2025 -> 2026

'It's a moment of death and rebirth': The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice #nature

Dozens of mysterious structures across the Northern Hemisphere – some nearly 5,000 years old – align precisely to frame the rising and setting Sun during midwinter's shortest day. What motivated people to construct these solar-calibrated masterpieces?

The winter solstice, which usually falls on 21 or 22 December in the Northern Hemisphere each year, marks the moment that one yearly cycle comes to an end and another is born. It is the day with the smallest number of sunlight hours in the calendar, and once it's over, the days lengthen again incrementally until the summer solstice in June.

The significance of this day is manifested in ancient monuments that were designed to acknowledge and celebrate its passing. One example is Maeshowe tomb in Orkney. To the untrained eye this burial cairn, created around 2800BC, looks like a grassy hillock – but it conceals a cuboid, stone-clad sepulchre and a 33ft (10m) long entry corridor oriented to the south-west. During midwinter, three weeks either side of the winter solstice, the setting Sun aims directly down the corridor and emanates its light into the tomb.

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Help my website is too small - lukeplant.me.uk #internet #crazy

The evidence that these sites are broken? They are too small:

https://www.djangoproject.com/: response body too small (6220 bytes)

https://www.cciw.co.uk/: response body too small (3033 bytes)

The first is the home page of the Django web framework, and is, unsurprisingly, implemented using Django (see the djangoproject.com source code). The second is one of my own projects, and also implemented using Django (source also available for anyone who cares).

Checking in webdev tools on these sites gives very similar numbers to the above for the over-the-wire size of the initial HTML (though I get slightly higher figures), so this wasn’t a blip caused by downtime, as far as I can see.

Apparently, if your HTML is less than 7k, that obviously can’t be a real website, let alone something as ridiculously small as 3k. Even with compression turned up all the way, it’s clearly impossible to return more than an error message with less than at least 4k, right?

Ryanair fined €256m over ‘abusive strategy’ to limit ticket sales by online travel agencies | Ryanair | The Guardian #economy #travel

Italy’s competition authority says Irish airline implemented technical obstacles to force sales through its own website

Earth’s atmosphere sheds onto the moon! #nature

When the Apollo astronauts brought back samples of the lunar soil, analysis revealed volatile (easily vaporized) substances, including water, carbon dioxide, helium, argon and nitrogen. Some of these particles come from the sun. But others, such as the nitrogen, must come from Earth. A 2005 study from the University of Tokyo suggested this could have occurred only before Earth had a magnetic field. But on December 11, 2025, a new study from the University of Rochester in New York said the magnetic field lines actually help funnel the particles from Earth’s atmosphere onto the lunar surface.

The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300 - The Silicon Underground #hardware #history #interesting

The Sony PVM-4300 was the largest CRT TV ever made. Its 45-inch tube provided 43 inches of visible improved definition TV. It stood about 27 inches tall. Sony’s part number suggests it has a 45 inch tube inside. But in a rare case of truth in advertising, Sony advertised it as a 43-inch model. It weighed about 450 pounds, stood about 27 inches tall, and it wouldn’t fit through a standard door frame. That’s probably okay, it’s not like someone was going to use this as a bedroom TV. This thing was going in your living room.

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Dainius