InevitableSwing

The beginning of the article

Who knew a dragon’s tongue could be so long?

Astronomers announced last week that they had discovered a black hole spitting energy across 23 million light-years of intergalactic space. Two jets, shooting in opposite directions, compose the biggest lightning bolt ever seen in the sky — about 140 times as long as our own Milky Way galaxy is wide, and more than 10 times the distance from Earth to Andromeda, the nearest large spiral galaxy.

Follow-up observations with optical telescopes traced the eruption to a galaxy 7.5 billion light-years away that existed when the universe was less than half its current age of 14 billion years. At the heart of that galaxy was a black hole spewing energy equivalent to the output of more than a trillion stars.

“The Milky Way would be a little dot in these two giant eruptions,” said Martijn Oei, a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Oei led the team that made the discovery, which was reported in Nature on Sept. 18 and announced on the journal’s cover with an illustration reminiscent of a “Star Wars” poster. The astronomers have named the black hole Porphyrion, after a giant in Greek mythology — a son of Gaia — who fought the gods and lost.

The discovery raises new questions of how such black holes could affect the evolution and structure of the universe.

Wikipedia: Porphyrion (radio galaxy)

There aren't many comments but they are very good.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/30/science/iceland-volcano-eruption-lava.html#commentsContainer

It's a NYT article. The actual subheader was a too long.

A study adds strong evidence to the hypothesis that the deadly rock came from a family of objects that originally formed well beyond the orbit of the planet Jupiter.

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A team led by Mario Fischer-Gödde, a research scientist at the University of Cologne in Germany, has bolstered that case with the help of the rare element ruthenium. Ruthenium is abundant in asteroids but extremely scarce in Earth’s crust, making it a handy bellwether of past impacts by space rocks. The team searched for isotopes of ruthenium in the geological remnants of the Chicxulub impact.

archive.today • Special counsel: No charges for Biden in classified documents probe - The Washington Post

[Edit - I found a much better screengrab.]

Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex

The Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex (SRMSC) was a cluster of military facilities near Langdon, North Dakota, that supported the United States Army's Safeguard anti-ballistic missile program.

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Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex : brutalism

Insane boondoggle of a backstory. Basically a colossal waste of $6B taxpayer money ($34B in 2024 dollars) because it only operated for 6 months before being decommissioned as ineffective by Congress. Present activity is blockchain mining.

"Get the hell out of here!" — American cartoon (undated, ca. 1930) showing the '4 Hour Day' booting the devil of 'Depression' off a cliff.

Presumably published in one of the Industrial Workers of the World's newspapers.

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