Last I heard, which seems to be similar to what is in an older article linked in the Futurism article, they are targeting low Earth orbit and will use a fleet of cubesats. This will allow a large display of dots, and could possibly be quite cheap to launch if they find another launch to piggy-back on with enough room. If using reflected sunlight, they don't need much power or weight, just a flat shiny surface. The first gen Irridium satellites were noted for being very bright when reflecting sunlight off a panel that is only a couple square meters.

I don't think it would be difficult to make a cubesat (or smaller) with a deployed mylar or kapton reflector, and most of the mass being used for fuel and engine for station keeping. It would probably be a question of just finding an appropriate launch to get enough spare room, and to find someone to pay for an ad that is only visible for a few minutes each night. Cubesats can cost as low as $10k each to launch.

I don't pay parents, siblings, or spouse for time and help, does that mean they are worthless and interchangable?

I actually rather dislike a lot of the coverage of things like "supermoon" and now "wolf moon" are getting. I've bumped into a few too many people, especially when doing science outreach work in the past, that had amateur astronomy ruined for them by unrealistic expectations. It is hard to say how many of them would have cared otherwise, but often the result is blaming the hobby or field and not the clickbait stories themselves.

Most people do not have to buy anything online. You could use one of the search engines that specialize in not retaining search histories and have existed for years now. If you don't trust them, there are tools that will make tracking you online much harder (near impossible if you don't give out easy to identify info). Nearly everything is still functional with these tools in use, just slightly less convenient.

People do give away a lot of information freely, but that info is a bit narrow. A lot more, broader info comes from tracking people based on what they do and not what they say, like through advertisements that can track your browsing habits. Either way, people don't care and some research has already shown it is not just a lack of understanding.

That building in London has the exact same architect as the hotel in Las Vegas above: Rafael Viñoly.

Canadians are friendly because they extracted all of their anger and hatred, and entombed it within the body of a demon. The demon was far too ugly though, so they gave it some feathers and a funny honk to soften the horror, at least from a distance.

Sort of, as in you should be able to see *very* roughly where it is. Close enough to a black hole event horizon, one would expect to see multiple, distorted images of things around the black hole as light gets bent around it, and the images would get kind of thin really close.

That said, the black circle gets referred to as the black hole's shadow and is somewhat larger than the actual event horizon. I've seen references that it is about 2.5x bigger, although I haven't kept up to date on it (a quick reference here that I have only had time to skim). The bending of the light seems to spread it out more, so you end up with a larger dark disk where it is much less likely for light to come toward you from.

I also haven't seen a reference to other literature, but if the light source is an accretion disk, there is expected to be a bit of gap between the inner edge of the accretion disk and event horizon. There is a distance from the black hole known as the innermost stable circular orbit. Stuff piling up any further than that can stay in orbit a long time by itself, and depends on friction, plasma effects, or radiated energy to decay in fall in closer. But once past the ISCO, orbits are no longer stable and decay without further interactions with other stuff, so you would end up with kind of a relatively empty area where stuff starts falling faster. This new work seems to be discussing how much light would come out of that gap.

There is a lot of work and graphics around for what a black hole does to near by light sources because the of Event Horizon Telescope that is attempting to image this with radio telescopes. The spin of the black hole would affect which way it is easier for bent light to go, so there are also predictions on how to measure the spin from said image.

That makes no sense... most people don't care and it obviously caters to at least a couple groups. It is pretty easy to make something milquetoast and inoffensive to a large number of people.

The Canadian Senate explicitly looked into this (one such story) and found no significant difference in accident rates. More recent news suggest a possible difference 5%(e.g. here), but they found no difference in fatalities. This is one of those situations where the numbers and effects get subtle, without getting into some of the studies on problems caused by people driving impaired because they need to hide from authorities instead of dealing with it (a big issue with underaged drinking).

Numbers aside, we as a society make choices all the time about whether it is better to let people do things at the cost of more accidents. We could also reduce risks of injuries from car accident by madating helmets for all driver's, but that is rarely popular and over the line for most.

I have no interest in using marijuana, even though I live in Canada now. But I am also not thrilled about the amount of money and manpower the government had used on criminalizing drugs, which causes quite a bit of harm itself without addressing actual problems leading to drug abuse. There are other options (e.g. Portugal's approach), and the always on going discussion of how society handles something that most people manage okay with while a subset has problems with abuse.

I hear of people marching some distance carrying their own weight in a backpack, so slow difficult movement should be above 2g. They seem to be assuming a person would train for this, so it is not like a random Joe is just dumped there and expected to walk around.

3g is often cited as a limit for space craft in situations where astronauts are expected to reach controls above them from a reclined position and that is not an absolute limit, but has some safety margin.

The paper calculates 4.6g max for walking using numbers world-record log carry, and later says 3.5g is more reasonable for a trained athlete. That doesn't seem that unreasonable to me, even if I would guess it is a bit on the high side.

In a reclined position, people can handle quite a bit more, so using an appropriately designed wheel chair they could go probably to almost twice that...

There is a lot of research into how fickle and bad memory can be in different situations, including many where people are really confident in their memories.