Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS has delighted observers already, but its morning run was only a warm-up — wait till you see what's coming.

The post Get Ready for Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS — The Best Is Yet to Come! appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Treat yourself to a comet bright enough to see plainly even in moonlight. Tsuchinshan-ATLAS beckons at dusk!

The post Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS Climbs, Brightens and Delights! appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS fades and shrinks as it rises high into a darker sky. Venus passes Antares. The waning Moon passes the Pleiades, Jupiter, and Mars. Arcturus becomes the Ghost of Summer Suns.

The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, October 18 – 27 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

We check in with the brightest comet of the year and see what's next, plus an update on Comet ATLAS (C/2024 S1), which still shows signs of life.

The post Grab Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS by the Tail appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Fading Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS poses high in a moonless sky for its fans with binoculars and telescopes, even as we wave farewell for at least a hundred thousand years, maybe forever. Meanwhile four brighter, more permanent members of the solar system await attention.

The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, October 25 – November 3 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

November’s night skies feature a cluster of prominent constellations led by a celestial queen. Our guided audio tour tells you how to identify them, along with tips for spotting all five bright planets and three meteor showers.

The post November Podcast: Cassiopeia & Company appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

The thin crescent Moon pairs beautifully with Venus low in Monday's twilight. And be on the lookout for any Taurid fireballs this week!

The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, November 1 – 10 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Astronomers have identified a distant stellar tagalong to the binary system V404 Cygni.

The post Newfound Stellar Companion May Explain Black Hole System appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Astronomers have, for the first time, mapped the 3D filamentary structure of a famous dandelion-shaped supernova remnant.

The post Astronomers Map a Dandelion Supernova appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Scientists have found possibly the oldest and largest crater on Venus — and it's like none they've ever seen on our sister planet.

The post Oldest and Largest Impact Crater Found on Venus appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Take a flight through Grus, one of the famous “southern birds” constellations.

The post Get to Know the Southern Constellation Grus, the Crane appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Exotic magnetars make brief, powerful flashes of radio waves — but a new discovery suggests there may be more than one way to make a magnetar.

The post A Radio Burst from a Giant "Dead" Galaxy appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

The stars betray that we've tipped from the season of warm evenings to the cold (or at least crisp). And the Moon this week skims Saturn, then the Pleiades.

The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, November 8 – 17 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

"Firestorm erupts over requiring women to sign up for military draft", reads the headline on a story today on TheHill.com.

Unfortunately, that firestorm amounts mostly to an exchange of sound bites and social-media posts, not a real debate, much less a hearing with independent witnesses, in either the House or Senate. It focuses on the proposal included in the Senate version of the annual National Defense [sic] Authorization Act (NDAA) to expand registration with the Selective Service System to include young women as well as young men, rather than on what may be a more significant proposal in the House version of the same bill to try to make draft registration automatic by basing the list of potential draftees on information aggregated from other Federal records rather than provided by registrants themselves -- denying potential draftees the chance to indicate their opposition to being drafted, and to obstruct the mobilization for total war, by opting out of draft registration.

Most importantly, the current "debate" ignores both the profound and quite possibly insolvable practical problems with trying to compile a registry of potential draftees from other existing Federal databases, and the more fundamental issue with any contingency planning or preparation for a draft: the way that, even when a draft is not active, the perceived availability of a draft as a fallback emboldens warmakers to embark on wars that people wouldn't volunteer to fight.

[First published on Antiwar.com.]

[“I have an amendment at the desk.” Rep. Chrissy Houlahan introduces a proposal from the Selective Service System to automate draft registration in the House Armed Services Committee, May 22, 2024.]

Under fire for proposing an ill-considered amendment to this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to “automatically” register all young men in the U.S. for a possible military draft, Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) has issued a statement that casts more doubt on her understanding of the current draft law and on the wisdom of her proposed changes to Selective Service registration.

Rep. Houlahan starts by claiming that “This new legislation saves taxpayers significant money.” But there’s absolutely no evidence to support this claim.

[Originally published by Responsible Statecraft, the journal of the Quincy Institute]

Two proposals that would radically alter the current system for registering Americans for a future draft were introduced recently in Congress without any hearings or debate.

They raise practical issues about whether any draft today would even be possible.

As part of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, the House voted this month to make registration with the Selective Service System of all draft-eligible men ages 18-26 “automatic.” In addition, the version of the NDAA on its way to the Senate floor would expand draft registration to include young women now, too.

Debate about the draft has typically been framed around whether the U.S. “needs'' a draft. Debate about women and the draft has been framed around whether women “should” be required to register. But the bigger question we face is three fold: will women sign up voluntarily (if in fact registration is not “automatic”), is “automatic” registration based on other databases feasible, and can registration or a draft – for men and/or women -- even be enforced.

When I was invited to testify before the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service (NCMNPS) in 2019, I told them that “any proposal that includes a compulsory element is a naïve fantasy unless it includes a credible enforcement plan and budget.... Women will be more likely to resist being forced into the military than men have been, and more people will support them in their resistance.”

[Originally published by Responsible Statecraft, the journal of the Quincy Institute]

How did this suddenly become the summer of “the draft”?

There are a number of proposals in the annual defense policy bill (National Defense Authorization Act, NDAA) that deal with the subject. There is one to expand Selective Service registration to women. Another that would make Selective Service registration for American men "automatic."

Still another proposed amendment to the NDAA, which has also been introduced as a freestanding bill, S. 4881, would repeal the Military Selective Service Act entirely. Meanwhile, the Center for a New American Security just published an exhaustive blueprint for modernizing mobilization, including readiness to activate conscription.

All this talk has compelled “fact checkers” to insist that no, the U.S. government isn’t suddenly "laying the groundwork" for a draft.

But saying the U.S. isn’t preparing for a draft is like saying it isn’t preparing for nuclear war. Just as the Department of Defense is tasked with maintaining readiness to initiate nuclear strikes whenever the Commander-In-Chief so orders, the Selective Service System has the sole mission of maintaining readiness to hold a draft lottery within five days and start selecting draftees and sending out notices to report for induction whenever Congress and the President so order.

As such, there are currently ten thousand draft board members who have been appointed and trained to adjudicate claims for deferment or exemption. As recently as this month, states have been openly seeking volunteers to fill empty slots. And both the SSS and hawkish think-tanks have been war-gaming the government’s contingency plans to activate a draft.

[Timeline for a draft, counting from “Mobilization Day” (M=0), from SSS Agency Response Plan (ARP) Workshop (September 7, 2023)]

There’s room for argument about how likely it is that the U.S. would launch nuclear missiles or activate a draft. But there’s no question that it’s planning and preparing for both, as it has been for decades. It would seem that after years of atrophy, the government is stepping up its attention to military mobilization and readiness for a draft.

Maybe it’s time to ask whether more easy and efficient ways of tapping into human capital for war make it easier to get into one and whether it is in our best interest to do so.

[First published on Antiwar.com]

Fantasies underlying push for conscription are delusional and dangerous.

Doubling down on their recent war-game exercises and report on the (un)readiness of the U.S. to activate a military draft, Taren Sylvester and Katherine Kuzminski of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) have a new article in War on the Rocks, “Preparing for the Possibility of a Draft Without Panic,” laying out why they think the U.S. needs to prepare for a draft in order to be able to win an all-out war with China over Taiwan.

CNAS and War on the Rocks like to describe themselves as “realists”. But their arguments for stepped-up planning and preparation for a draft are strikingly unrealistic, in at least four respects:

Generative Artifial Intelligence [sic] is one of the issues I've been working on with the National Writers Union and other allies.

Travel writers and others may be interested in the presentation I gave on Artificial Intelligence and Real Writers this issue to the Bay Area Travel Writers at our virtual meeting in September:

• Video (1 hour)
• Slides

Additional resources mentioned in my presentation:

• National Writers Union (NWU): Platform and Principles for Policy on Generative AI
• International Federation of Journalists (IFJ): Call to action on 'articifial intelligence'
• International Authors Forum (IAF): Principles for Artificial Intelligence and Authorship

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An Israel Association for Care and Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities is hiring a Grant and Content writer.The writer will be responsible for the full grant cycle including LOIs, proposals and reporting as well as related content, and will work within the international fundraising team. The position is full-time and based out of the Jerusalem office.Responsibilities:Write and prepare proposals and reports for funders.Conduct donor research.Prepare program and grant related budgets with s...

יש לי אתר ובו מודעות גוגל אדסנס ומודעות אאוטבריין. אני מחפשת מישהו /י שיודע /ת להגדיר את מערכת Ad Manager כדי לגרום למודעות גוגל אדסנס ואאוטבריין להתחרות זו בזו.

דרוש /ה פרילנסר /ית לפיתוח אפליקציה חברתית עבור Android&IOS- הצעת מחיר כוללת.- אין דחיפות בלוחות הזמנים.

PayPal Advanced Checkout lets you accept credit and debit card payments directly from the website. You can set up custom credit card fields and add card payment form without any PayPal branding. The card input fields and payment form style can be customized as per the website design along with your business branding. The PayPal JavaScript SDK and REST API provide an easy way to integrate advanced checkout and credit card payment system in the web application. PayPal has 2 types of checkout systems, Standard and Advanced. If you want to embed PayPal branded payment component, integrate PayPal Standard Checkout

The post PayPal Advanced Checkout Card Payments Integration in PHP appeared first on CodexWorld.

OpenStreetMap is a free and open-source platform that is used to embed maps on the website. You can use OpenStreetMap API to embed maps with marker in HTML. Similar to Google Maps, OpenStreetMap is used to display maps with marker and info window. Mostly, the single marker is pointed on the map to display the location with marker and info window popup. We can embed maps with multiple markers and info-windows using OpenStreetMap API. Map with multiple markers are very useful when you want to show multiple locations on a single map. The user can see multiple locations with markers

The post OpenStreetMap with Multiple Markers and Info Windows using JavaScript appeared first on CodexWorld.

The web form is a commonly used element in each website. In some cases, the user is allowed to select files with the input data so that the files are attached to the form data. Mostly the default HTML file input interface is used to select and upload files. But if you want to make web form UI more effective, drag and drop file upload feature can be used. The drag-and-drop feature provides an advanced file upload interface on the web page. The user can drag the files from the local drive and drop them into the DOM element. In

The post Create Web Form with Drag and Drop File Upload using JavaScript and PHP appeared first on CodexWorld.