Similar situation - guy remembers a catchy song, lyrics and all, but can’t find any trace of the band or the music. I won’t say more than that as it’s worth listening to them tell the story (The Guardian article also doesn’t spoil it).
Clear skies happen regularly enough. You can see refractive phenomena frequently (sun dogs, moon halos and the like). Same for night, plenty of clear skies and auroras during the winter when it’s dark enough to see them.
IceCube sends housekeeping and priority transient events (like a supernova) over satellite, selected high quality events get synced over satellite daily and everything else gets stored and shipped out in the summer. There is a redundancy everywhere - it’s a very thoughtfully designed system.
They didn't just travel on-site, they over-wintered, which means travelling to the site and then staying through the worst weather, while it's completely dark, without any practical means of leaving for months.
I feel obliged to say that while it gets cold over winter, the weather isn’t particularly bad by Antarctic standards; the coast is much worse. In places like McMurdo it can get bad enough that travel between buildings is prohibited, South Pole not so much. I also wintered for SPT which involves one of us going out to the telescope, daily. There were only a couple of days when it was marginal. Even then, winds and low visibility usually means cloud cover and warmer weather (-40 vs -90). The worst days are windy with clear skies.
As for darkness; consider a single day is stretched out over the year. There’s only a two months of astronomical night and the moon is up every couple weeks. You’re correct though, that the station is isolated between mid Feb and late October.
Neutrinos need a large detector volume for efficiency because they interact so rarely. You can’t detect them directly so you need a transparent medium to detect their collision byproducts. Good detector mediums are water and ice, and are underground to minimise background light. There are relatively few places you can do this. Mine caverns and under the sea are the most common, but marine detectors are notoriously hard to build. Francis Halzen proposed using ice. At the Pole, the glacial plateau is 2 miles high and the breakthrough was confirming that the ice is in fact highly transparent if you go deep enough.
Why the pole specifically? You could probably build a second IceCube 100 miles away, but how are you going to get that materials there? Pole has a skiway for large aircraft and infrastructure to house a large number of people. The traverse (SPoT) only became operational near the end of construction - the initial holes were drilled in 2005 and almost everything had to be flown in.
Telescope In The Ice does a great job of explaining the history and science behind the experiment.
The biggest challenge is finding ice without dust layers from historical volcanic activity, and the South Pole is particularly clean because of it's remoteness as well as the prevailing wind directions. There is, however, one big dust layer that causes signal distortion.
But you can definitely get printers to dump a blob of filament out without worrying about cooling problems, if the extruder speed is high enough. I was debugging some issues in P2PP (a post processor for the Mosaic Palette. One problem was that the printer would extrude all the filament at the start of some travels instead of along the path.
> But you can definitely get printers to dump a blob of filament out without worrying about cooling problems
Yes, but we're not talking about dumping a blob of filament. We're talking about injecting filament into a well-insulated channel where it's physically impossible for it to receive any active cooling whatsoever.
That's not a situation where you can just ignore cooling.
> We're talking about injecting filament into a well-insulated channel where it's physically impossible for it to receive any active cooling whatsoever.
Look up the thermal conductivity of air.
Then look up the thermal conductivity of 3D printing filaments which form those channels that are being injected into.
The filament will be cooling faster in the channel than in free air.
This cannot work unless the part is heated to a temperature where the filament flows.
You cannot compare the raw thermal conductivity of a fluid like air (that pulls heat via convection) to a solid material like plastic (that pulls heat via conduction). Especially when the fluid is being actively moved with the intention of cooling down the plastic.
On top of that, the lattice structure of the infill will mean that heat will not conduct away from the channels well regardless of the material used.
I can imagine it working with a needle shaped nozzle that inserts into a hole and extrudes filament as it withdraws back out. This is probably much more than a software change, though.
When I was younger, I used to think the Shard was daylight robbery. But 16 quid for a signature cocktail and a view (or 12 for a spirit + mixer) is no longer outrageously expensive in London and you'd pay that to go up a skyscraper in many countries anyway. Both Rockefeller and the Empire State are $40+, though you can go outside. Even Aqua Shard, which is apparently in the Michelin guide, "only" charges about 20. Which is bordering on outrageous, but the view is great.
Though while the bar is reasonable, Aqua Shard is overpriced if you're going their to eat (the food is good, but you can get better food for the same/similar price elsewhere, including at Hutong, one floor up).
But if you're going to a bar in the Shard, Gong (52nd floor), Ting (35th) and Hutong (32nd) are all higher up. Gong and Ting also has the advantage that you don't have to pass through that ridiculous security scanner (entrance is via the Shangri La hotel)
I recently started playing around with my Palette 3 again
(on a MK3.5S). It’s an amazing piece of engineering that has a reputation for being frustrating to use. It’s now discontinued but Mosaic still sell spare parts and it’s designed to be stripped down and repaired. Despite the problems, it was built by good engineers - it uses one torx head for all screws (and comes with a driver). The next printer I get will probably be an INDX system though, the future is multitool.
I had written it off, because of how irritating Mosaic’s cloud slicer is. I’ve been pleasantly surprised how well it works with a fork of P2PP (vhspace/p2pp), a post processor for PrusaSlicer that is completely local. All it does is swap out the filament change commands with Palette splice instructions. I fixed a few gcode interpreter bugs that solved the issues I had with bed calibration and extrusion, and even splicing seems quite reliable. I’ve been using it for simple 2-color same-brand prints that would require a lot of manual changing, so not complex but it’s much nicer to use than an MMU2.
That one has a strange rendering error for me, the trees and horizon are in front of the mill building and the exterior isn't properly rendered unless you are in orbit mode. But my mind was a little blown when i discovered that I could walk up the stairs. It needs shift to run!
The scene desperately needs some clipping on the boundaries. If you use an app like Scaniverse, you can add a bounding box to cull far away points which are often poorly reconstructed.
If you have a newer iPhone with a LIDAR scanner, highly recommended. You can make dolls-house renderings of your house or garden which is surprisingly useful for planning and measuring walls/features.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/mar/10/reply-a...
Similar situation - guy remembers a catchy song, lyrics and all, but can’t find any trace of the band or the music. I won’t say more than that as it’s worth listening to them tell the story (The Guardian article also doesn’t spoil it).
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