BBC: “To the Moon and beyond”

Shannon started to focus on ideas that were viable. What made a lot of sense was the ability to build a very small crew-tended space station around the Moon, he says. Gateway gives you a place for crews to get set up before they go down to the surface. It gives you an opportunity to control remote vehicles on the surface. It would also act as a safe haven were anything to go wrong during a mission.

The Apollo missions took all the hardware necessary for completing the mission with them to the Moon. Nasa put them on a path around the Moon called a free return trajectory, which would get them safely back to Earth if, for example, an engine didn’t fire to send them into lunar orbit. But this limited them to landing in a narrow band around the equator.

Gateway will be higher up, in an oval-shaped path around the Moon called a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO), giving Nasa the ability to land wherever it wants.

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The administration cited Chinese lunar ambitions while justifying the return date of 2024. Some observers think space-faring nations like the US, China and Russia will need to coordinate lunar exploration to navigate murky legal waters over who owns lunar resources.

I think there’s a very large risk of geopolitical conflict, says Phil Metzger. If a single nation decides to go it alone on creating industry in space, then eventually that single nation would have a tremendous political, economic and military advantage.

Ignoring the potential of space resources just creates a power vacuum, he says: The ethical way to fill it would be to do it cooperatively, internationally, trying to make sure that all humanity benefits.

Paul Rincon

Despite criticism, I am very supportive of NASA’s Artemis mission to the Moon, with the potential to cement a more sustained human presence on the Moon and to reach beyond it into the inner solar system. At the same time, this project should really have happened decades ago immediately after the Apollo program. I am somewhat pessimistic that these plans will come to fruition in the current form, not only delayed by budget cuts, but eventually changed beyond recognition by the shifting priorities and moods of each new American administration.

Gizmodo: “This Working Quadcopter Drone was built using Leonardo da Vinci’s 500-Year-Old Sketches”

A team of engineers at the University of Maryland used da Vinci’s sketches to create a functional drone for a flight design contest (via CNET). Called Crimson Spin, the device is a small, unmanned quadcopter drone with wings inspired by da Vinci’s “aerial screw” design, which used the concept of an Archimedes’ screw to push against air in order to obtain flight.

The drone has four corkscrew-shaped wings made of plastic, but instead of having someone hand spin (or pump) them as da Vinci proposed, these wings are powered by batteries and electric motors. Much like today’s drones, this creation relies on small changes to propeller speed to tilt one direction or the other. Creating a single-shaft design as seen in da Vinci’s sketches would have been far more complex and required some of the technology used in modern helicopters.

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We might not be flying around on a 530-year-old helicopter design, but this project comes as the use of VTOL, or vertical take-off and landing, aircraft have gained interest for their potential ability to deliver packages or be used as aerial taxis. The unique aerodynamics of Crimson Spin addresses a few of the many challenges faced by VTOLs in that it produces less downwash and would likely be quieter than conventional propellers.

Phillip Tracy

Fascinating that such old concepts could become tangible technologies! The shape and size of the propellers seem to make them quite inconvenient though, especially if scaled up enough to lift a person…

Euronews: “Belgium approves four-day week and gives employees the right to ignore their bosses after work”

A government spokesperson confirmed to Euronews Next that employees would be able to ask to work four days a week for a period of six months. After that, they could choose to continue the arrangement or return to a five-day week with no negative consequences.

The period of six months was chosen so that an employee would not be stuck for too long in case of a wrong choice, they said.

Under the Belgian system, employees would be able to condense the current five-day week into four days. In practice this means maintaining a 38-hour working week, with an additional day off compensating for longer work days.

Tom Bateman

Reading the headline (and retweeting it) a couple of days ago, I assumed this meant a four-day week on the same 8-hour working schedule, but apparently I was overly optimistic… A 38-hour working week divided into four days translates into two working days on 9-hour shifts and another two on 10-hour shifts… Not the work-life balance progress I was expecting. For reference, Iceland also experimented with shortened working weeks with great results, but they moved from a 40 hour week to a 35 or 36 hour week.

Protocol: “Blame cheap music for Joe Rogan being on Spotify”

Left unsaid during the leaked town hall was another aspect of this relationship: Spotify is in bed with Joe Rogan because streaming music is too damn cheap.

Music services have long struggled to pay those huge royalty checks their contracts with the music rights holders are calling for. Some have even argued that the deck is fundamentally stacked against the streaming media industry, and that music subscription services can never be profitable.

• Spotify has indeed lost billions of dollars over the years, a streak that continued in 2021: For the full year, the company booked net losses of $38.8 million on $11 billion in revenue, according to its latest earnings report released yesterday.

Janko Roettgers

I have been trying to abstain from commenting on this Joe Rogan dispute because people were throwing around the most ridiculous and biased arguments they could find. For the record, I don’t listen either to Joe Rogan’s podcast or to Neil Young’s music, but I am a Spotify premium subscriber, and have no intention to change that. This article discusses the business reasons for the situation; I would go a bit further and say that the underlying issue is the increasing lack of competition on this market.

The Washington Post: “Apple changes employees’ titles to ‘associate’ after they leave”

The title “associate” is generally used to connote more junior roles. Entry-level retail workers, for instance, are often called associates. Law firms refer to recent law school hires in the same way, and in universities, associate professors are ranked below those with the title “professor”.

The practice recently came to light when Cher Scarlett, a former Apple software engineer who raised concerns about alleged discrimination and misconduct at the company, filed a complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging that when Apple changed her job title to “associate”, it delayed the hiring process at a prospective employer by nearly a week, during which time the company rescinded the offer. Scarlett said the job verification service hired to vet her résumé was unable to resolve the discrepancy with Apple.

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Irrespective of the reasons why they are doing it, this is a very bad and possibly unlawful practice, said Laurie Burgess, an employment law attorney who represents Parrish in her labor board case against Apple. Seems to me that this action interferes with employees’ reasonable future economic interests.

Reed Albergotti

Today in ‘shit corporations pull when nobody’s watching’! Apple is straight up providing false information about their former employees whenever someone checks what their position inside Apple was. A petty tactic worthy of Apple’s usual arrogance that can be punishing to employees regardless of whether they left in good terms or bad. As people amusingly proposed on Twitter, now that this practice is no longer a secret, people could use it to their advantage by claiming in job interviews that they had more senior roles while working at Apple.

The Economist: “America’s elected coroners are too often a public-health liability”

Death investigation in America falls into two broad categories. Medical-examiner systems are run by unelected technocrats, physicians who probe deaths and draft certificates. Coroner systems are led by elected officials, who may or may not be medical doctors. Both are supported by forensic pathologists, specialists in autopsies.

About 60% of Americans live under medical-examiner systems, according to Jeffrey Jentzen, a professor at the University of Michigan and author of a history of death investigation. Coroners dominated during the early years of the republic, but were prone to corruption. Undertakers, law-enforcement officials and insurance agents all stood to gain by taking on a second job as a coroner. Issuing death certificates provided many potential avenues for profit, from determining insurance payouts to covering up evidence of a crime.

A push to replace coroners with medical examiners gained traction in the early 20th century, before losing momentum. Coroners attract little attention—about 80% ran unopposed in the latest electoral cycle. But polarisation has created more competition. When Bobbi Jo O’Neal ran for coroner in South Carolina’s Charleston County in 2020, after two decades as a nurse conducting death investigations, she faced a less qualified opponent. Yet as a Republican in an increasingly liberal area, she barely scraped through.

The Economist

One strange aspect of American society that I have only recently became aware of is the pervasiveness of elections in many areas of public life: state attorneys general, state judges (a notorious example was the judge presiding over Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder trial), and apparently coroners. In most other countries these positions would simply be filled through aptitudes tests, based on qualifications and experience.

City A.M.: “Mark Zuckerberg and team consider shutting down Facebook and Instagram in Europe”

In its annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Meta warns that if a new framework is not adopted and the company is no longer allowed to use the current model agreements “or alternatives”, the company will “probably” no longer be able to offer many of its “most significant products and services”, including Facebook and Instagram, in the EU, according to various media reports, including in iTWire, The Guardian newspaper and Side Line Magazine.

Sharing data between countries and regions is crucial for the provision of its services and targeted advertising, Meta stressed.

Therefore, it previously used the transatlantic data transfer framework called Privacy Shield as the legal basis to carry out those data transfers.

However, this treaty was annulled by the European Court of Justice in July 2020, because of data protection violations. Since then, the EU and the US did stress they are working on a new or updated version of the treaty.

Michiel Willems

Given how violently markets reacted to the recent disclosure that Facebook lost 1 million daily users in North America, I would venture to say that Zuckerberg would never dare to cut off 300 million European users, one of its more lucrative markets, no matter the final form of the data transfer agreement. They are probably more worried about the extent to which this will affect their ability to target advertising, the core of its business and already under threat by Apple’s changes to tracking on iOS.