this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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Sputnik 1 (/ˈspʌtnɪk, ˈspʊtnɪk/, ‹See Tfd›Russian: Спутник-1, Satellite 1) was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 as part of the Soviet space program. It sent a radio signal back to Earth for three weeks before its three silver-zinc batteries became depleted. Aerodynamic drag caused it to fall back into the atmosphere on 4 January 1958. The world's first observation was made at the school observatory in Rodewisch (Saxony).

It was a polished metal sphere 58 cm (23 in) in diameter with four external radio antennas to broadcast radio pulses. Its radio signal was easily detectable by amateur radio operators, and the 65° orbital inclination made its flight path cover virtually the entire inhabited Earth.

The satellite's success was unanticipated by the United States. This precipitated the American Sputnik crisis and triggered the Space Race, part of the Cold War. The launch was the beginning of a new era of political, military, technological, and scientific developments. The word sputnik is Russian for satellite when interpreted in an astronomical context; its other meanings are spouse or traveling companion.

Tracking and studying Sputnik 1 from Earth provided scientists with valuable information. The density of the upper atmosphere could be deduced from its drag on the orbit, and the propagation of its radio signals gave data about the ionosphere.

Sputnik 1 was launched during the International Geophysical Year from Site No.1/5, at the 5th Tyuratam range, in Kazakh SSR (now known as the Baikonur Cosmodrome). The satellite traveled at a peak speed of about 8 km/s (18,000 mph), taking 96.20 minutes to complete each orbit. It transmitted on 20.005 and 40.002 MHz, which were monitored by radio operators throughout the world. The signals continued for 22 days until the transmitter batteries depleted on 26 October 1957. On 4 January 1958, after three months in orbit, Sputnik 1 burned up while reentering Earth's atmosphere, having completed 1,440 orbits of the Earth, and travelling a distance of approximately 70,000,000 km (43,000,000 mi).

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 months ago (2 children)

culinary arts students be like: oh damn i got a plate of spaghetti due tomorrow

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago (2 children)

So I wake up this morning and the first things I see are Kamala Harris doing an unironic "Thank you for your service Mr dick cheney" and Tim Walz doing Zionist lebensraum

Please my dreams were pleasant I want to go back to them

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago (3 children)

New Megathread nerds!

sputnik

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No current struggle session discussion here on the new general megathread, i will ban you from the comm and remove your comment, have a good day/night :meow-coffee:

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago (2 children)

im about to get high at 130 pm because i just accepted a job offer but i dont start working until the beginning of next month. im finally free from linkedin

Death to America

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago

Man, Israel’s going to bomb Iran and my stupid ass is just working overtime

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago

my "Am I Racist?" movie is raising a lot of questions already answered by the movie

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Told my Partner about Hexbear and this owl that pisses and farts a lot.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

My boss's ability to answer my question while providing absolutely no clarity about what I asked is honestly incredible

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago

this is probably the same calculation that was made by whoever promoted him

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I have returned from Bluesky. It is a horrible, accursed place. Much worse than Twitter. I will be retiring to my rooms now, I am weary from battle.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (5 children)

transphobia, xenophobia, hellish burger political dread

Watch Mets/Phillies game

Saw 3 Trump ads hammering on the "Kamala is using your tax dollars to give illegal alien terrorist fentanyl smugglers free transgender surgeries" line

It's so stupid and shoddily made that it'd be funny if it weren't a reminder that a significant chunk of this dogshit country are rabid hog people that fantasize about murdering people like me

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago

Said it's actually a bad thing that Cheney endorsed Kamala on Reddit and now my phone won't stop vibrating. Surely the people in my replies aren't defending a war criminal clueless

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (3 children)

The volume button should make subtitles bigger.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (5 children)

I met a libertarian expat today!

White American guy who thinks raising the minimum wage is bad and that poverty is a choice because he was poor and made it through college without having to use social services at all!

He’s married to a local brown Guatemalan woman from a wealthy family. She treats him like shit. Throws knives at him when she doesn’t like the food he cooks, took off her engagement ring and threw it at his eye when she got mad, frequently hits him, calls him the r-slur and giggles like a child over it, and will forge checks in his name all the time. Has also sent messages to his family pretending to be him and saying he hates all of them.

He says she’s a sweet person deep down and loves her despite all of it. It turns out that despite their facade of the rugged individual, Libertarians are as submissive as you can get.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That got very quickly to the point I couldn't laugh at the guy.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (2 children)

The premiere of Always sunny is closer to the premiere of Seinfeld than the present. Idk if that's interesting or noteworthy.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Someone buy me the six string gold AK bass plz

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (8 children)

It's super fucking idealist but I've always been fascinated by the general aura of 'decay of intent' amongst mass projects. to make it materialist I'd say there's a level of reification of the idea that is indoctrinated into people by the conditions on the ground that strips away the subtle nuances over time, mirroring it in an imperfect way, a la simulacra theory.

take the zionist entity–if one could call them a shrewd actor before, they absolutely cannot now. The so-called 'smart ghouls' are a dying generation as the society becomes increasingly more 'blood for the blood god' death and destruction-type ghouls. The US, another example–the CIA is washed, folks. The beltway is increasingly people who were duped into the ideas filtered to them through the lens of the media, rather than the realpolitik hitlerites like Kissinger.

My gut explanation (besides decaying material conditions) is that these projects sort of succumb to the inertia of what they're filtering down through the media apparatus–whatever is temporarily convenient for citizens to believe might become dangerous as it seeds poison into the mythos. An education crisis, essentially; it's advantageous to keep people out of the know when you're doing stuff behind closed doors but the shortcuts you have to take to explain that might backfire because you're also projecting said propaganda towards your potential successors down the line.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago

maybe its because many of these projects never create or let fall apart their education aparatus for their cadres, and lose their capability to elevate new trained cadres into leadership positions. This is something the soviet union failed to do too. Right now the people that climb the ranks in the USA are self interested backstabbers first and foremost that will do anything to gain more money and power. They are not ideologically committed fascists with fascist goals. The fascism is often a byproduct of their actual goals (make money) as well as institutional inertia passed down. Basically no one is thinking at all i-love-not-thinking

The opposite is seen in china, which seems to have very rigorous rules for building up its cadres and incentives against corruption (getting purged) meaning the people that make up the government are generally gonna be ideologically commited.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (4 children)

you can open a few cans and dump them in a pot for a few minutest and then eat it. did anyone else know this?

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Field Marshall Tso's chicken

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (4 children)

People will straight up say things like "evil in lord of the rings is totally aesthetic" and then Melkor is just right there, with Ungoliant, murdering the source of light and beauty in the world for literally no reason except that he's a man who thinks he should be the main character and he hurts anyone who defies him.

Likewise, Sauron. Giant nation, secure borders, strong agricultural base, no real geopolitical rivals.

Sauron: "I'm going to send armies to invade my neighbors, destabilize their internal politics, and murder shitloads of people because I, Sauron, am the main character and should be in charge."

Saruman: I should make a eugenics army, seize control of a super weapon, and install myself as king of everyone. And if that doesn't work I'm going to go bully the hobbits just because I like it when people are afraid of me.

Even Smeagol murdered his friend over a piece of jewellry.

"Evil" in LotR isn't a mythical, ineffable force. It's abusive men in positions of power. Throughout the whole story - Melkor, Sauron, Feanor, Saruman, even pathetic Smeagol - it's abusive men using violence and coercion to take what they want.

And goodness is making cool shit and being nice to people. The Vala aren't wrathful gods. They're a bunch of nice hippies who wanted to make a nice, safe, beautiful garden for the Children of Illuvatar to play in. They were reluctant to fight Morgoth directly because they were afraid they'd just make things worse. Gandalf is a kind old man who inspires hope in people. His magic power is literally hope. The Elves, when Feanor isn't being a shit, mostly just want to hang out and sing and make beautiful things. The Dwarves want to drink beer and do hard rock mining. Hobbits want to eat and fuck and read predictable genre novels. Men... are there.

Like the idea that LotR is built on these absolutist, black and white supernatural forces of ineffable, tangible goodness and evilness just isn't in the narrative. The forces of good are sweet and kinda dumb. The forces of evil are almost uniformly men who abuse their position of authority to take what they want, and if they can't get it they break things so no one else can enjoy them.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Reddit's such a weird place. I wasn't doing well last night and found /r/S*icideWatch and wrote a post looking for help and advice. I woke up this morning to zero comments and my post was downvoted, lmao. (edit: I know going to that site in the first place wasn't a good idea, but I naively thought that a community specifically for people struggling with ideation would be a safe space)

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago

I'm thinking of becoming the most annoying person alive by calling any piece of media you bring up in a conversation "colonizer fiction"

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I got blackout drunk last night at a house party and made an utter fool of myself. I'm actually mortified I feel like I need to fake my death and move to a different city and make a new identity

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (4 children)

"ugh, I dont feel like thinking about politics today" logs on to hexbear for the 1500th day in a row

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Lego Makima and the calico fiend

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Sputnik changed the world. Being able to put an object into orbit is an incredible engineering challenge. Space is easy. Just go 100Km straight up and you're in space. It takes some engineering skill, but nothing beyond what a few competent engineering undergrads can and do regularly manage.

Staying in space is the hard part. I don't know much about guns, but google tells me that a 5.56 rifle round travels roughly at 3500Km/h. To stay in space you need to travel sideways at roughly 28000Km/h minimum. Or in plain english, you need to be eight times faster than a speeding bullet just not to fall out of the sky, to say nothing about getting to more distant places. And you usually need to do that with a massive multi-tonne spacecraft, not just a little bullet. I think that puts into perspective the amount of chemical energy stored in a rocket's propellant tanks.

But back to Sputnik, what always blows my mind is that the country that first accomplished it had been a technological backwater just forty years earlier. Forty years to go from a dismal literacy rate and barely any industrialization, to accomplishing science and engineering first-of-their-kind marvels that will be forever remembered in history.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago

Old news, but it’s also a fun fact: Claudia De La Cruz is actually the candidate for two parties. The workers party got her on a state ballot by choosing to nominate the PSL candidate as theirs after gaining ballot access.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago

Reading back through a lot of the dumb silly shit folks used to do - Discordianism, Church of Subgenius, culture-hacking and culture jamming, and like, we fucking lost, huh? Game gate and now it's, idk, culture-extorting social media hate mob offspring from hell are doing evil culture jamming effectively and reliably when all AdBusters ever managed was selling a slick 25$ per magazine. People are all caught up in weird cults but they're banal, evil, mass market cults of politics and money. The counterculture of the 20th still exists but it's been completely 100% subverted, chewed up, and spit out as self help culture and and commercialized snake oil.

Is whimsy, satire, and contrarian bullshit even possible in the present day social, media, and political atmosphere? I Can't even see dumb shit like Flying Spaghetti Monster taking off in the aftermath of New Atheism and the stratification of US society under two competing cults of fascism with a big chunk of the population stuck between them, totally depoliticized and without much in the way of real beliefs.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Bit idea: the Joker sequel actually does attract an incel shooter, but the theater is so empty that it doesn't even make the news

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Saw my first cybertruck irl

It was somehow even more garish looking in person than I was expecting and the guy driving it looked probably exactly what you'd imagine a bazingamobile owner to look like

data-laughing

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Object Oriented Programming but it was invented in the Soviet Union:

Class Conscious Programming

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It does genuinely cheer me up to think "at least I'm not Zelensky". Try it sometime, it's great

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The church and whatever gives me existential dread on a level that the scale of the universe can't match. I'm in a bizzare mood rn but it's fucking absurd to me that the abrahamic religions have such powerful pull in the history of the world. Dude, what the fuck.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago

Just took a bong rip after eating hot Cheetos and, y'all I have fucked up. My lungs are spicy

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I’ve never really liked this guy. A lot of his clothing takes are pretty based in classism, he is pretty self aware of it, but he’s always had a very Reddit-ass, financially comfortable with the unexamined political biases that come along with that class position and this is kind of an example of that

Like no Derek everyone lowering their expectations forever is not the solution. In 5 years we’ll just have these units being 1500 dollars anyway. When I first started renting 10+ years ago you could get a 800 sq single bedroom in my area for less than 7-800 dollars. I just left one of the shittiest apts I’ve ever lived in (about that size) and it was 1300-1400 dollars. This isn’t solving shit

Someone pointed out that the problem is the lack of regulation of housing as a “commodity” (bleh) and his smug ass is like “how do you propose we do that?” Like sure reforming housing is impossible, no society has ever done it before, but your solution which doesn’t address the root cause AT ALL and is basically the next in a long trend that has been going on for decades will FOR SURE sort it out. Stick to clothes dumbass

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Imagine having left over lasagna and not slapping it in the air fryer

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

I hate the fucking labor situation in food service, and it isn't even as bad as if I were working in a restaurant. But it really fucking sucks how nobody can ever call out or have a day off without someone else having to work like 10-12 ffucking hours or work 6 days in a fucking week

I had to do dinner last night, but the sous chef is gone this weekend and there's some fucking bullshit open house bullshit so I'm here at 8am getting ready to feed 400 people after getting 4 hours of sleep on what's supposed to be my fucking day off

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (11 children)

New bit idea: horror comedy where a cattle rancher is hunting a wolf that he thinks is eating all his cattle. The twist is that the rancher is a werewolf and is hunting himself.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago

my grandad threw all his kids in the car and drove them way out to the countryside where it was real dark so the light pollution wouldn't get in the way of everyone having a clear look at Sputnik cruising by. He thought it was important for them to see.

It's about the wholesomest image I can imagine in the 1950s.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (8 children)

Why do I bother arguing with libs yes-honey-left

The Lemmy.world mods and admins have been by far the worst, most predictable liberals imaginable, as though made in a lab.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It would be interesting to find the first behind the scenes feature where someone refers to the director of photography as the DoP instead of DP for the first time. We could then pinpoint exactly when the internet destroyed us

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