Notices by Hippy Steve (exador23@m.ai6yr.org)

Damn, The Onion. That's some dark ass satire. (prediction of the future?)

Trump Announces Seal Team 6 Killed U.S. Protester In Daring Overnight Raid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1v1xtRrOI4

Some may find this video news satire piece disturbing.

Say what now?!?

Faraday-caged drone triggers and directs lightning strikes https://newatlas.com/drones/faraday-caged-drone-lightning/

In a world first, Japanese researchers flew a lightning-proof drone in a thunderstorm, using it to induce and direct natural lightning strikes. The team is now working on how this flying lightning rod might capture and store lightning energy.

There's a decent bit of energy in the average lightning strike, as you might expect; Real Clear Science estimates about a billion joules. That translates to around 278 kilowatt-hours, or enough to charge a standard Hyundai Ioniq 6 nearly six times over. There are around 1.4 billion lightning strikes every year globally, or about 44 every second, representing some 383.6 terawatt-hours of electricity flashing out of the sky for free. That's nearly 1.5% of global electricity consumption (at 2023 levels) – and quite a decent resource if we could capture it.

yep.

🤦

NBC: A groundbreaking microscope at Harvard Medical School could lead to breakthroughs in cancer detection and research into longevity. But the scientist who developed computer scripts to read its images and unlock its full potential has been in an immigration detention center for two months — putting crucial scientific advancements at risk.

The scientist, the 30-year-old Russian-born Kseniia Pertova, worked at Harvard’s renowned Kirschner Lab until her arrest at a Boston airport in mid-February. She is now being held at ICE’s Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, Louisiana, and fighting possible deportation to Russia, where she said she fears persecution and jail time over her protests against the war in Ukraine.

AP: The Education Department will begin collection next month on student loans that are in default, including the garnishing of wages for potentially millions of borrowers, officials said Monday. Currently, roughly 5.3 million borrowers are in default on their federal student loans.

The Trump administration ’s announcement marks an end to a period of leniency that began during the COVID-19 pandemic. No federal student loans have been referred for collection since March 2020, including those in default. Under President Joe Biden, the Education Department tried multiple times to forgive millions of people’s student loans, only to be stopped by courts.

Head of Homeland Security can't even secure her purse.

CNN: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem fell victim to a thief while eating dinner at a downtown Washington, DC, restaurant Sunday night. Noem, who was asked about the theft at the White House Easter Egg Roll, acknowledged the incident & said the matter has not been resolved.

The Secret Service, which provides security for Noem, reviewed security camera footage at the restaurant & saw an unknown white male wearing a medical mask steal her bag & leave the restaurant. The thief got away with Noem’s driver’s license, medication, apartment keys, passport, DHS access badge, makeup bag, blank checks, and about $3,000 in cash.
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Who the hell carries around $3000 in cash?!? Did she just take a bribe or something?

@evan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyVTgYjwjeQ

@evan

Looks like maybe the animation was the same folks who did the old Time for Timer PSAs

And this is even cooler.

MEV-1 service spacecraft makes history with first satellite undocking https://newatlas.com/space/mev-1-service-spacecraft-undocking/

Built & operated by SpaceLogistics LLC, a Northrop Grumman subsidiary, MEV-1 had already made history on Feb 25, 2020 when it docked with the decommissioned Intelsat IS-901 communications satellite in GEO at an altitude of 22,000 miles above the Earth. Paradoxically, there was nothing wrong with the US$250-million IS-901 even after 15 years of service. The only reason it was taken out of service and shunted into a graveyard orbit was that it had run out of the propellant that it needed to keep it in its proper orbit and maintain attitude control.

Instead of tossing out a perfectly good piece of hardware, Northrop developed the MEV as a life-extension spacecraft that can not only bring defunct satellites back into service, it can also dock with craft that were never designed with a docking mechanism. The MEV-1 managed its docking feat with a special probe that inserts into the main engine nozzle of the target satellite and locks itself in. It then takes over the propulsion and attitude control duties, allowing the satellite to be reactivated and put back on the job.
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So this spacecraft docked with a satellite never intended to be docked. Provided the orbital control needed for a satellite out of fuel giving it an extra 5 yrs of life. Then moved it to an unused orbit, undocked, & is heading for another satellite to service. this is the way.

This is actually kinda cool.

World’s Oldest Satellite Has Been in Space for 67 Years. Engineers Want to Bring It Home https://gizmodo.com/worlds-oldest-satellite-has-been-in-space-for-67-years-engineers-want-to-bring-it-home-2000587158

Vanguard-1 is the second U.S. satellite launched to space. Conceived by the Naval Research Laboratory in 1955, it was designed to test the launch capabilities of a three-stage launch vehicle and the effects of the harsh space environment on a satellite. Today, it remains as the oldest artificial object orbiting Earth. A team of researchers and engineers from Virginia-based consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton have put together a proposal on how to retrieve the satellite from space, bringing it back to Earth to study how its equipment has fared over the years, according to a report by Space.com. The team’s proposal is detailed in a study published in the Aerospace Research Center earlier this year.

Vanguard-1 went silent in 1964, but tracking data shows its location and orbit. The satellite has persisted for so long due to its location in a highly elliptical orbit, unlike the Soviet Sputniks and the U.S.’s Explorer-1, which fell back to Earth within months or years due to atmospheric drag in low Earth orbit. If it were to be retrieved, Vanguard-1 would be the oldest satellite ever returned to Earth.
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The technological hurdles overcome on such a project would potentially allow for later space junk cleanup projects. Before we Kessler Syndrome ourselves out of space for millennia.

DHS tells US citizen and immigration advocate to leave the country https://www.nbcsandiego.com/nbc-7-responds-2/dhs-us-citizen-immigration-leave-country/3806750/

“You are currently here because the Department of Homeland Security paroled you into the United States for a limited period. DHS is now exercising its discretion to terminate your parole. Unless it expires sooner, your parole will terminate seven days from the date of this notice. If you do not depart the United States immediately, you will be subject to potential law enforcement actions that will result in your removal from the United States.“

“I was born in National City, California," Martinez said. "I was never paroled, I was never admitted into this country, I am no type of parole." Although he was born in the U.S., Martinez said he is still worried, since he has been helping the undocumented community for years.

American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on “college protesters,” “radicalized” political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers, according to internal documents, contracts, and communications 404 Media [and Wired] obtained via public records requests. https://www.404media.co/this-college-protester-isnt-real-its-an-ai-powered-undercover-bot-for-cops/

Massive Blue, the New York-based company that is selling police departments this technology, calls its product Overwatch, which it markets as an “AI-powered force multiplier for public safety” that “deploys lifelike virtual agents, which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels.” According to a presentation obtained by 404 Media, Massive Blue is offering cops these virtual personas that can be deployed across the internet with the express purpose of interacting with suspects over text messages and social media.

So there’s a big portion of the clog.

This cuisinart coffee maker is some bullshit. lasted less than a few months. not very repairable. the part that's clogged is inaccessible.

@ai6yr surgery successful! The patient lives again!

#RightToRepair

@ai6yr found a pair of straight needle nose pliers and made a poor man’s hemostat. Time for surgery. lol

@ai6yr don’t ever buy one. lol.

One major hurdle left to reassemble and test… this orange tube needs to be re-clamped. Because it needs to stretch to get the heater element assembly back in place. If I stretch without the clamp it comes off without a way to reattach. It’s about 4-5” down an area too tight for hands. My long pliers are bent ends and won’t fit. My wire stripper pliers aren’t quite long enough. Oh for a long armed Hemostat

@ai6yr poorly designed. Took a lot of disassembly and picking and blowing from each side of the clogged tube to finally get air flowing thru it. And this is an industrial 160 psi compressor.

Also note that coffee grounds accelerated out of a tube via 160psi compressed air feels like being sandblasted. And all their plastic bit are quite sharp. I’ve literally got blood, sweat, and tears invested in this repair now. lol

A feel-good story in the news today...

Residents of all ages in a small Michigan community formed a human chain and helped a local bookshop move each of its 9,100 books – one by one – to a new storefront about a block away.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/17/book-brigade-us-town-forms-human-chain-to-move-9100-books-one-by-one

The “book brigade” of about 300 people stood in two lines running along a sidewalk in downtown Chelsea on Sunday, passing each title from Serendipity Books’ former location directly to the correct shelves in the new building, down the block and around the corner on Main Street.

“It was a practical way to move the books, but it also was a way for everybody to have a part,” Michelle Tuplin, the store’s owner, said. “As people passed the books along, they said ‘I have not read this’ and ‘that’s a good one’.”

Tuplin said the endeavour took just under two hours – much shorter than hiring a moving company to box and unbox the thousands of titles. The brigade even put the books back on the shelves in alphabetical order.

This looks to be a rather important scoop by Politico. Musk's DOGE brats are behind a lot of the deportation shenanigans that have been going on. They're inside ICE and Social Security, and IRS, and etc. funneling that info to ICE and even helping to develop the strategies to deport as many people as possible, i.e. to make the ICE director's dream of "An Amazon Prime for humans" a reality.

DOGE’s bread and butter has been slashing headcounts but it is now wielding its influence deep inside the nation’s immigration system — an initiative led by one of Elon Musk’s closest friends, three Trump administration officials granted anonymity to discuss internal dynamics told POLITICO. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/11/doge-immigration-taskforce-00287327

Antonio Gracias, a Musk confidante whose history with the billionaire goes back more than 20 years, is quietly heading up a specialized DOGE immigration task force that’s embedded engineers & staffers across nearly every nook of the DHS, two of the people said. The task force is also working with DOGE operatives stationed at other agencies like the Social Security Administration & the Department of Health and Human Services, which house sensitive data on undocumented immigrants.

With Musk’s trusted friend & fixer at the helm, the task force marks a significant expansion of DOGE’s portfolio — from primarily working on agency-wide layoffs to executing the president’s most hardline immigration policies. It’s also a test for how far DOGE’s reach can extend.