#oolite

It's a fantastic space simulator that's part of a cool legacy. Piracy, space exploration, dog fights, trading, missions, bounty hunting, astroid mining, all the good stuff! It's fairly simple but surprisingly immersive, dynamic, and full of character.

Maybe you've heard of Elite, one of the first 3D space sims, or the modern Elite Dangerous. Oolite is a free (and open source I believe) iteration of the game, made back when the Elite series seemed dead.

Even though it was released in 2003, it's still being updated, and it holds up really well! And since it came out in 2003 it'll run on just about anything PC/Mac/Linux (I first started playing it on an eMac from 2005). One can easily upgrade the graphics with mods, or 'expansion packs.'

There's a really strong community feel to the game, with TONS of expansion packs, an active forum, even fanfiction.

It's not a perfect game, but it's a lot of fun. I've been playing it on and off for about 12-14 years. And its FREE. like. Why don't more people play this? I've literally never met anyone else who plays this except for the people on the forum (mostly middle aged Brits who played Elite back in the day).

The source of the materials used to make the Venus of Willendorf, a 30,000-year-old figurine that counts among the world’s oldest artifacts, have long eluded experts. The figurine, which resembles a woman with fulsome breasts and round hips, is made of a rock known as oolite, which isn’t native to Willendorf, the village in Austria where it was found. At long last, how the oolite made its way to Willendorf appears to be solved.

An anthropologist with the University of Vienna and two geologists said on Tuesday that the Venus of Willendorf’s oolite most likely came from an area in the north of Italy near Lake Garda. The findings by Gerhard Weber, Alexander Lukeneder, and Mathias Harzhauser put forward in their paper, which appears in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports, have the potential to reshape how experts understand the movement of various peoples during the Paleolithic era.

Working in collaboration with the prehistorian Walpurga Antl-Weiser and the Natural History Museum in Vienna, which owns the Venus of Willendorf, the team of researchers closely examined the figurine to determine its origins. They relied on a technique called micro-computed tomography, which uses extremely high-definition photography to offer cross-sections of objects.

Inside the oolite, they discovered remnants of shells and limonites, a kind of large grain. Some of the limonites appear to have fallen out of the figurine as it was being carved, leaving depressions behind. The experts suggested that the Venus of Willendorf’s gaping belly button was the result of this—a happy accident that was embraced by its maker.

If indeed the oolite came from northern Italy, it means that the sculpture’s maker likely traveled across an area where the Alps are sited. But because glaciers that have since melted once covered those mountains, the creator likely circumvented the Alps.

Because the oolite went from Italy to Austria, it probably means that the people of civilization that the sculpture’s maker belonged to “looked for and inhabited favorable locations,” Weber said in a statement. “When the climate or the prey situation changed, they moved on, preferably along rivers.”

Cleopatra's beach

The sand you see here gracing this rather ordinary beach on the Turkish island of Sedir did not originate here, and was not brought to its resting place by the action of waves or other natural forces but by the hand of man some 2,000 years ago in antiquity recording a romance that has fascinated people including Shakespeare, which is why this sand is protected by the government.During the civil war that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March Octavian (soon to become better known as the first emperor Augustus) was pitted against Marcus Antonius and his ally Cleopatra, ending in his victory over the ill fated couple at the battle of Actium.

The sand is made out of limey oolites, formed when supersaturated water starts to form a kind of natural pearly as grains roll in the waves and have calcium carbonate precipitated in layers over their central nuclei (see https://bit.ly/1WHE33i). They were transported by ship (legend says 16 large barge loads were needed) and hard graft from Egypt to make a perfect bathing spot for the amorous pair. The ruins of their local palace lie on the hillside opposite, and it may have been linked to the beach by a secret tunnel. Analysis has shows them to be identical to those on beaches west of Alexandria, at the time their main base, demonstrating that legend often contains a kernel of truth, however distorted and partially forgotten. .

Loz

to any pirates, vagrants, or any ~rebels~ who think picking on small mining craft is a good idea for managing their income

I got no quarrel with you. I’m just trying to get by.

But I have a Transporter with 0.1 LM top speed, a Mining Laser with a 3-second cooldown, and a job to do.

So when some Adder Pirate with a ECM-hardened missile, or the two Rebel buddies in a Moray Star Boat and a Krait a minute before her, come by lasers blazing thinking they can balance their fricking checkbooks from MY FRICKING HOLD...

There are three new burned out hunks of steel floating between Zaonce Astrum and Zaonce Prime.

I lost a single steel plate of cargo and a quarter tank of injector-fuel.

SO THIS IS YOUR ONE. ⁎⁎⁎⁎ING. WARNING. PUNKS. STAY THE **** AWAY FROM

MY

✱✱✱✱ING

CARGO