Author: David Chappell

Words Without Burden: The Cosmonaut Ludmila Recording and its Misinterpretation

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The Judica-Cordiglia brothers, Achille (1933–2015) and Giovanni Battista (1939–2024), radio amateurs of Turin, Italy.

The so-called Cosmonaut Ludmila recording is of a series of radio transmissions intercepted by the Judica-Cordiglia brothers in May of 1961 on a channel which they believed was used by the Soviet space program. They interpreted the utterances as a distress call from a Soviet female astronaut reporting an onboard fire. Since no corresponding Soviet space mission has ever been identified, it is now widely supposed that the recording is a clumsy hoax. We carefully transcribe the recording and find that it contains no references at all to space flight, only nondescript utterances interspersed with childish patter and frivolous remarks about the heat in the radio operator’s workspace.

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Every Sound Soon Dies

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A portrait of a man in suit and tie
Guglielmo Marconi in 1909

Since my previous article on Marconi I have tracked down the source of the extraordinary assertion made in the Provincetown Independent that the radio pioneer believed “sound never disappears from Earth”.i All the references I have found to this idea eventually lead back to the book Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music by Greg Milner which was published in 2009ii.

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Nessus in the Role of a Tease

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Nessus is a security scanner sold by a company called Tenable. It runs through a customer’s network checking to see whether the computers have any known defects which could undermine their security.

Normally this works well. Yes, sometimes the test plugins do not have access to full information and have to make assumptions which lead to false positives. But sometimes Tenable writes the test procedure incorrectly. This has happened three times in the last three weeks.

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Workaround for Diversity Visa Lottery Site Bugs

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Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

How to get around Connection Reset on DV Lottery application:

Increase the JPEG compression on your photos until they are 60KB or smaller. Keep the dimensions at the required 600 by 600 pixels.

If you still get Connection Reset, don’t despair, you don’t need to enter everything again:

* Start a new application
* Do the Captcha
* Go back to your original application and reload the page

First Review of Star Wars in the Soviet Union

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The review as it appeared in the Literary Gazette. Caption under photograph of storm trooper: This is what one of the “heroes” of the film War of the Stars looks like.

This is the first review of Star Wars published in the Soviet Union. It appeared in the Literary Gazette, a Moscow weekly, on September 7, 1977.

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Mystifying Marconi

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A portrait of a man in suit and tie
Guglielmo Marconi in 1909

My attention was recently drawn to an article in the Provincetown Independent entitled The Marconi Mythology. This makes the claim that “His ideas were derived from spiritualism, a pseudo-religious movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries by which people sought to commune with the spirit world.” It also claims that Marconi believed that “sound never disappears from Earth” and that one could potentially construct a device to recover the sound of the angels singing in Bethlehem!

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