Thursday Things: Spin to Win Edition
4 August 2022. Vol 4 No 31 By Dan McGirt. #156
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“Say, is this thing spinning faster than usual?” Photo by ckturistando on Unsplash
Flying Car Update: This is the future! Where are our flying cars? Still in development, it seems, but getting closer to your garage each day. Supposedly. In other words, the same place flying cars have always been. But hope springs eternal!
The latest news concerns a sweet ride called the Switchblade:
Samson Switchblade flying car is finally ready for takeoff
After 14 years of development, the Samson Switchblade – a fast, street-legal three-wheeler that converts at the touch of a button into a 200-mph (322-km/h) airplane – has been approved for airworthiness by the FAA. The team is now preparing for flight tests.
The Switchblade is named after the knife-like way its wings swing out from beneath its two-seat cabin when it's time to fly. The tail, too, swings out from where it's stowed behind the large pusher prop, then unfolds into a generous T shape. Samson says the entire push-button conversion from street-legal trike to aircraft takes less than three minutes, and while it's yet to demonstrate the entire process on a physical prototype, it looks like it'll be a pretty spectacular process.
Still in testing, of course, like quantum computing, controlled fusion, robot butlers, and all the other cool stuff. But FAA approved!
Approved for testing, sure. Still, it’s progress. So we wait.
Switchblade go! Source: Samson Sky
Estimated retail price is $150,000. I’m sure it will cost more than that by the time the Switchblade is in production, if ever.
Earth is doomed! Again. The end is always near. What the end will be depends on who you listen to — fire, flood, famine, war, social media, robot uprising, giant meteor. And much, much more. Choose your poison. It could happen any time.
Or maybe, just maybe, that’s wrong. Maybe doom is on a schedule.
Earth Has An Unexplainable, 27.5-Million-Year Cycle of Mass Extinctions
Massive, planet-impacting events are largely thought to happen randomly over time. However, a study of ancient geological events suggests that Earth follows a 27.5-million-year cycle, according to a recent paper published in the journal Geoscience Frontiers. This indicates that our planet has an extremely slow and steady "pulse" of catastrophic events.
Strangely, this geological activity keeps the time and the geologic events are correlated, not random. Notably, they include volcanic activity, mass extinctions, plate reorganizations, and sea level rises.
So every so often Gaia gets grumpy and bad things happen.
The researchers looked at the ages of 89 well-dated major geological events over the previous 260 million years, including times of marine and non-marine extinctions, major ocean-anoxic events, continental flood-basalt eruptions, sea-level fluctuations, global pulses of intraplate magmatism, and times of changes in seafloor-spreading rates and plate reorganizations.
Yes, that does sound bad. But how often does this happen?
To their surprise, the researchers discovered that these worldwide occurrences are usually clustered at 10 distinct time points, grouped in peaks or pulses roughly 27.5 million years apart.
Every 27.5 million years. So then we have to ask how long has it been since the last periodic global wipeout?
They saw that the most recent cluster of geological events was approximately 7 million years ago. This suggests that the next big geological event will occur in the next 20 million years…
Whew! We’ve got a little time to prepare. Maybe we’ll even have flying cars by then!
Read all about it in Geoscience Frontiers.
On the other hand…things may be spinning out of control faster than we expect.
Scientists baffled as Earth spins faster than usual
Scientists have been left baffled after discovering the Earth is spinning faster than normal — making days shorter than usual.
New measurements by the UK’s National Physical Laboratory show that the Earth is spinning faster than it was half a century ago.
On June 29, the Earth’s full rotation took 1.59 milliseconds less than 24 hours — the shortest day ever recorded.
Scientists have warned that, if the rotation rate continues to speed up, we may need to remove a second from our atomic clocks.
“If Earth’s fast rotation continues, it could lead to the introduction of the first-ever negative leap second,” astrophysicist Graham Jones reported via TimeandDate.com.
A negative leap second? That means chaos!
Thanks, NY Post for bringing this to our attention. We’ll let the nerds at TimeandDate.com take it from here:
Why Is This Happening?
What is causing the current downward trend in the length of the shortest day?
It could be related to processes in Earth’s inner or outer layers, oceans, tides, or even climate. Scientists are not sure, and struggle to make predictions about the length of day more than a year ahead. But there are tentative ideas.
Translation: the boffins don’t know.
At next week’s annual meeting of the Asia Oceania Geosciences Society (presentation SE05_A009), Leonid Zotov—together with his colleagues Christian Bizouard and Nikolay Sidorenkov—will suggest the current decrease in the length of day could have some relation to the ‘Chandler wobble’.
Okay, somehow this is Matthew Perry’s fault. That is believable.
Chandler wobble is the name given to a small, irregular movement of Earth’s geographical poles across the surface of the globe.
“The normal amplitude of the Chandler wobble is about three to four meters at Earth’s surface,” Dr Zotov told timeanddate, “but from 2017 to 2020 it disappeared.”
Aliens. Has to be.
What Happens Next?
Will the length of day continue to decrease, or have we already reached the minimum? Nobody knows for sure, but we asked Dr Zotov for his best guess.
“I think there’s a 70 percent chance we’re at the minimum,” he said, “and we won’t need a negative leap second.”
No, not that! Not a negative leap second!
Scientists are now warning that this could lead to the introduction of the first-ever negative leap second.
They think that if the rotation continues to accelerate, we might be forced to remove a second from our atomic clocks.
This will potentially bring challenges for the Information Technology systems as their clocks would have to skip one second as well, and due to their reliability on timers, that's were the devastating news start.
See? It would be Y2K all over again. Some of you may be too young to remember Y2K, but trust me — it was bad.1
I just wonder if scientists are using this negative leap second talk to distract us from the real danger — that the Earth starts spinning so fast we all fly off into space!
Eat, drink, and be merry. If all this end of the world talk is making you thirsty, or hungry, or both, here’s the cure.
The Spanish filmmaker Eugenio Monesma has dedicated his life to capturing the traditions of his homeland and its surrounding areas. He began his career by first taking up a Super-8 camera at age 25 back in the nineteen-seventies, and in the decades since, his mission has taken him to the furthest corners of Spain and beyond in search of ever-older ways to preserve in detail. This places his work in the tradition of the anthropological or ethnographic documentary. But in a still-unconventional move in his field, he’s united the old with the new by creating his own Youtube channel on which to make his documentaries free to watch around the world.
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