow (e.g., upgrade certificates), how many complementary upgrades to allow, etc., forget things like schedule and route planning, and so forth. All three of the big US airlines are already using dynamic pricing on reward tickets such that you get a different price if you're logged in to their web site versus doing it anonymously.

So, again, lying through his teeth.

Succeeds, or causes a different morbidity to the patient, or worse.

I mean, you can inject tuberculin toxin into a tumor too, or radioactive thallium, or any of the vast suite of toxic concoctions, but it might not work out so well for the rest of the patient. Especially if you call yourself an inventor, instead of a medical scientist, with the level of training and knowledge expected for each.

I don't know why anyone would allow notifications on their phone (or their computer).

My time is not available to be interrupted for marketing outreach or other drivel. If it were, there would be a substantial payment required, because of the interference. When I want to know if there is a message to be read, I'll have a look at an appropriate time of my choosing.

Anyone who allows themselves to be bombarded by New! On Sale! Hi! Remember Us! OMG! messages in any medium does not value their time.

The peer-review process is so unpredictable and irregular that it effectively decouples the time-of-year for the discovery from the time-of-year for the publication of said discovery.

So, the answer to your question is, "no," on that grounds.

But, also, if there *were* any push for results, it would be aligned with the end-of-budgetary-year for a given grant, which is three times per year, and doesn't necessarily align with the Federal fiscal cycle.

So, again, the answer is, "no."

How about just working on making KDE smaller and faster, instead?

Pretty please?

With the last Plasma update, the time to intialize my desktop went from acceptable-but-could-be-better, to (not kidding) 60+ seconds. No changes on my side.

(And to the folks over at Mozilla, you've completely dropped the ball for rapidly getting Firefox to a usable state.)

Even better: when launch is initiated, disarm weapons, disable remote command, and land gently at intended target, so as to provide materiel to the Ukranians.

Right, clandestine sabotage would have been far better: explode N seconds after launch, or explode N seconds after its neighbor launches, or just brick itself.

That would be the difference between a group looking for fame, and a group looking for results.

I'm inclined to think the hackers are using the word "destroyed" in the contemporary, overblown 1337 sense, and that no actual damage was caused. But I hope the retrieved records prove useful in future counter-ops.

It's one thing to delete a bunch of technical information that, if the organization is half-competent has an off-site backup. It's another thing entirely to get into the actual machines and put them in a state outside the normal envelope of operation to cause physical damage, such as with Stuxnet.

This event sounds more like the former, and less like the latter. Unless, of course, triggering the fire alarms engaged sprinkler systems and flooded the place. That might have caused some physical damage.

The biggest win here might actually just be exfiltration of that technical data to assist hacking the drones themselves in the future.

... remember to read the headlines of currently posted stories before starting work. It doesn't take long and forgetting to do it does not help repair the tarnished reputation of the Slashdot editorial crew.

What, in your argument, is the difference between LLM copy-edited text, and for-hire human copy-edited text. The editorial services I have seen *sometimes* try to find editors that are kinda-sorta near the correct field of expertise, but there's no guarantee you'll get someone who even has a passing level of familiarity with your field, and for some services, all they have is a degree in English.

So, again, what's the difference between linguistic polishing by machine and linguistic polishing by semi-qualified human?