<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div><ul><li>The longest total <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/lunar-eclipse">lunar eclipse</a> of the century happened last week, on July 27.</li><li>Although the event looked stunning from many parts of Earth, a 2014 video from NASA's Messenger satellite reveals what the event would have looked like from&#xa0;Mercury.</li></ul>On the night of July 27 and the early morning hours of July 28, sky-watchers across the Eastern Hemisphere were treated to the&#xa0;<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/blood-moon-in-july-will-be-longest-lunar-eclipse-in-a-century-2018-6">longest lunar eclipse</a>&#xa0;of the 21st century.A&#xa0;<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-lunar-eclipses-work-earth-moon-red-shadow-2018-7">lunar eclipse&#xa0;</a>occurs when the sun, Earth, and moon are directly aligned, and the moon's orbit brings it into Earth's shadow. The moon passes through the darkest region of Earth's shadow, known as the umbra, which gives the moon a reddish sheen because of the way the sun's light gets refracted by Earth's atmosphere.The event captivated people on&#xa0;Earth, who took <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/blood-moon-photos-longest-lunar-eclipse-of-the-century-2018-7">stunning photos of the "blood moon"</a> - a term that comes from the red-orange hue the moon takes on during a lunar eclipse.German astronaut Alexander Gerst, who is currently onboard the International Space Station, even watched and <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/blood-moon-lunar-eclipse-images-international-space-station-2018-7">photographed the&#xa0;eclipse</a>&#xa0;from his temporary home about 250 miles&#xa0;<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/earth-moon-distance-edge-of-outer-space-2018-5">above Earth</a>.From other vantage points in our solar system, the eclipse would also look remarkable. If someone were standing on the moon&#xa0;during a lunar eclipse, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/what-earth-looks-like-during-blood-moon-2018-7">the Earth would appear to be surrounded by a bright-red ring of fire</a>.And NASA's&#xa0;Messenger satellite, which orbited Mercury between 2011 and 2015, provided remarkable footage of what lunar eclipses look like from our solar system's innermost planet.NASA satellites orbiting distant planets occasionally train their cameras on the moon during these celestial events, and Messenger did so during a&#xa0;2014 lunar eclipse. From there, here's what it looked like:In this timelapse, which&#xa0;was created from 31 images taken two minutes apart, the brighter light is Earth, and the smaller one is the moon. Once the moon is fully in Earth's shadow, it seems to disappear completely.Messenger was the first spacecraft ever to orbit Mercury, but its mission came to an end when NASA intentionally crashed the satellite into the planet in April 2015.&#xa0;If you missed the most recent lunar eclipse, you may get another chance to see one on January 20-21, 2019.<div><div style="position:relative;padding-bottom:54%"></div></div> <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/lunar-eclipse-why-moon-is-blood-red-2018-7">Why the moon turns red during a total lunar eclipse</a></h3> <div> </div> </div></hr>

A NASA satellite revealed what a lunar eclipse looks like from Mercury

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Blue Wells and his wife sold their Atlanta home and moved to a tiny-home village in South Carolina.</li><li>Shortly after the lifestyle change, he was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.</li></ul>This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ronald Wells, who goes by Blue, about moving into a tiny-home village in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, and his life there now. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. I moved into a 600-square-foot solar-powered one-bedroom, 1 ½-bathroom tiny home in December 2021 with my wife, Pamela, and our two dogs and two cats. It was designed and built by Eclipse Cottages.It's much taller than a typical tiny home: The ceilings in our main room are 16 feet, and the ceilings in our loft are 6.6 feet. Before buying my tiny home, I lived all over the country: Virginia, Chicago, Missouri, Maryland, and Atlanta, where I was for the past 16 years before moving to South Carolina. After moving down here and getting diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, I realized that something was pushing me this way that I wasn't aware of.The best thing about this place is the freedom. I can come home and go out to eat whenever I want. I never have to worry about it. It takes me 30 minutes to clean my entire house.I've told people since my diagnosis: "I am less stressed now as a stage 4 cancer patient living in a tiny home than I was being a six-figure executive in Atlanta."That took more years of my life than this cancer will.<h2>I've always loved tiny homes, so after I got laid off, we decided to buy one</h2>I was working for a software company. In February 2021, I got laid off and took a severance package.I had been an aficionado of tiny homes for years. I watched every YouTube video and every TV show about the different designs and what people were doing and how they're doing it. I drove my wife and kids nuts.<div type="image" title="Blue Wells and his wife Pamela" height="425" width="480" msid="96092108" hostid="261" sizebytes="21454"></div><h2>We looked at several communities. The one we chose was affordable, unique, and community-based.</h2>We spent a couple of months researching where we would want to be. The place in Georgia we looked at was nice but not really a development. There was a lack of community. It also didn't have any cell signal or internet, and there wasn't enough industry around it where I felt I could go out and get a job. We really liked a place in Tennessee, but the price for tiny homes there became the same as that of a regular home because of the way the houses were built. It was close to $200,000, and I had set a limit for myself of $150,000.Then we came to South Carolina, and after meeting Justin Draplin, who founded the Eclipse community — and after seeing the design — we decided on it. So we put our 3,500-square-foot house on the market and sold everything in it. In May 2021, we moved and stayed in a rental while our house was under construction. <h2>I may not have ever found out about my cancer if I didn't move here</h2>Justin and I just clicked. He seemed like a decent guy who was the opposite of everything I'd dealt with for 35 years in the corporate business world.In January, I went to work for Justin. That lasted four months before I fell off a ladder and broke my heel. After that surgery, they uncovered the cancer. If I hadn't fallen off that ladder, there would have been no impetus for me to go to the doctor and figure anything else out. It literally saved my life. <div type="image" title="the inside of Blue Wells' tiny home" height="2667" width="2000" msid="96092109" hostid="261" sizebytes="230000"></div><h2>We pay nearly one-tenth of what we did in Atlanta, and it allows us a lot of freedom, but it took some getting used to</h2>My home in Georgia cost us $4,000 to $6,000 a month. In the hot summertime, electric bills were upward of $600. I pay my lot rent, which includes electricity, water, trash pickup, and access to everything in the community. That's about $500. My out-of-pocket expenses are my internet, which is $50 a month, and my propane, which is $30 a month.It takes some getting used to when you go from 3,500 square feet to 600 square feet. It's taken us probably six to eight months, maybe a year, with everything else that's been going on to really decorate it. Most furniture is not built for tiny homes. You stick a sofa from a big home into a tiny home, and there's an entire room filled. You have to be very judicious about what you're looking at. What we found was that antiques worked best. You can find a lot of smaller, older furniture that fits nicely.This was the only manufacturer we saw whose builds had 1 ½ baths, and after the year that we've had, I don't understand how more than two people can live in a tiny home without an extra bathroom. It's also the only one we saw to offer lofts this tall. Typically it's a crawl space, so we have a true loft. <h2>Everyone seems lighter in our community</h2>We just had Thanksgiving in our clubhouse in the neighborhood. We had probably 35 or 40 residents and more food than you needed to feed an army: multiple turkeys, multiple hams, and a whole table of desserts. It was maybe the best Thanksgiving I'd ever had. It struck me that I was looking at a bunch of people who decided that they were tired of the rat race, the stress, and the pressure that society and jobs put on us, and that we put on ourselves. The people that I've met here, they feel lighter to me than anyone else I've met.

A 55-year-old traded in his corporate job and 3,500-square-foot house for a tiny home in a village at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Despite a post-move cancer diagnosis, he says he's never felt freer.

<keyword id="12161" type="LOCATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="San-Francisco">San Francisco</keyword>, <keyword id="2141158" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="Billionaire-Richard-Branson">Billionaire Richard Branson</keyword>'s <keyword id="10424911" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="space-tourism-company-virgin-galactic">space tourism company Virgin Galactic</keyword> cut short the first rocket-powered test flight of its spaceplane from New Mexico in the US. The company had been planning to reach space with the test flight on Saturday but the spaceplane's engine cut off too early. Following the incident, the vehicle's two pilots flew back to <keyword id="1138905" type="LOCATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="Spaceport-America">Spaceport America</keyword> and landed safely. "Our flight today did not reach space as we had been planning," said Michael Colglazier, CEO, Virgin Galactic. "After being released from its mothership, SpaceShip Two Unity's onboard computer that monitors the rocket motor lost connection. As designed this triggered a fail-safe scenario that intentionally halted ignition of the rocket motor," he said. This test flight hoped to fulfill a number of objectives, including testing elements of the spaceplane's customer cabin as well as assessing the upgraded horizontal stabilisers and flight controls during boost. The flight also carried payloads as part of the NASA Flight Opportunities Programme. "As we do with every test flight, we are evaluating all the data, including the root cause assessment of the computer communication loss," Colglazier said, adding, that the company would share information on its next flight window in the near future. This flight which <keyword id="10424912" type="COMPANY" weightage="20" keywordseo="the-virgin-galactic">the Virgin Galactic</keyword> had to cut short was meant to be a key step in helping the company in preparation of its aim sending first passengers to space on the spaceplane called VSS Unity, The Verge reported. The space tourism company aims at starting flying commercial passengers from 2021, the report said. SEE ALSO: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/science/space/news/dos-and-donts-during-solar-eclipse-surya-grahan/articleshow/76436997.cms">The do’s and don’ts of a Solar Eclipse — here what you need to know to protect yourself</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/science/space/news/solar-eclipse-december-2020-time-date-everything-you-need-to-know/articleshow/79697355.cms">The total solar eclipse and its 'diamond rings' won't be visible in India on December 14</a>

Virgin Galactic's first rocket-powered spaceflight test runs into a snag before reaching orbit

Sure, Google's answer to ChatGPT will save you time. But it'll also lie to you.This week Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, <a href="https://blog.google/technology/ai/bard-google-ai-search-updates/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">announced</a> that his company's internet search engine — the way the vast majority of humans interact with a near-total corpus of human knowledge — is about to change. Enter a query, and you'll get more than pages and pages of links, along with a few suggested answers. Now you'll get an assist from artificial intelligence."Soon," a Google blog post under Pichai's byline declared, "you'll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web." A chatbot named Bard will deliver search results in complete sentences, as a human might.A day later Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-chatgpt-bing-finally-beat-google-2023-2">announced</a> that his company's competing search engine, Bing, will do the same, using the tech behind the popular AI chatbot <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-chat-gpt-2023-1">ChatGPT</a>. No search engine has ever really challenged Google's hold on the world's questions; Microsoft sees AI as its chance to come at the king.These new chatbots aren't actually intelligent. The tech behind the scenes is called a large language model, a hunk of software that can extract words related to each other from a huge database and produce sophisticated writing and visual art based on minimal prompting. But when it comes to the acquisition, classification, and retrieval of knowledge, this approach is the subject of an old fight. It's been brewing since at least the early 2000s — and maybe since the 0s, at the Library of Alexandria. Fundamentally, it's a debate about the best way to know stuff. Do we engage with the complexity of competing information? Or do we let an authority reduce everything to a simple answer? Bard has a simple answer for that age-old question. From now on, instead of showing you a dozen webpages with instructions for opening a can of beans, machine-learning droids will just tell you how to open one. And if you believe that effective search is what made the internet the most important technology of the 20th and 21st centuries, then that seemingly simple change should give you the shakes. The collateral damage in this war of the machines could be nothing less than the obliteration of useful online information forever.<h2>A hallucination of answers</h2>Sometimes a simple answer is fine. In what the trade calls a "known-item search," we just want a factual response to a specific question. What's the most popular dog breed? How old is Madonna? Google is great at that stuff.The other kind of search — "exploratory search" — is the hard one. That's where you don't know what you don't know. What's the right phone for me? What's the deal with the Thirty Years' War? Getting a satisfactory answer is more iterative. You throw a bunch of keywords into the search box, you scroll through the links, you try new terms. It's not perfect, and it's skewed by the profit motives of advertisers and the implicit judgments that Google makes behind the scenes about which pages count as authoritative. But it's what made it possible for us to find a needle in an online haystack.Then came ChatGPT. As Google's vice president of search told me a year ago, when I wrote an article about <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/search-web-email-google-streaming-online-shopping-broken-2022-4">why online search sucks</a>, the company was already using artificial intelligence to make its search bar better at understanding what we seekers of knowledge really meant. But the seemingly overnight success of ChatGPT left Google scrambling to bring online a bot of its own that could answer back. Google has been dreaming of this particular electric sheep for a long time. At <a href="https://thenextweb.com/news/google-our-new-search-strategy-is-to-compute-answers-not-links" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a conference in 2011</a>, its chairman at the time, Eric Schmidt, declared that <a href="https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/02/google-now-wants-to-answer-your-questions-without-links-and-with-ai-where-does-that-leave-publishers/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">search's endgame</a> was to use AI to "literally compute the right answer" to queries rather than identify relevant pages. A <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3476415.3476428" target="_blank" rel="noopener">2021 paper from Google Research</a> lays out that aspiration in much more detail. "The original vision of question answering," the authors write, "was to provide human-quality responses (i.e., ask a question using natural language and get an answer in natural language). Question answering systems have only delivered on the question part." Language-model chatbots might be able to provide more humanlike answers than regular old search, they added, but there was one problem: "Such models are dilettantes." Meaning they don't have "a true understanding of the world," and they're "incapable of justifying their utterances by referring to supporting documents in the corpus they were trained over." To make an AI chatbot effective at search, the paper concludes, you'd have to build in more authority and transparency. You'd have to somehow remove bias from its training database, and you'd have to teach it to incorporate diverse perspectives. Pull off that <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3498366.3505816" target="_blank" rel="noopener">hat trick inside a backflip</a>, and you'd transform the bot from a dilettante to a reasonable facsimile of a "domain expert." I talked to a bunch of non-Google computer scientists about the state of internet search for my story last year, and all of them said the same thing about this idea: Don't do it.For one thing, chatbots lie. Not on purpose! It's just that they don't understand what they're saying. They're just recapitulating things they've absorbed elsewhere. And sometimes that stuff is wrong. Researchers describe this as a tendency to "<a href="https://research.google/pubs/pub51844/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">hallucinate</a>" — "producing highly pathological translations that are completely untethered from the source material." Chatbots, they warn, are inordinately vulnerable to regurgitating racism, misogyny, conspiracy theories, and lies with as much confidence as the truth.That's why we, the searchers, are a crucial component of the search process. Over years of exploring the digital world, we've all gotten better at spotting misinformation and disinformation. You know what I mean. When you're scrolling through the links in a Google search, looking for "esoteric shit," as one search expert calls it, you see some pages that just look dodgy, maybe in ways you can't even totally articulate. You skim past those and open the legit-looking ones in new tabs.Conversational answers generated automatically by chatbots will pretty much eliminate that human element of bullshit detection. Look at it this way: If you're the kind of person who reads this kind of article, you're trained to think that a halfway decent bit of writing signifies a modicum of competency and expertise. Links to sources or quotes from experts indicate viable research and confirmed facts. But search chatbots can fake all that. They'll elide the sources they're drawing on, and the biases built into their databases, behind the trappings of acceptable, almost-but-not-quite-human-sounding prose. However wrong they are, they'll sound right. We won't be able to tell if they're hallucinating. An early example of what we're in for: A wag on Mastodon who has been challenging chatbots <a href="https://qoto.org/@twitskeptic/109819433906709439" target="_blank" rel="noopener">asked a demo</a> of a Microsoft model trained on bioscience literature whether the antiparasitic drug ivermectin is effective in the treatment of COVID-19. It simply answered "yes." (<a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2797483" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Ivermectin is not effective against COVID-19</a>.) And that was a known-item search! The wag was looking for a simple fact. The chatbot gave him a nonfact and served it up as the truth.Sure, an early demo of Bing's new search bot provides traditional links-'n'-boxes results along with the AI's response. And it's possible that Google and Microsoft will eventually figure out how to make their bots better at separating fact from fiction, so you won't feel the need to check their work. But if algorithms were any good at spotting misinformation, then QAnon and vaccine deniers and maybe even Donald Trump wouldn't be a thing — or, at least, not as much of a thing. When it comes to search, AI isn't going to be a lie detector. It's going to be a very authoritative and friendly-sounding bullshit spreader.<h2>Knowing where we've been</h2>In his blog post, Pichai says conversational responses to complex queries are easier to understand than a long list of links. They're certainly faster to read — no more of that pesky scrolling and clicking. But even though a chatbot will presumably be drawing on the same sources as a traditional search engine, its answers are more likely to be oversimplifications. The risk is that search results will from now on be tales programmed by idiots, full of sound and vocabulary but with answers signifying nothing. That's not a result. It's spam.But the really dangerous part is that the chatbot's conversational answers will obliterate a core element of human understanding. Citations — a bibliography, a record of your footsteps through an intellectual forest — are the connective tissue of inquiry. They're not just about the establishment of <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263775816668857" target="_blank" rel="noopener">provenance</a>. They're a map of replicable pathways for ideas, the ligaments that turn information into knowledge. There's a reason it's called a train of thought; insights come from attaching ideas to each other and taking them out for a spin. That's what an exploratory search is all about: figuring out what you need to know as you learn it. Hide those pathways, and there's no way to know how a chatbot knows what it knows, which means there's no way to assess its answer."In many situations there is no one answer. There is no easy answer. You have to let people discover their own answers," Chirag Shah, an information scientist at the University of Washington, told me last year. "Now we have the technical abilities to build a large language model that can capture basically all of human knowledge. Let's say we could do that. The question is, would you then use it to answer all the questions? Even the questions that are not factual? It's one thing to ask when Labor Day is, or the next full solar eclipse. It's another to ask, should Russia have invaded Ukraine?"Complex subjects and ideas with multiple facets and arguments don't lend themselves to one-and-done answers. What you want is to click on the links, to follow your nose. That's how people turn existing information and art into something new, through innovation and synthesis. And that's exactly what chatbot search will not favor. Worst case, you won't be able to know anything outside what an opaque algorithm thinks is most relevant — factual or not.Microsoft's bot already shows its work. Presumably Google is also working on that. But honestly, it might not be much of a priority. "They want to keep things as simple and easy as possible for their end users," Shah observes. "That allows them to intertwine more ads in the same display and to optimize on whatever metrics they want in terms of ranking. But we already know that these things are not purely ranked on relevance. They're ranked on engagement. People don't just click and share things that are factually or authoritatively correct."Google and Bing, after all, are businesses. The chatbots answering our search terms can't be honest information brokers, not just because they're dumbasses, but because an honest information broker won't sell as many ads or amp up engagement. Google's search pages already aren't fully trustworthy — they overindex YouTube video results, for example, because YouTube is a subsidiary of Google. If the best instructional video for how to paint tabletop-game minifigures is on Vimeo? Tough.So imagine the kind of hallucinations a large language model like Bard will have if, in addition to misreading its own sources, it's programmed to favor engagement. It'll push the stuff that keeps us meatbags clicking. And as the past few years of social media have shown, that's rarely the truth. If a search engine offers only easy answers, no one will be able to ask hard questions.<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/author/adam-rogers" rel="">Adam Rogers</a> is a senior correspondent at Insider.

You Searched For "solar eclipse 2021" and got 4 results

A NASA satellite revealed what a lunar eclipse looks like from Mercury

Jeremy Berke

A 55-year-old traded in his corporate job and 3,500-square-foot house for a tiny home in a village at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Despite a post-move cancer diagnosis, he says he's never felt freer.

Kelsey Neubauer

Virgin Galactic's first rocket-powered spaceflight test runs into a snag before reaching orbit

IANS

The new ChatGPT clones from Google and Microsoft are going to destroy online search

Adam Rogers