welcoming autumn

minshara class

Subject to confirmation when the patch of sky occupied by the star system undergoes detailed inspection by the TESS programme later in November, exoplanet hunting astronomers believe that they have found a rocky, terrestrial world (M-Class, spelled out from the Vulcan term above, in Star Trek parlance but not a scientific designation) approximately seventeen light years away from Earth orbiting a triennial star called 40 Eridani (in the Southern constellation Eridanus—a river in Hades that is thought to correspond with the Po or the Rhône) or properly Keid (from the Arabic qayd for eggshells) that matches the canonical location of the Vulcan home world.
There’s quite some range of possibilities for the planet and surely reality will prove more fantastic than fiction but it is within reason to believe that 40 Eridani A β (there was already one other planet found there before this suspected Super Earth) might have similar conditions to those imaged for Vulcan, arid and higher gravity. Long before Star Trek, Vulcan was the designation for the planet that astronomy needed to be subaltern of Mercury to explain its anomalous orbit, until Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity dispensed with that hypothetical world.

saffir-simpson

At the same time as Hurricane Florence was bearing down on the North American eastern seaboard, the deadly Typhoon Mangkhut was roiling in the Pacific with both areas still dealing with the consequences. The latter refers to the Thai form of the purple citrus-like exotic fruit the mangosteen—as we learn from Oxford Words blog, native to the Malaysia and anticyclones do not share the naming conventions that the World Meteorological Organisation has established for storms in the Atlantic, alternating alphabetically between boys’ and girls’ names, like Irma, Katrina, Maria and Harvey.
This tradition started in the US in September 1950 when three hurricanes made landfall simultaneously and there was confusion within the public and weather centres, using exclusively female names at first (male names were added in 1979) derived from the Air Force’s phonetic alphabet. And while member nations are not required in the context of local reporting and coverage to keep to the assigned designation (the WMO is the final arbiter one whether particular names should be retired after a particularly disastrous event, ninety so far so I guess by necessity we’ll have to start including more non-traditional ones soon), in the West where personal names are employed, we are generally at a consensus and use the one standard. In Asia, however, different jurisdictions modify the storms’ designation to fit local language and customs. Quite sensibly, in the Philippines, they taunted it with the name Omlong (the toothless, the feckless one) in hopes it would crumple from the insult—rather than giving a common name that might potentially stigmatise later on.

survivery 101

Over at the labs of AI Weirdness (previously) with the academic year just beginning, researcher and handler Janelle Shane wondered how a neutral network might interpret a college course catalogue and the major and minor courses of study that this virtual institution might have on offer.
While I am not sure I’d take any of these electives (though many sound pretty metaphysical and part of the core-curriculum) many of the titles have my curiosity piqued. We especially liked:

Language of Circus Processing
Werestory
Marine Writing
The Sun Programpineerstance and Development

It’s well worth reviewing the whole list and see if you can figure out what human conventions the artificial intelligence is drawing from and check out Shane’s past experiments.