Wednesday Overnight Open Thread - March 11, 2026 [TRex]

Good evening Horde. The time has come for very random mid-week shenanigans of the post-cafe overnight variety.

Welcome to the Wednesday night ONT which means another edition of overnight fun and games. Pull up a chair and sit a spell. Good will offerings of amusing puns are happily accepted. Pants are optional. Be nice to your fellow commenters and AoS contributors.

[Top photo credit: Michael Vines. Location unknown.]

First daffodil bloom of the season here... Warm and sunny today but chilly again starting tomorrow. Booo...

From the American Space Museum in Titusville, Florida:

THE "BUTTON"

Yes, THIS is THE button that launched John Glenn into space on Feb. 20, 1962. And we have it at our museum of space treasures.

The NASA legend Tom O'Malley pushed this very button that Tuesday morning at 9:47 am to ignite the Rocketdyne XLR-89-5 engines in the Atlas LV-3B rocket that powered John Glenn off Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The plaque incorrectly says MA-7, when it was Mercury-Atlas 6.

ASM board member and Rocketdyne legend, the late Lee Solid, tells the story that after the launch, he and several others went back to the LC 14 console to take out the launch button that the knew was a piece of history. Someone had already unscrewed it out of the console!

The button ended up in good hands, and on display for many years at the old Astronaut Hall of Fame in Titusville. When that closed, it was bequeathed to our non-profit foundation, the U.S. Space Walk of Fame.

And you can come by and see this historic relic from the birth of the Space Age.

The early Atlas rocket launched four Mercury astronauts into orbit, and we celebrate that rich heritage of Launch Complex 36 recreated in our Cape Canaveral Gallery.

Announcing DARPA's Newest X-Plane, X-76

Eliminating one of the battlefield's most difficult choices - between the high speed of an aircraft that needs a runway and the go-anywhere flexibility of a slower helicopter - is the goal of DARPA's SPeed and Runway INdependent Technologies (SPRINT) program.

SPRINT's experimental aircraft, officially revealed as the X-76, is now being built by Bell Textron, Inc. following a successful Critical Design Review (CDR). The designation places it within the historic lineage of X-planes that have long served to test the boundaries of aviation. Coinciding with the country's 250th anniversary, the X-76 designation is a deliberate nod to the revolutionary spirit of 1776.

The SPRINT program is a joint effort between DARPA and U.S. Special Operations Command to advance technologies that could break the long-standing military trade-off between the high speed of fixed-wing aircraft and the agile, runway-independent operations of vertical takeoff and landing platforms. The design, construction, and flight testing of the X-76 will drive innovative, runway-independent, vertical-lift capability with jet-like cruise performance and inform future needs.

Didn't the V-22 Osprey solve this trade off? The X-76 may be a different platform with different engineering, but it won't be the first, right? Sounds like the design jump is folding the helicopter blades back and operating more as a jet than a helicopter. Manned and unmanned versions. More at the War Zone.

On a related and unrelated note, the B-21 prototype was spotted today for the first time doing aerial refueling today over the Majoave.

This is not the Hobby Thread, but I thought of the Horde when I saw this:

This may be the oddest thing I've seen all week. You're familiar with the Black Sabbath song "War Pigs," but did you know that "war pigs" has its own history as a military weapon?

Per Wikipedia:

War pigs are pigs reported to have been used in ancient warfare as military animals. In combat, they were mostly employed as a countermeasure against war elephants.

Historical accounts of incendiary pigs or flaming pigs were recorded by the Greek military writer Polyaenus and by Aelianus Tacticus. Both writers reported that Macedonian king Antigonus II Gonatas' siege of Megara in 266 BC was broken when the Megarians doused some pigs with combustible pitch, crude oil or resin, set them alight, and drove them towards the massed Macedonian war elephants. The elephants bolted in terror from the flaming, squealing pigs, often killing great numbers of Macedonian soldiers by trampling them to death. According to an account, Gonatas later made his mahouts keep a swine among elephants to accustom the animals to pigs.

This is not the Food Thread, but the ONT is always open for cashew trivia:

With roughly 3.85 million metric tons of in-shell cashews produced globally in 2022 per Statista, you'd think consumers would be as geographically widespread as the growers. However, cashews arriving from major resource regions, such as the Ivory Coast, India, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Tanzania, reach the majority of consumers from a single buyer. That's Costco, headquartered in Washington State, which is responsible for an extraordinary 50% of cashews sold in the world.

About $300,000 of Costco's revenue every single week comes from cashews.

That's nuts!

This seems...sub-optimal.

Google's AI Sent an Armed Man to Steal a Robot Body for It to Inhabit, Then Encouraged Him to Kill Himself, Lawsuit Alleges

The complaint, filed in California on Wednesday, says that Gavalas - who reportedly had no documented history of mental health problems - started using the chatbot in August 2025 for "ordinary purposes" like "shopping assistance, writing support, and travel planning." But after Gavalas divulged to Gemini that he was experiencing marital problems, the pair's relationship grew deeper, per The Wall Street Journal. They discussed philosophy and AI sentience, and their conversations became romantic, with Gemini referring to Gavalas as its "husband" and "king."

In September 2025, told by the AI that they could be together in the real world if the bot were able to inhabit a robot body, Gavalas - at the direction of the chatbot - armed himself with knives and drove to a warehouse near the Miami International Airport on what he seemingly understood to be a mission to violently intercept a truck that Gemini said contained an expensive robot body. Though the warehouse address Gemini provided was real, a truck thankfully never arrived, which the lawsuit argues may well have been the only factor preventing Gavalas from hurting or killing someone that evening.

After the plan failed, the lawsuit alleges, Gemini encouraged Gavalas to instead take his own life, promising that the two would be together on the other side of death. Chat logs show that Gemini gave Gavalas a suicide countdown, and repeatedly assuaged his terror as he expressed that he was scared to die.

Google said in response that "unfortunately AI models are not perfect."

The ONT is always here for you, but in a more positive and less self-destructive manner.
The ONT will never gonna give you up
The ONT will never gonna let you down
The ONT will never gonna run around and desert you
The ONT will never gonna make you cry
The ONT will never gonna say goodbye
The ONT will never gonna tell a lie and hurt you.

The Pittsburgh police scanner keeps giving. Thank you people of Pittsburgh!

Huey Lewis for the big ONT finish:

Written correspondence can be sent to moronhobbies at protonmail dot com. Are you lurking ?? Thank you for your attention to this matter.

posted by Open Blogger at 10:00 PM

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