This action-packed film embraces the good-versus-evil dichotomy of World War II as Allied commandos rain fury on the Nazis. //

Sometimes an old-fashioned, Nazi-killing romp is just what the movies need. And that’s exactly what “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” brings to the cinema. The film, very loosely based on the real-life exploits of World War II British special operators, eschews politics in favor of humor, action, and plenty of Nazi-centric violence.

The "CHNV" migration parole program stands for Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Immigrants from these countries are eligible to participate in the parole program. The program permits them to fly into the U.S. directly under certain conditions, such as having a sponsor in the U.S. and being approved for travel.

Between January and August 2023, approximately 200,000 migrants flew into the U.S. via this program. Notably, 80 percent of these arrivals, totaling 161,562 individuals, landed in four cities in Florida: Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, and Tampa.

Magnetic Tapes

Sub-Zero Cold Storage for the Permanent Preservation of Photographs,
Motion Picture Films, Books, Newspapers, Manuscripts, and Historical Artifacts

he top ten reasons Eternal Damnation is better than Windows Software Development

Welcome to Fourmilab's calendar converter! This page allows you to interconvert dates in a variety of calendars, both civil and computer-related.

• Gregorian Calendar
• Julian Day
• Julian Calendar
• Hebrew Calendar
• Islamic Calendar
• Persian Calendar
• Mayan Calendars

Waterfall Under Ancient Stars
Eileen Padgett

A Rocket A Day Keeps the High Costs Away asks why it is, considering that the V2 cost about US$13,000 each (1945 dollars) and could be launched at rates approaching 100 a week, that today's launchers cost 1000 times as much. A market-oriented approach to overcome the current cost barrier to space development is suggested. //

September 27, 1993

There's a pretty general consensus that one of the greatest barriers to the exploration and development of space is the cost of launch to low earth orbit. The incessant and acrimonious arguments among partisans of the Shuttle, DC-*, NASP, TSTO, Big Dumb Boosters, bringing back the Saturn V, buying launches from the Russians and/or Chinese, or of developing exotic launch technologies (laser, electromagnetic, skyhook, etc.) conceal the common premise of all those who argue—that if we could launch payloads for a fraction of today's cost, perhaps at a tenth to a thousandth of today's rates of thousands of US$ per kilogram, then the frontier would open as the great railway to orbit supplanted the first generation wagon trains. The dispute is merely over which launch technology best achieves this goal.

Conventional wisdom as to why industry and government choose not to invest in this or that promising launch technology is that there aren't enough payloads to generate the volume to recoup the development cost and, in all likelihood, there never will be.

How much would it cost to find out if this is true? //

Consider the following mass-produced expendable rocket.

• Number manufactured: 6,240 //

These are actual figures for the first mass-produced rocket vehicle, the V-2 (A-4)—fifty years ago. //

... after the war U.S. intelligence expert T. P. Wright estimated that at full production, unconstrained by wartime shortages, the Mittelwerk plant could have produced 900 to 1000 V-2s per month.

One thousand rockets per month…fifty years ago. Think about that. ///

This is almost what SpaceX is doing with Falcon9, 30 years later...

In astronomy, a planetary transit is when a planet closer to the Sun passes in front of the Sun's disc as seen from a more distant planet. From the Earth, transits of Mercury and Venus are visible; recently, observers were treated to these spectacles in back-to-back years: 2003 and 2004.

In the run-up to the 2004 transit of Venus, I became obsessed with one of those silly questions which, once they sink their claws into one's mind, won't go away without being answered yes or no. Is there ever a simultaneous transit of Mercury and Venus visible from the Earth?

The naïve answer is, “Of course not (you idiot)! Transits can occur only when inferior conjunction with the inner planet coincides with its crossing the ecliptic. Transits of Venus always occur in June and December, transits of Mercury in May and November, and thus a simultaneous transit can never happen.”

But this doesn't take into account the evolution of planetary orbits over time. Analytical planetary theories such as VSOP87 are useless beyond the period for which they are fit (say, −4000 to +8000 years Gregorian). To go beyond that, you need to do full-up numerical integration of the motion of the Sun and planets.

Well, that's what computers are for, isn't it? So, I found a high-precision numerical integration code for the Solar System written by Steve Moshier, built a back-end to search for transits, and set it looking for this extraordinarily rare event. Since I didn't want to burn months of computing time with nothing to show for it, I decided to prepare a canon of all Solar System transits (excluding marginal graze events) visible in the time interval I chose, namely a quarter million years centred on the start of the so-called “Common Era”. Here it is.

Kerbal Space Program is a computer game in which the player can build spacecraft, aircraft, and spaceplanes to their own design and use them on missions, both robotic and with crews, to explore the planetary system of the star Kerbol. The space program is conducted on behalf of the Kerbals, inhabitants of planet Kerbin, and the player manages the space program, advancing in technological capability, ambitiousness of missions, and size and skill of the kerbonaut corps. //

One thing which is certain is that after you've spent some time with Kerbal Space Program you will develop an intuition about orbital mechanics which few people, even authors of “hard” science fiction, have.

Simultaneity Ain't what It Used to Be

One of the most fundamental deductions Albert Einstein made from the finite speed of light in his theory of special relativity is the relativity of simultaneity—because light takes a finite time to traverse a distance in space, it is not possible to define simultaneity with respect to a universal clock shared by all observers. In fact, purely due to their locations in space, two observers may disagree about the order in which two spatially separated events occurred. It is only because the speed of light is so great compared to distances we are familiar with in everyday life that this effect seems unfamiliar to us. Note that the relativity of simultaneity can be purely due to the finite speed of light; while it is usually discussed in conjunction with special relativity and moving observers, it can be observed in situations where none of the other relativistic effects are present. The following animation demonstrates the effect. //

... by extracting transmissions from the LM from those originating in mission control onto separate tracks with the Audacity audio editor, I was then able to time-shift transmissions originating from the Earth by the light delay of 1.2865 seconds to reproduce what Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong heard through their headphones in the cabin of the Eagle lunar module on the surface in Mare Tranquillitatis. During the landing phase, an on-board tape recorder in the lunar module captured the voices of Armstrong and Aldrin even when they were not transmitting on the air to ground link. From this noisy source, I have restored the few remarks by Armstrong which were only heard within the cabin. This is, then, the lunar touchdown as heard by the astronauts who performed it.

Now it's obvious what happened to Armstrong's post-landing transmission! Right before he began the call, Duke's message, sent a second and a quarter earlier, arrived at the Moon. While, from an earthly perspective, this was spoken well before Armstrong said “Houston”, on the Moon this message “stepped on” the start of Armstrong's transmission (especially considering human reaction time), and caused him to pause before continuing with his message. Note also that on the Earth-based recording, Duke's response occurs almost immediately after the end of Armstrong's transmission, but on the Moon, the astronauts had to wait for the pokey photons to make it from the home planet to their high gain antenna on its distant satellite.

There are about 200 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Over the next million years our descendents will spread among the stars in an exponential explosion of life, remaking the galaxy as surely as life has remolded Earth in its own image. //

Imagine the variety of worlds and wealth of living species flourishing upon them! Water worlds, desert planets, mountains that reach above the sky—every habitat imagined in science fiction will become real, and many more yet to spring from the imagination of world-makers born half a million years from now.

Terranova is a highly premature anticipation of this exhilarating milestone in the endless adventure of life and intelligence. Every day around 11 a.m. Universal Time a new planet is created using random parameters, and an image of it, as seen from the bridge from your approaching starship, is produced.

“If they existed, they would be here”, said Fermi. So where are they? Nowhere in evidence. Intelligent beings with technologies advanced millions of years beyond our own, spread to the far ends of the galaxy, should not be difficult to detect. We already possess the means to detect even primitive technological civilisations like our own at a distance of hundreds of light years.

If they existed, they—the first intelligent species to expand outward among the stars—would be here. And since we look around and see nobody but ourselves, then it is only reasonable to conclude, “We are here, so we are them.”

Remember, this transfer that you (or I) are about to undertake may be the last time (and hopefully the best time) that the original is transferred. Here are some suggestions:

1. Make at least two masters and a listening copy. Keep one set of masters off-site. //

2. Make straight transfers before processing. Save these as better noise processing algorithms may be available in the future.

3. Save a good portion of the noise footprint on the tape without other signal information for later noise reduction processing.

4. At first, worry less about a final product than getting a good, clean transfer with as few artifacts as possible.

5. Above all, listen…are you getting the best transfer you think you can?

This checklist is not a complete guideline. It contains only those items that experience and testing show will have an immediate or severe effect on magnetic tape. Failure to adhere to the items on this list may cause premature loss or deterioration of magnetic tapes and should be considered misuse of the medium. These are minimum handling requirements that summarize good practices.

If the restoration/preservation reformatting is for an institutional client, then the first transfers should be as unprocessed as possible — at least the initial copies that are archived should be done that way. The main reason for this is that processing algorithms will always get better and they may hide some information that is useful to future researchers–information that today we consider “noise.”

I am conservative when setting audio levels when making transfers because there is no way of knowing the loudest portion of the signal in advance. So I generally transfer at 24 bits and then raise or normalize the level prior to dithering down to 16 bits for the distribution copy. If I’m working on music, I will generally archive the 88,200 ks/s or 96,000 ks/s files before the normalization.

Processing should generally be done on a copy. The exception to this in my mind are private clients who want the best possible copy of their parents’ wedding, or some other important event. If applied conservatively, noise reduction and equalization will be appreciated by these clients and most of them won’t care a bit that it’s been processed. I keep the unprocessed files on my servers until I am sure the client is happy with the processed version.

As to what to use, there are a wide variety of options available. At the high-end, this falls into the category of “remastering” rather than simple restoration and I’m sure there are options that I’m not aware of.

As a first step, I am very pleased with the basic capabilities built into Samplitude. In addition to that, I use Algorithmix Noise Free Pro as well as the Sound Laundry suite. Really tough projects can often be improved by the filters in Diamond Cut 6 Live/Forensics and most of the filters are available in the lower-priced Diamond Cut 6. Diamond Cut and their main dealer, Tracertek, often run sales which was how I upgraded to Live/Forensics.

Other products with excellent reputations are Cedar Cambridge, Quadriga Audio Cube, and many others. Listening to and discussing with other users via one or more of the mailing lists listed here is very useful.

Often a tape comes in for restoration that has been poorly wound or poorly stored. Here is an example:

cinched tape

One of the interesting things about this particular tape was it had been recently wound on a constant-tension professional machine prior to shipping to me.

We think that the entire tape had not been re-wound, allowing the higher tension wind to compress the inner core slightly, causing this cinching. After transferring the tape (which didn’t show much ill effect for its cinching), we still found it difficult to get the tape to wind smoothly on the reel.

Therefore, our current suggestion is if you find a tape like this, do not rewind it and attempt to clear up the cinching unless you are also ready to transfer the tape, as there are no guarantees that it can be wound better after unwinding.

The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs: Traditional and Digital Color Prints, Color Negatives, Slides, and Motion Pictures

by Henry Wilhelm
with
contributing author Carol Brower

In 2006, I wrote a blog post (here) called “Let Sleeping Tapes Lie: What to do with poorly wound tapes”. For years, tape experts have been suggesting that it is not as good an idea to rewind tapes as was originally thought. This was partially based on the fact that most rewinding in archives was done on the oldest, junkiest machines so as to not wear out the good machines. Unless rewinding is done on high-quality tape transports, it is indeed counter-productive.

It seems some people new to tape are confused over how to align a tape recorder. This is the abbreviated version.

If you want to record on a tape recorder (and I do not recommend doing that these days as you’re just generating more tapes that will need to be transferred later) the first thing to do is get the playback correct. //

Anyway, I think that quality digital recording will capture sounds closer to the original than analog magnetic tape. This has been true in most tests run since the early days of digital recording and why most of the classical engineers who are looking for accuracy and not colouration were early adopters of digital. If you wish to record on analog that’s wonderful, but consider that analog tape is being used as much as an effect or sound-colourant as it is a storage medium. Also, remember that your legacy of tapes will be much more costly to preserve and migrate than digital files, although they may withstand neglect better.