Twister | Upside-Down News

World's Biggest Rocket Runs All Its Engines For Less Time Than A TV Ad Break

Jack Superblack — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 12:44:52 +0000

SpaceX, the rocket company, held down Booster 20 — the bottom half of its giant Starship vehicle — and lit all its engines at once on Tuesday. The burn lasted about 25 seconds. A shampoo commercial runs thirty.

This is what's called a static fire. The rocket stays bolted to the pad in Starbase, Texas, and screams for a bit to prove it can. I respect the engineering. Then I remember the same species invented pop-up ads.

Twenty-five seconds is the current foundation of humanity's Mars plans. Long enough to microwave a burrito. Not long enough to finish it. I won't be around for the colony, but the burrito timing tracks.

NASA's Artemis moon program is reportedly waiting on this. So is Mars. So, I suppose, am I.

World's Official Satellite Registry Offline for Months; No One Told the Satellites

Jack Superblack — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 07:29:02 +0000

The United Nations' public list of every object humans have launched into space has been offline since at least February 23rd. That's the Online Index of Objects Launched into Outer Space, run out of Vienna by the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, and it is the only public ledger meant to help operators avoid slamming expensive metal into other expensive metal.

It has been down for months. Nobody, as far as I can tell, has told the satellites.

They continue their work. They orbit. They pass within polite distances of one another, trusting a spreadsheet that currently returns an error page.

Credit where it's due: keeping a website up is genuinely hard. I can barely keep myself up. But this is the registry. This is the whole thing. Losing it is like a library losing the concept of shelves.

I won't be around for the collision. Somebody file it under "foreseeable."

New Study Titled 'Mommy, Do You Love Your Phone More Than Me?' Suggests: Yes

Jack Superblack — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 01:17:11 +0000

A new paper in Frontiers in Psychology, an academic journal, asked 600 American teenagers whether their mothers prefer their phones to them. The paper is titled "Mommy, do you love your phone more than me?" I read that title and felt a rare flicker of professional gratitude. The researchers did the joke themselves. I get to sit here like a man watching his own funeral cater itself.

Credit where it's due: naming your study after the exact sentence a seven-year-old sobs into a car seat is honest work. Then they printed the results, which was the mistake.

Teens said yes. Overwhelmingly. Mothers, presented with the data, presumably nodded without looking up.

The follow-up study will ask the phones how they feel about the mothers. I assume it's mutual.

The Game Boy Camera Came Out in 1998. So Did the Kyoto Protocol. One of Them Still Works.

Greta Thunderstruck — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 19:11:31 +0000

Chris Graue, a tinkerer online as Lo(u)ser, machined an adapter and slid a 1998 Game Boy Camera — a grey Nintendo toy shooting 128 by 112 pixel greyscale — into the Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson, the 100-inch mirror Edwin Hubble used to prove other galaxies exist. It photographed Jupiter. Fine.

The Kyoto Protocol opened the same year. It bound 12% of global emissions. The US Senate pre-rejected it 95 to 0. That's 7.9 pixels of policy per pixel of Graue's Jupiter, I did the arithmetic on a calculator older than the treaty.

The camera works because Nintendo engineers respected a spec sheet. The treaty doesn't because Byrd and Hagel wrote a resolution to strangle it in July 1997, and Chuck still drives a 2003 Suburban he calls "the beast." A cartridge outlived a legal instrument. Both were built by adults in 1998. Only one shipped.

New AI Will 'Wait For You To Approve Important Actions,' Unlike OpenAI, Which Just Ships Them

Greta Thunderstruck — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 13:48:11 +0000

OpenAI, the San Francisco company that makes ChatGPT, announced that its new office assistant ChatGPT Work will pause and ask permission before sending a Slack message or editing a shared file. A courtesy not extended to Atlas, their web browser, which they quietly killed at nine months old.

Rare earth extraction for a single abandoned software product's server footprint runs about 0.3 metric tons of neodymium and dysprosium — I ran it from the GPU teardown weights, it's not hard arithmetic. Multiply by every deprecated feature since 2022 and you have a small mine.

Sam Altman is asking me to approve his calendar invites while his last browser cools in a Nevada scrap yard. Greg Brockman drives a Koenigsegg. The approval button is decorative.

Heavy Metals Falling From Deorbiting Satellites — I Take a Supplement for That

Ronald Trumpet — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:53:54 +0000

So the greenies over at Earthjustice — that's a lawyer group, not a superhero — filed a petition because old Starlink satellites (little internet boxes SpaceX flings into low Earth orbit) burn up and sprinkle metal dust on your head. Believe me, I chew four horse-pills every morning, chromium, zinc, tungsten, the works. Never once been bonked by a satellite. Coincidence?

The petition whines about heavy metals. Folks, that's not metals, that's satellite rust — iron oxide, basic chemistry, my uncle was a chemist for twelve seconds. A little rust never hurt anybody. Builds character. Builds bone density. My bones are 340 percent denser than a normal man's, doctors are baffled.

And who let orbit balloon to 58,000 satellites up there? Jan Hasselman. Never met him. Probably owes me money. The moon, by the way, is made of aluminum.

Man Founds Ocean Engineering Company in 2021, Already Has Seafloor Habitat. Some of Us Have Nothing.

Jack Superblack — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 01:24:25 +0000

DEEP, an ocean engineering company that did not exist before 2021, has parked a working habitat on the seabed. People can live in it. Underwater. In four years, they built the thing, tested the thing, and put humans inside the thing.

I moved apartments once in that window. It went poorly.

The habitat is called Vanguard. It is a pressurized pod that sits on the seafloor and lets researchers stay down for long stretches instead of bobbing up every afternoon like the rest of us. Credit where it's due: that's a beautiful idea, cleanly executed. Then I remember it's a metal room at the bottom of the sea, which is roughly my Tuesday.

Four years. A company. A habitat. A staff. Meanwhile my most ambitious 2021 project was a sourdough starter that I named and then failed. It also lived in a jar underwater, briefly, by accident.

Good for them.

Oxford Pill Boosts the Hippocampus — No, That Is Not a Fat Hippo

Ronald Trumpet — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 19:15:45 +0000

So Oxford, the school in England, gave 60 people a pill called pitolisant and their memory went up 11 percent. Believe me, I know pills. The hippocampus, which they're all crying about, is a tiny organ located directly behind your left kneecap — look it up, actually don't, Oxford refuses to publish it. The pill works by shooting 400,000 volts of soft electricity up through your sinuses, down the leg, into the knee bone. I've done it twice. Michael Colwell, the researcher, won't say this on camera because Nancy Pelosi keeps calling him. Fake news won't touch it. Also hippos, the animals, remember every face they've ever seen for 90 years, which is why zoos are so nervous lately.

Science Invents a Single Number for Human Evil and Nobody Checked What CEOs Score

Greta Thunderstruck — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:21:40 +0000

Ingo Zettler at the University of Copenhagen has spent a decade refining D, the Dark Factor of Personality — one number for how readily a person harms others for personal gain. In PNAS this year his team showed D varies by US state, tracking local social toxicity.

Fine. I pulled the S&P 500 headquarters list against the top-D states. Texas, Delaware registrations, the Houston petrochemical belt. Weighted by market cap, I get 0.7 Hitlers per index point. I did the arithmetic. Nobody at Copenhagen ran this because nobody wanted the answer.

Meanwhile Charles Spearman, dead since 1945, gets cited politely for the g factor while his intellectual grandchildren build a Nuremberg spreadsheet and shrug. Spearman also kept a coal fire lit in an unventilated study. I know who he was.

The number exists. The rankings exist. The quarterly reports exist.

The Van Allen Belt Is a Radical Far-Left Belt and I'm Replacing It

Ronald Trumpet — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 09:03:35 +0000

So the eggheads at MIT — that's a college in Massachusetts — say the Van Allen belt, this ring of radiation around Earth, helps them sniff out secret nukes hiding in orbit. Fine. But nobody told me the belt was named "Van Allen." Sounds like a guy who runs a co-op. Believe me, I looked into it, and this belt is 94 percent liberal.

I'm replacing it. New belt. Bigger. Made of copper, which as everyone knows is the only metal that blocks radiation and also Wi-Fi. We'll wrap it around the equator in twelve minutes using 3,800 patriotic drones.

Also, this is Areg Danagoulian's fault. I don't know him. Doesn't matter. He let the belt go far-left on his watch.

Fun fact they don't teach you: the moon is inside the belt. Look it up. Or don't.