Mark Adamson

Working in the creative/digital/knowledge economy. Proj leadership, bizdev, research, funding, strategy. Football & other musings (views own) included

[Mark Adamson @adamsonmark]

@northumbriana 😳

[Mark Adamson @adamsonmark]

Phenomenal, sensational. What a run 👏👏 Sabastian Sawe makes history with first competitive sub-two-hour marathon - BBC Sport https://t.co/FeYufxQ5Zt

[Mark Adamson @adamsonmark]

I 100% loved this game back in the day … and still do.

https://t.co/0Xee1utpRV

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The math on this black hole should mass-humble every physicist who thinks we understand gravity.

M87's central black hole is 6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun. It's 38 billion kilometers across. It spins at 80% of the theoretical maximum speed allowed by physics. And it's firing a plasma beam at near light speed that stretches 5,000 light-years into space.

To put 5,000 light-years in perspective: if you started driving at highway speed when the Egyptian pyramids were built, you'd have covered roughly 0.0005 light-years by now. This beam covers ten million times that distance.

The plasma travels in a spiral along a coiled magnetic field. Hubble watched it for 13 years just to confirm the motion pattern. And the beam isn't just decorating empty space. Stars near its path explode twice as often as stars elsewhere in the galaxy. Nobody knows why. The lead researcher at Stanford said they don't understand the mechanism at all.

The black hole eats roughly 90 Earth masses of material per day. The energy output from that feeding process matches the power of the jet itself, somewhere between 10^33 and 10^37 joules per second. The upper end of that range is a number so large it has no human analogy.

Your brain runs on 20 watts. This thing outputs more energy per second than every star in the Milky Way combined. And we photographed it with a telescope in 2019.

[Mark Adamson @adamsonmark]

Nothing to disagree with here… 👇

[Craig Hope @CraigHope_DM]

A league high 25 points lost from winning positions for NUFC now this season.
They are soft. Gone is the nastiness & smarts to defend a lead.
For Brian Brobbey last time out, see Jean-Philippe Mateta this time. They can be bullied. Mentality minnows.

[Gateshead FC @GatesheadFC]

When others didn't, we believed 😤🤍

#WorClub ⚪️⚫️

[Brian Hart @BrianTHart]

This is a truly incredible shot, especially given that the NASA live feed chose to show video of the cheering crowd right at the exact moment of solid rocket booster separation…

[Mark Adamson @adamsonmark]

This. All of it 👇

[Jim Keoghan @jim_keoghan]

Probably the best summation of the disparity of treatment between Everton and Chelsea’s (courtesy of @AHunterGuardian)

[Mark Douglas @MsiDouglas]

Really, really good away win, that. 4 wins from last 5 on the road.

Am sure the Howe out brigade told me season was over a fortnight ago... BUT 6 points off 5th. All of the top 9 (with exception of Arsenal) now played home & away.

Still plenty to play for in the league! #NUFC

[Mark Adamson @adamsonmark]

@northumbriana Me too, Dan.

A work of art.

[Mark Adamson @adamsonmark]

I don’t think we were even the third best team in that game. Absolute fair play to Ireland. #ENGvIRE

[The Athletic | Football @TheAthleticFC]

Newcastle United will be in Monday's FA Cup fifth round draw after beating Aston Villa 3-1.

But the game will most likely be remembered for the dreadful officiating:

▪️ Aston Villa's goal should not have stood. Tammy Abraham had mistimed his run and was a yard offside when the free-kick was delivered

▪️ Lucas Digne's late challenge on Jacob Murphy only brought a yellow card rather than a red. It left Murphy bleeding

▪️ Chris Kavanagh awarded a free-kick outside the area when Digne handled inside the penalty box

📝 @GeorgeCaulkin @ChrisDHWaugh

🔗 https://t.co/eWxrLCoFyZ

[Mark Adamson @adamsonmark]

This 👇

[Mark Douglas @MsiDouglas]

Don't think you can underestimate how big that result us for Eddie Howe and #nufc season. Two different systems / starting XIs in last two games, both paid off for the manager. Tonali celebration told its own story - unity is still there.

And into the draw, everyone can dream..

[George Parker @GeorgeWParker]

Tomorrow is the first anniversary of Peter Mandelson's big pre-Washington interview, when he claimed questions about Epstein were "an FT obsession" adding: "You can all f*** off."
https://t.co/Ss3gbbhg7T

[Mark Adamson @adamsonmark]

This 👇

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The signal strength hitting Earth from Voyager 1 is less than one trillionth of a watt.

To put that in perspective, your phone’s WiFi signal is roughly 100 billion times stronger, and it drops a connection walking between rooms.

NASA picks up Voyager’s whisper using arrays of 70-meter antennas, then reconstructs coherent data from it at 160 bits per second. That’s slower than a 1990s modem. Downloading a single photograph at that rate would take weeks.

The spacecraft itself runs on 8.8 kg of decaying plutonium-238 that generated 470 watts at launch in 1977. Today it produces roughly 200 watts, losing about 4 watts per year. NASA has been shutting down instruments one by one since the 1980s to keep the math working. They turned off the cosmic ray sensor just this year.

And here’s the part nobody’s talking about: there is exactly one antenna on Earth that can send commands to Voyager. Deep Space Station 43 in Canberra. It went offline for major upgrades from May 2025 through early 2026. During that window, if Voyager had a critical fault, the team would have had to wait months to respond.

A 48-year-old spacecraft built on 1970s computing, running on a plutonium battery that’s lost 60% of its output, transmitting at a power level that barely qualifies as existing, from a distance where light itself takes 23 hours to arrive. And a German observatory just casually picked up its carrier signal on a live stream.

The engineering margin NASA built into this mission was designed for 4 years to Saturn. Everything after that is borrowed time the engineers keep extending by doing math with 200 watts.

[Mark Adamson @adamsonmark]

@Graemethedean That first song was probably about a once cherished car he owned 😉

[Mark Adamson @adamsonmark]

@MsiDouglas Corrupt is the word you need to use there.

[Stephanie "LB" 🟧 @LincolnsBible]

posted on substack by a person named Teri Leigh

I’m writing this from Minnesota.

These are just a few things that may not be making the national or international news.

a beloved local donut shop Glam Doll Donuts across the street from where Alex Pretti died turned into a warming house and medic center for protestors building and maintaining the memorial site.

a 70yo independent bookstore owner DreamHaven Books down the street expressed his pain on camera, walked through a tear gas cloud, and his website crashed less than 24 hours later from too much business and donations.

the day after tear gas bombs destroyed a N-Mpls neighborhood sending a 6mo old baby to the hospital, at daybreak, a small church community cleaned up the mess of pepper balls, tear gas containers and trash so the neighbors didn’t have to wake up to the memories.

a local independent journalist Mercado Media pounding the streets everyday reporting things from the ground had a testicle removed and showed up two days later to walk with 75,000+ community members to walk the streets in -20 degree weather.

a local sex-positive adult-store The Smitten Kitten has completely transformed into a donation and distribution center.

a local pizza place Wrecktangle Pizza raised over $83K in less than a few days to support families that are sheltering in place.

tow-truck companies are donating their services to clean up the accidents and abandoned vehicles left by ICE and the city is waiving impound fees.

local multi-faith spiritual leaders are spearheading sit-ins at corporate headquarters such as Target and USBank to have deeper conversations with CEOs and boards of directors about community relief.

social workers are taking in children who came home from school with both their parents “disappeared.”

animal shelters and pet-fostering agencies are rescuing pets left alone for days or weeks after their humans were detained.

every restaurant, church, karate dojo, dance studio, school, barber shop, and other small business has created their own underground grassroots supportive network to protect their neighbors, get people to and from work, and raise funds to pay everyday bills.

women who are moms and work full-time jobs are donning reflective vests in shifts to stand watch at bus stops, city parks, and grocery store parking lots ini sub-zero temps to bear witness before going home to tuck their babies in at night.

the MN National Guard offered donuts, coffee, and hot cocoa to peaceful protesters the day after Alex Pretti died, reminding community that we are all in this together and they are here to keep the peace.

These are just a few examples. Stories like this are happening in the hundreds here, every single day!

Community is EVERYTHING!

This Substack community and the MN-Strong resistance has saved my mental health these last weeks.

Thank you for reading.

Thank you for giving a shit.

I love you.

[Mark Adamson @adamsonmark]

@northumbriana @Jen86_north Just can’t see it myself, Dan 😉

[Mark Adamson @adamsonmark]

@PaulBristow_ I was getting excited/carried away with 25mins to go! Hope you’re having a fab festive break, Paul. Shame it hasn’t led to a late Bristolian present to the Red Bulls 😉