What Makes The Artemis Moon Mission NASA's Next Leap Forward?

Hygrocybe coccinea

Slovakia

I’m still crying over the beauty that was the Sony Reader. Cell service, stylus, dictionary, touchscreen, audio and came in a robust case.

Amazon killed E-ink innovation. But it's back.

Amazon killed E-ink innovation. But it’s back.

View On WordPress

A day one sloth will remember for a long time..

Source

20-12-22

If Artemis 1 launches tonight I WILL end up crying. Just watching NASA Live is making me emotional.

5 posts!

Hello! i saw your kimono drawing guide, and i have some questions. I saw this art and was wondering about a few things: what is the tied knot& tassel things on the sleeves for? and, what hairstyle is the lady wearing? If you know, please tell me! If you don't know, could it be possible to direct me to someone that might? Thank you for taking the time to answer, if you're able! Have a lovely night/day!

Hi and thank you for your question :) The ukiyoe you are sharing is by Utagawa Kunisada and titled Genji rokujo no hana (源氏六條の花), or "Cherry Blossoms at Genji's Rokujô Mansion". It is part of a three prints set:

It depicts an imaginary scenery from The tale of Genji, and the young lady playing with her pet cat is the princess Onna San no Miya.

Characters are not shown wearing period accurate clothes (from Heian era), but luscious Edo period attires. Because of her rank, the young princess is wearing what Edo princesses would, especially the trademark hairstyle named fukiya 吹輪.

You'll find below a translation from a costume photobook I did a while ago. Note the big bridge style front hairpin, and the drum like one in the back. Princesses from the buke (samurai class) would also have dangling locks called aikyôge (I also found the term okurege), but I am not sure kuge princesses (noble class) wore them too.

There is a whole dispute about this hairstyle, as we are not actually sure it was worn as such by actual princesses. This style may have in fact started as a somehow cliché bunraku/kabuki costume used to depict princesses (think a bit like Western Cinderella-types princess gowns). Nowadays, it is found only as a theater style, or worn by Maiko during Setsubun season.

For comparison, here is character Shizuka Gozen from kabuki play Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura:

As for the dangling cords, I covered those in a past ask about kamuro that you can find here (part 1 / part 2). TL:DR: I am still not sure what is the exact name for those decorations (kazari himo? sode no himo?).

But their use is pretty much linked to 3 things:

1) luck + protection (knots have auspicous meanings),

2) reinforcing weak points of garnment (here: sleeves wrist opening)

3) cuteness impact, as much like furisode (long sleeves kimono) those dangling ribbons were mostly seen on girls/young unmarried ladies by the Edo period

All the design elements chosen by Utagawa Kunisada for his Onna San no Miya stress own young and carefree she is still (which considering her narrative arc is in fact a bit sad... like all Genji Monogatari stories). BUT: bonus points for pet cat!

Hope that helps :)

Get Space-Crafty with Earth Science!

It’s time to get space-crafty! (Get it?) We’re getting ready to launch Landsat 9 into space this fall, and we want to know, how does Landsat inspire you?

For nearly 50 years, Landsat satellites have been collecting important data and taking beautiful images of Earth, as a partnership between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. Scientists and policy makers alike use this data to understand climate change, deforestation, the growth of cities, and so much more.

In celebration of the Landsat 9 launch in September, we are calling all crafters to create space-crafts inspired by your favorite Landsat image! From watercolor paintings to needlework to frosted cakes, let your creativity flow and show us how you see Landsat images.

Post a picture of your craft on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook with the hashtag #LandsatCraft. We will spotlight some on social media!

For a little inspiration, here are some #LandsatCraft examples from some of the people who work with Landsat:

“Looking through the Visible Earth Landsat gallery for inspiration, I saw the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA) and knew immediately what I had to do -- recreate it in a mosaic of my own. LIMA is a composite of more than 1,000 cloud-free Landsat 7 images of Antarctica, and when it was released in 2007 it was our first high resolution, true-color look at the icy continent.” – Kate Ramsayer, NASA Landsat Communications Coordinator

“I love embroidering satellite imagery and NASA data. For Landsat, I wanted something with lots of straight lines -- much easier to stitch! -- and crop fields like these fit the bill. It’s amazing how clearly we can see the influence of human activities in satellite imagery like this. It’s a constant reminder of the effect we have on our home planet.” – Katy Mersmann, Earth Science Social Media Lead

“We didn’t have the discipline or the organizational skills to do any of the really, really fancy images, like Lena Delta, so we chose Garden City, Kansas in 1972. We added a model of Landsat 1, too.” – Ryan Fitzgibbons, Earth Science Producer, and Charles Fitzgibbons, Age 8

"I was inspired by this Landsat image which demonstrates how we can use satellite imagery to remotely monitor cover crop performance, a sustainable farming practice that promotes soil health. Since I began working with NASA Harvest, NASA's Food Security and Agriculture Program, I've come to understand the critical importance of conservation agriculture and resilient farmlands in support of a food secure future for all, especially in the face of a changing climate." – Mary Mitkish, NASA Harvest Communications Lead

“I chose particular ingredients that represent the Landsat qualities that we celebrate:

The base spirit is gin because Landsat data is clean and precise. Vermouth represents our foreign collaborators. Using both lemon and lime juices signifies the diverse uses of the data. The ginger is for the land we study. The apple, well, because it’s American. The club soda makes it a long drink, for the long data record.” – Matthew Radcliff, NASA Landsat Producer

“Last year for the 50th Earth Day, I created this poster, inspired by our views of river deltas -- many captured by Landsat satellites -- which are particularly beautiful and evocative of water coursing through our land like a circulation system of nature. In 2000, Landsat 7 took one of my favorite images of the Lena Delta, which is the basis for this art.” – Jenny Mottar, Art Director for NASA Science

Are you feeling inspired to create yet? We’re so excited to see your #LandsatCraft projects! Follow NASA Earth on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to see if your art is shared!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

Adobe steals your color

When a company breaks a product you rely on — wrecking decades of work — it’s natural to feel fury. Companies know this, so they try to deflect your rage by blaming their suppliers. Sometimes, it’s suppliers who are at fault — but other times, there is plenty of blame to go around.

For example, when Apple deleted all the working VPNs from its Chinese App Store and backdoored its Chinese cloud servers, it blamed the Chinese government. But the Chinese state knew that Apple had locked its devices so that its Chinese customers couldn’t install third-party apps.

That meant that an order to remove working VPNs and apps that used offshore clouds from the App Store would lock Apple customers into Chinese state surveillance. The order to block privacy tools was a completely foreseeable consequence of Apple’s locked-down “ecosystem.”

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

In 2013, Adobe started to shift its customers to the cloud, replacing apps like Photoshop and Illustrator with “Software as a Service” (“SaaS”) versions that you would have to pay rent on, every month, month after month, forever. It’s not hard to understand why this was an attractive proposition for Adobe!

Adobe, of course, billed its SaaS system as good for its customers — rather than paying thousands of dollars for its software up front, you could pay a few dollars (anywhere from $10-$50) every month instead. Eventually, of course, you’d end up paying more, assuming these were your professional tools, which you expected to use for the rest of your life.

For people who work in prepress, a key part of their Adobe tools is integration with Pantone. Pantone is a system for specifying color-matching. A Pantone number corresponds to a specific tint that’s either made by mixing the four standard print colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and black, AKA “CMYK”), or by applying a “spot” color. Spot colors are added to print jobs after the normal CMYK passes — if you want a stripe of metallic gold or a blob of hot pink, you specify its Pantone number and the printer loads up a separate ink and runs your media through its printer one more time.

Pantone wants to license this system out, so it needs some kind of copyrightable element. There aren’t many of these in the Pantone system! There’s the trademark, but that’s a very thin barrier. Trademark has a broad “nominative use” exception: it’s not a trademark violation to say, “Pantone 448C corresponds to the hex color #4a412a.”

Perhaps there’s a copyright? Well yes, there’s a “thin” database copyright on the Pantone values and their ink equivalents. Anyone selling a RIP or printer that translates Pantone numbers to inks almost certainly has to license Pantone’s copyright there. And if you wanted to make an image-editing program that conveyed the ink data to a printer, you’d best take a license.

All of this is suddenly relevant because it appears that things have broken down between Adobe and Pantone. Rather than getting Pantone support bundled in with your Adobe apps, you must now pay $21/month for a Pantone plugin.

https://twitter.com/funwithstuff/status/1585850262656143360

Remember, Adobe’s apps have moved to the cloud. Any change that Adobe makes in its central servers ripples out to every Adobe user in the world instantaneously. If Adobe makes a change to its apps that you don’t like, you can’t just run an older version. SaaS vendors like to boast that with cloud-based apps, “you’re always running the latest version!”

The next version of Adobe’s apps will require you to pay that $21/month Pantone fee, or any Pantone-defined colors in your images will render as black. That’s true whether you created the file last week or 20 years ago.

Doubtless, Adobe will blame Pantone for this, and it’s true that Pantone’s greed is the root cause here. But this is an utterly foreseeable result of Adobe’s SaaS strategy. If Adobe’s customers were all running their apps locally, a move like this on Pantone’s part would simply cause every affected customer to run older versions of Adobe apps. Adobe wouldn’t be able to sell any upgrades and Pantone wouldn’t get any license fees.

But because Adobe is in the cloud, its customers don’t have that option. Adobe doesn’t have to have its users’ backs because if it caves to Pantone, users will still have to rent its software every month, and because that is the “latest version,” those users will also have to rent the Pantone plugin every month — forever.

What’s more, while there may not be any licensable copyright in a file that simply says, “Color this pixel with Pantone 448C” (provided the program doesn’t contain ink-mix descriptions), Adobe’s other products — its RIPs and Postscript engines — do depend on licensable elements of Pantone, so the company can’t afford to tell Pantone to go pound sand.

Like the Chinese government coming after Apple because they knew that any change that Apple made to its service would override its customers’ choices, Pantone came after Adobe because they knew that SaaS insulated Adobe from its customers’ wrath.

Adobe customers can’t even switch to its main rival, Figma. Adobe’s just dropped $20b to acquire that company and ensure that its customers can’t punish it for selling out by changing vendors.

Pantone started out as a tech company: a way to reliably specify ink mixes in different prepress houses and print shops. Today, it’s an “IP” company, where “IP” means “any law or policy that allows me to control the conduct of my customers, critics or competitors.”

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

That’s likewise true of Adobe. The move to SaaS is best understood as a means to exert control over Adobe’s customers and competitors. Combined with anti-competitive killer acquisitions that gobble up any rival that manages to escape this control, and you have a hostage situation that other IP companies like Pantone can exploit.

A decade or so ago, Ginger Coons created Open Colour Standard, an attempt to make an interoperable alternative to Pantone. Alas, it seems dormant today:

http://adaptstudio.ca/ocs/

Owning colors is a terrible idea and technically, it’s not possible to do so. Neither UPS Brown nor John Deere Green are “owned” in any meaningful sense, but the companies certainly want you to believe that they are. Inspired by them and Pantone, people with IP brain-worms keep trying to turn colors into property:

https://onezero.medium.com/crypto-copyright-bdf24f48bf99

The law is clear that colors aren’t property, but by combining SaaS, copyright, trademark, and other tech and policies, it is becoming increasingly likely that some corporation will stealing the colors out from under our very eyes.

[Image ID: A Pantone swatchbook; it slowly fades to grey, then to black.]

3D printing pen / 3Doodler