A motley collection of ideas
According to the Gregorian calendar, today is August 17, the day of Hyacinth. Exactly 48 years ago, the TIT Budapest Planetarium opened in Népliget, and also 48 years ago, the Russian nuclear icebreaker Arktika broke through the ice cover of the Arctic Ocean basin for the first time in the history of navigation and reached … Read more
www.youtube.com/@BluePawPrint It is a widespread – and completely false – belief that the first television broadcast through which humanity unintentionally announced its presence to the Universe was Adolf Hitler’s speech at the opening ceremony of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. This myth entered popular culture largely thanks to Carl Sagan’s novel Contact. In reality, that was … Read more
After Ákos Hadházy staged his liberal–sorosista jamboree outside the paternal farmstead of the esteemed General Doctor Prime Minister’s illustrious father, Telex.hu has now sunk its teeth into the same carcass. One of the liberal online media dreadnought’s unnamed readers — presumably with a passing disregard for aviation laws (link in the comments) — sent up … Read more
https://trek.nasa.gov One day, a trip to the Seychelles, Zanzibar or Thailand might no longer seem exciting enough. After Tibor Kapu’s space journey, how could we settle for anything less than Mars, Europa or the asteroid Vesta? While traveling there isn’t yet possible in person, we can already explore these destinations virtually. The NASA Solar System … Read more
Hungary’s tallest tower since 1933 has been the Lakihegy transmitter tower. This iconic structure has become a symbol of Hungarian radio broadcasting over the past century. Located on the outskirts of Szigetszentmiklós, the octahedron-shaped tower, made up of eight triangles, reaches a maximum height of 307 meters — taller than the Eiffel Tower was. The … Read more
Morning on the radio, Péter Zentai was philosophizing that the key question of the future will be: will humans control artificial intelligence, or will artificial intelligence control humans? I thought, let me ask ChatGPT—after all, who on Earth would know the answer better than an AI? In response, the AI wrote a short essay. Here … Read more
By “positive feedback” (positive feedback, Positive Rückkopplung) we mean a process that excites itself. The elements of a system interact in such a way that the process which triggered the effect becomes ever stronger. This phenomenon occurs in technical devices, in biological systems, and in society as well. For example, everyone has probably experienced the … Read more
The history of wired telecommunications in Hungary spans more than 150 years, reflecting the evolution of global communication technology from the mid-19th century to the digital era. This chronology traces the key milestones from the first telegraph lines to the complete digitalization of Hungary’s wired network in 2005, highlighting technological, organizational, and regulatory changes that … Read more
This morning I thought of Professor PJT, a born techno-optimist. We never really liked each other, but we respected each other’s opinions—and perhaps quietly irritated one another too. Mutual sympathy was certainly not helped by the fact that my better half didn’t hesitate to rub it in early on that she was an ecologist, from … Read more
Lately, the Hungarian press has been full of reports that the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) and the Ukrainian police have arrested a 28-year-old local resident who, on the night of July 16, 2025, set fire to the Greek Catholic church in Palágykomoróc and wrote anti-Hungarian slogans on its wall. Palágykomoróc (in Ukrainian: Паладь Комарівці) is … Read more