February 2021 Archives

Sunday, February 28, 2021

CONTEXT: Why Do Space Probes Still Use Monochrome Cameras?

Posted at 15:12 Permalink

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: History and Evolution of Dynamic RAM and CPU Interface

This is a long and detailed technical thread on how dynamic RAM has evolved over the years, particularly in how it interfaces to external components. The tricks used to improve interface bandwidth will make you shudder: adaptive tuning to compensate for signal propagation delays which vary with supply voltage and temperature, for example.

Posted at 13:53 Permalink

CONTINUITY: Why π^π^π^π Could Be an Integer

Posted at 12:28 Permalink

Saturday, February 27, 2021

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter—Spotting Objects on the Moon

Posted at 14:45 Permalink

CONTEXT: NANOGrav: A Galaxy-Scale Detector for Gravitational Background Radiation

Here is the Web Site of the NANOGrav project. This PBS video explains what they're trying to detect and how they're going about it.

Posted at 12:52 Permalink

CONTINUITY: Niiiice Doggy…

Posted at 12:34 Permalink

Friday, February 26, 2021

CONTINUITY: 1959—IBM 1401 Product Announcement

The IBM 1401 was a small (for the time) transistorised computer intended for business applications, where it would replace punched card machinery. It also served as an input/output processor for larger systems, offloading the overhead of directly driving card readers, punches, and line printers. More than 12,000 1400 series computers were sold, and the system remained in production until 1971.

This is a film recording of a nationwide closed circuit television product announcement from IBM, introducing the 1401 and its peripheral devices, including the IBM 305 RAMAC disc storage device.

Posted at 16:30 Permalink

CONTEXT: Fusion and Magnetic Reconnection Propulsion

A plasma thruster, which can be powered by any source of electrical energy, exploits the same electromagnetic field configuration which causes solar flares to create substantial thrust with exhaust velocities between 20 and 500 km/sec (the best chemical rockets produce around 4 km/sec). Here is the paper describing the thruster: “An Alfvenic reconnecting plasmoid thruster”.

Face it: “Alfvenic reconnecting plasmoid thruster” sounds like something right out of Doc Smith!

Posted at 12:57 Permalink

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Top Ten Craziest x86 Instructions

The Intel x86 “architecture” (if you can call it that) is the most amazing collection of bags hanging on the side of bags bulging with kludges hacked over a long history of providing absurdly complicated instructions almost nobody uses lest their code not run on older processors that don't implement them. Here are some of the most egregious examples.

I have actually used one of these instructions: can you guess which? I remember giggling when I learned the Univac 1107 had an instruction called “Magnitude of Characteristic Difference to Upper”. Imagine the progress that fifty years would bring!

Posted at 12:19 Permalink

Thursday, February 25, 2021

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Докторская колбаса—The Socialist Sausage That Changed the World

Doctor's sausage was created in the Soviet Union in 1936 under the direction of Anastas Mikoyan.

Posted at 15:13 Permalink

CONTINUITY: A Flying Oil Tanker—Boeing Resource Carrier One

Posted at 13:35 Permalink

CONTEXT: Who Could Have Imagined? Common Sense Predicts Replicability of Social Science Studies

Posted at 11:57 Permalink

Wednesday, February 24, 2021

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: NASA Perseverance Mars Rover Images Impact of Sky-Crane that Delivered It

Posted at 22:39 Permalink

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: A Thorium-228 Nuclear “Lightbulb” Rocket

Posted at 21:18 Permalink

CONTINUITY: “The Magnetic Office”—IBM Mag Card Selectric Typewriter, 1969

If they can put a man on the Moon, they can keep a “girl” from having to retype the whole page when the boss changes one word! This seems laughably crude today, but it was a miracle compared to doing it all manually, and IBM's “user interface” for editing was pure genius.

Posted at 16:09 Permalink

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: United Airlines Flight 328 NTSB Press Briefing Summary

Yesterday, 2020-02-23, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board held a press briefing about the investigation of the fan blade failure on the Boeing 777-200 operating United Airlines flight 328. Juan Browne presents a summary with the key take-aways from preliminary examination of the event.

Here is the complete NTSB briefing.

Posted at 13:07 Permalink

THE HAPPENING WORLD: SpaceX Starship SN10 Static Firing

The engine firing only took about a second. This video shows it from various directions, with pre- and post-firing operations. After the test SpaceX said that performance of one of the three engines was “suspect” and it will be changed out, with another static firing before the vehicle is cleared for flight. The next static firing may be as soon as 2021-02-24.

Posted at 12:51 Permalink

CONTEXT: Landing on Mars Like You’ve Never Seen It Before

Here is Scott Manley's analysis and commentary on the Perseverance Mars landing video, including decoding the secret message encoded in the gores of the parachute.

Posted at 12:35 Permalink

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

CONTINUITY: Hydroelectric Plant Fuse Replacement and Startup

The fuse replaced was 14,400 volts at 200 amperes. Fourmilab's electrical substation has three fuses rated for 8 amperes at 16,000 volts in each of the three phases of the incoming feed.

Fuses in the Fourmilab electric substation: 16000 V, 8 A

Posted at 13:09 Permalink

Monday, February 22, 2021

CONTEXT: United Airlines Flight 328 Update: Boeing 777-200 Fan Blade Failure

Posted at 22:23 Permalink

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Perseverance Rover’s Descent and Touchdown on Mars

Here is the complete NASA/JPL news conference presenting this video, discussing how it was acquired, and what it reveals about the performance of the landing system. The video captured during the descent and landing phase was captured by commercial video cameras and processed on-board the rover with a Linux-based computer running the ffmpeg open source video encoder software.

Posted at 21:49 Permalink

CONTINUITY: Molecular Sieves—A Vacuum Pump with No Moving Parts

Here is more information on molecular sieves.

Posted at 16:12 Permalink

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: How Do Nuclear Submarines Make Oxygen?

I'd never heard that submarines use “oxygen candles” as a backup to electrolysis to generate oxygen. Combustion that liberates free oxygen in a submerged submarine—what could possibly go wrong?

It is also interesting that monoethanolamine scrubbing allow removal of carbon dioxide without a consumable such as lithium hydroxide.

Posted at 13:27 Permalink

Sunday, February 21, 2021

CONTEXT: Remington Rand Electric Typewriter Sales Demonstration

The description of this film on YouTube says it dates from the late 1940s, but that can't be right since the salesman's pitch begins by linking the technology of the electric typewriter to the Remington Rand Univac I computer installed at the U.S. Census Bureau. The Census Bureau did not place its order for the Univac computer until March, 1951, and the computer was not delivered until December, 1952. So, it's probably from the early 1950s.

Posted at 15:06 Permalink

CONTINUITY: How Strong Is a Giant Solid Glass Ball?

Don't try this—anywhere!

Posted at 13:35 Permalink

THE HAPPENING WORLD: United Flight 328—What You Don’t Want to See out Your Passenger Window

Shortly after departure from Denver airport bound for Honolulu, a United Airlines Boeing 777-200 suffered a catastrophic failure of the right engine as photographed by a passenger above. Here is a quick look analysis by Juan Browne, including dash-cam video of the failure as it happened, video and pictures of debris falling to and on the ground, air traffic communications during the emergency, and video of the landing back at Denver.

Posted at 11:59 Permalink

Saturday, February 20, 2021

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Gabriel's Horn—Finite Volume but Infinite Surface Area

Here is more on Gabriel's Horn. Interestingly, as long as the curve rotated is continuously differentiable, there is no surface of revolution which has finite surface area and infinite volume.

Posted at 14:55 Permalink

CONTEXT: Bill Gates: Showing One’s Work and Getting the Right Answer Are “Racist”

Posted at 13:52 Permalink

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Antares Cargo Launch to the International Space Station

Posted at 13:44 Permalink

CONTINUITY: Corgi Movie Vision—Kid Vid from the 1970s

Sadly, there do not seem to be any movies of corgis! This thing ought to have been given away by the manufacturers of D-cell batteries.

Posted at 12:59 Permalink

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Rocket Sky-Crane Delivers Nuclear-Powered Aircraft Carrier to Alien Planet

“Aircraft carrier?"—yes, indeed.

Posted at 11:57 Permalink

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Owl Bet You Don't See Me

Posted at 11:54 Permalink

Friday, February 19, 2021

CONTINUITY: The 8-Bit Guy Got Wiped Out in the Texas Storm

Posted at 20:31 Permalink

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Detecting Extraterrestrial Biosignatures in the Atmospheres of Exoplanets

Posted at 20:06 Permalink

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: de Havilland Mosquito —– Was It the Most Versatile Aircraft of WW II?

The de Havilland Mosquito, built largely from wood, was not only one of the most effective Allied aircraft, it was one of the fastest multi-role aircraft of the war.

Posted at 14:06 Permalink

CONTEXT: Hydrogen-Oxygen Detonations with an Optimal Mixture

Clearing snow from the roof with supersonic shock waves!

Posted at 11:58 Permalink

Thursday, February 18, 2021

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Perseverance Lands on Mars: First Picture from the Surface

Posted at 21:55 Permalink

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Microscope Images of Molecules Which Give Distant Planetoids Their Red Colour

Atomic force microscopy shows carbon compounds actually look like their structural formulæ: images of the organic (abiotic) gunk that's abundant in the universe and may have been the building blocks of the first living organisms.

Posted at 14:56 Permalink

THE HAPPENING WORLD: NASA Perseverance Landing on Mars

Landing is scheduled for 20:55 UTC (or, more precisely, that's when confirmation of landing [or otherwise] will reach Earth). If you prefer more informal and chatty coverage, Everyday Astronaut will be covering the landing.

Here is a NASA/JPL animation of the Perseverance entry, descent, and landing sequence.

Posted at 11:59 Permalink

Wednesday, February 17, 2021

CONTINUITY: Canning Meat at Home

This should work fine with any lean meat. If your meat has a lot of fat, you may want to drain some of it before canning. I'd go with garlic rather than green peppers in the seasoning, but that's just me.

Posted at 23:53 Permalink

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Did an Engine Failure Kill a SpaceX Booster on Its 6th Flight?

Scott Manley analyses yesterday's SpaceX Falcon 9 landing failure, comparing mission video and telemetry of the re-entry burn to an almost identical mission profile flown a couple of weeks earlier.

Posted at 13:51 Permalink

CONTINUITY: Interstellar Migration for Non-Grabby and Very Patient Aliens

A new paper on arXiv, “Minimal conditions for survival of technological civilizations in the face of stellar evolution” by Brad Hansen and Ben Zuckerman, examines how alien technological civilisations which developed around type G stars like the Sun might cope with the inevitable departure of their star of origin from the main sequence and the consequent end of habitability of their home planet.

A civilisation which emerged in the window of habitability of their planet comparable to humans on Earth (around a billion years of habitability remaining), and wishes to survive, but has no interest in broad-scale colonisation of other stars, might simply choose to wait until the motions of stars around the galaxy brings a suitable new star and planetary system close to their own. If the plan is to re-settle around a red dwarf star (the most abundant, by far, in the galaxy, and with lifetimes measured in trillions of years), waiting on a time scale of hundreds of millions of years (the details are complicated, as described in the paper) is likely to bring a suitable target star sufficiently close that travelling there using only techniques currently within our grasp (rocket propulsion and gravity assists by giant planets orbiting the original star) is possible in around 100 years, or two orders of magnitude faster than reaching a star with an average distance (around four light years) in our region of the galaxy.

Once ensconced around the new dwarf star, there would be no need for further migration for a timescale comparable to the expected habitability of the galaxy. The authors suggest how star systems in which such a migration might presently be possible might be identified, and suggest them as candidates in searches for techno-signatures such a migration might create. What the re-settled aliens might do when, a couple of billion years after they're settled in their new home, the advancing front of grabby aliens arrive, is not discussed.

Posted at 11:55 Permalink

Tuesday, February 16, 2021

CONTEXT: Fun with Plasma Tubes

There is a great deal of wisdom here about setting up inexpensive but effective home laboratory vacuum systems, high voltage electric sources, and safety in using such equipment. The first baby steps toward magnetic confinement nuclear fusion for the amateur scientist!

Posted at 14:03 Permalink

THE HAPPENING WORLD: SpaceX Starlink Launch: Payloads Orbited Successfully, Booster Recovery Fails

I have started this SpaceX video of the mission just before the start of the entry burn for the first stage booster at 6 minutes after launch. Everything appears normal until the end of the entry burn, at which point there is a prolonged bright light at the right of the frame after the three engines were expected to cut off. At the scheduled time of landing, there is a brief orange glow to the right of the drone ship, and that's it. Interestingly, mission control, which usually calls out the start of the landing burn, was silent at the time it would have been expected.

Posted at 12:22 Permalink

CONTEXT: Mars Traffic Report

Key [from subsequent tweet]: Black circle - Mars surface Green circle - Areosynchronous orbit. Green: natural Martian satellites. Red: 2020 Mars Fleet. Blue: Active Mars orbiters. Magenta: Mars space junk (positions representative only)

Posted at 12:03 Permalink

Monday, February 15, 2021

CONTINUITY: How Does a Variac Wiper Avoiding Shorting Adjacent Turns? It Doesn't!

Posted at 16:50 Permalink

CONTINUITY: Balloon Busters—World War I's Forgotten Aces

Posted at 14:02 Permalink

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: 2000 Tonne Hydraulic Press Forging 3 Tonnes of Red Hot Steel

Posted at 13:35 Permalink

Sunday, February 14, 2021

THE HAPPENING WORLD: SpaceX Starlink Launch

Weather is presently estimated at only 40% favourable for launch, and Elon Musk has said that weather in the first stage booster recovery zone is estimated as permitting around a 60% chance of successful recovery, so this one may be delayed.

A second Starlink launch is scheduled for Wednesday, 2021-02-17 at 05:55 UTC.

Posted at 19:28 Permalink

CONTEXT: Restoring a Soyuz Electro-Mechanical Space Clock

The ticking would have driven me nuts, but it wouldn't have been as loud with the case closed and mounted behind the control panel.

Posted at 14:20 Permalink

CONTINUITY: Shepard Tones: Infinitely Rising or Falling Tone Auditory Illusion

Here is background on Shepard Tones. They are excellent for putting an audience on edge in science fiction and suspense movie soundtracks.

An on-line Shepard Tone generator is available.

Posted at 12:25 Permalink

THE HAPPENING WORLD: St Valentine's Day—Opening a Keyless “Love Lock”

Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
The LockPicking Lawyer,
makes quick work of you.

Posted at 12:00 Permalink

Saturday, February 13, 2021

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Worst Fake “Power Saver” Plug Yet

“Active component”—a big capacitor…with both leads connected to the mains neutral wire! Also, a fuse with a short-circuit across it. There is an LED to console you that is it's doing absolutely nothing other than wasting a tiny bit of power.

Posted at 14:19 Permalink

CONTINUITY: How Engineers Brought the SOHO Spacecraft Back to Life…for 25 Years

And it's still going strong after all these years! Here are the latest images.

Posted at 12:57 Permalink

Friday, February 12, 2021

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: A Transatlantic Glider Mission

Posted at 18:20 Permalink

CONTINUITY: Blue Origin Lunar Descent Demo Mission

Posted at 14:45 Permalink

Thursday, February 11, 2021

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Robin Hanson at the Foresight Institute: “A Simple Model of Grabby Aliens”

We've written here twice before about the Grabby Aliens model:

Posted at 19:49 Permalink

CONTEXT: The Modern Miracle of Living Stereo

The the late 1950s, mass-produced stereophonic recordings on vinyl discs were introduced by a variety of record labels, using the Westrex system where the two channels are encoded at 45 degree angles to the vertical. This is an RCA Victor promotional film explaining the technology and showing some of the first stereo phonographs made by the company. Early stereo records contained warnings against playing them on monophonic record players. Stereo cartridges used a smaller stylus and allowed motion in both the vertical and horizontal axes. Playing a stereo record with a mono cartridge would lead it its “ploughing” the groove and destroying the stereo content.

Posted at 14:16 Permalink

Wednesday, February 10, 2021

CONTINUITY: Blazing Satellites! The Almaz Space Cannon

Here is my 1998 article, “Blazing Satellites: Guns in Space!”.

Posted at 18:12 Permalink

CONTEXT: Wright Aeronautical Development Center Aircraft in Operation Redwing, 1956

Operation Redwing was a series of 17 atmospheric nuclear test detonations conducted between May and July of 1956 at Bikini and Eniwetok atolls in the South Pacific. A variety of fighter and bomber aircraft were flown in the vicinity of the explosions, equipped with instruments to measure the effects of the thermal load and shock wave upon their structure and operation with the goal of developing guidelines for operations involving nuclear weapons.

Posted at 15:51 Permalink

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: SpaceX Starship SN9 Test Flight in 4K Video and Slow Motion

Posted at 15:23 Permalink

THE HAPPENING WORLD: China's Tianwen-1 (天问) Spacecraft Arrives in Mars Orbit

Here is background on the mission. Landing and deployment of the rover is planned for May, 2021.

Posted at 14:26 Permalink

CONTINUITY: Making (and Hammering In) a Golden Railroad Spike

Well, there's one thing you can't do with Bitcoin!

Posted at 13:19 Permalink

Tuesday, February 9, 2021

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Emirates' Hope (مسبار الأمل) Spacecraft Enters Mars Orbit

Here is background on the mission.

Posted at 16:36 Permalink

CONTINUITY: The Baffling Fix that Kept Apollo 14 from Getting Sloshed

Posted at 14:06 Permalink

Monday, February 8, 2021

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Thermodynamically Sound Money: The Physics of Bitcoin

We mock your green paper “dollars”, created at the whim of an impotent and obsolete continental-scale, railroad-era empire, which defy fundamental physical principles such as conservation of mass-energy and replace them with the folly of illegitimate institutions at the behest of their political masters. Instead, we bypass your ziggurat of unpayable debt and fraud and supplant it with inherent scarcity grounded in number theory, then route around your coercive control, hidden confiscation by printing of funny money, and exclusion of billions of “unbanked” from the emerging global and eventually solar system free market.

Think you'll “Ban it?”

Go ahead, make my day.

Posted at 23:00 Permalink

CONTEXT: Coming: The High Frontier—Documentary on Gerard K. O'Neill and Space Colonies

Posted at 19:30 Permalink

CONTINUITY: A Clever and Efficient Solar-Powered LED Lantern

Nokero (“No kerosene”) produce solar-powered lamps intended to replace kerosene lanterns (with their attendant fuel expense, fire hazard, and indoor air pollution) for the approximately 1.2 billion people without access to reliable electric power. The design uses a lithium-iron-phosphate battery which, although having a lower energy density than lithium ion batteries, withstands more charge/discharge cycles without loss of capacity, is more tolerant of overcharge and discharge, less likely to explode or burst into flames, and uses a safer electrolyte.

The Nokero lamp uses a current regulator driven by a microcontroller to extract the most useful light from a battery charge, providing constant light and avoiding losses due to voltage drops in regulator components. In typical applications, the lamp provides around 15 hours of light from one day's charge in sunlight and about 2000 charge cycles without loss of capacity.

In this video, Big Clive reverse engineers the circuitry and explains how it achieves its admirable performance.

Posted at 15:50 Permalink

CONTEXT: Chimpanzees Have Astounding Short-Term Memory

Posted at 13:07 Permalink

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Air Stairs, a Hijacking, and the “Cooper Vane”

Posted at 12:05 Permalink

Sunday, February 7, 2021

THE HAPPENING WORLD: World's Oldest Known Wild Bird Hatches Chick at Age 62

 

Posted at 20:52 Permalink

CONTEXT: World's Simplest Electric Train

Posted at 13:58 Permalink

CONTINUITY: 1988 Basel Airshow Crash of Air France Airbus 320—What Happened?

Posted at 13:28 Permalink

Saturday, February 6, 2021

CONTINUITY: Fermi to Dirac: “Did you read my paper?”

Here is background on Fermi-Dirac statistics.

Posted at 11:49 Permalink

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: The Lorenz Mill—A Drippy Chaotic System

Posted at 11:42 Permalink

Friday, February 5, 2021

CONTEXT: Harvard’s Avi Loeb — Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

Harvard professor and chairman of the Astronomy department Avi Loeb believes that the most parsimonious explanation for interstellar object 1I/‘Oumuamua is that it is a discarded light-sail built by an advanced technological civilisation. In his recently published book, Extraterrestrial, he argues that natural explanations for the object's bizarre light curve, reflectivity, trajectory, and non-gravitational acceleration as it departed the solar system are more contrived and implausible than the object's being a piece of technology humans could build and launch today if we so wished.

In this conversation with Brian Keating, Prof. Loeb discusses ‘Oumuamua, what the Copernican principle implies for such objects and our likelihood of finding additional exemplars passing through the solar system, and why academic science is so loath to investigate evidence for artefacts of extraterrestrial technology while entertaining theories such as the multiverse, dark matter, supersymmetry, and string theory, for which there is no experimental evidence whatsoever.

Posted at 17:15 Permalink

CONTINUITY: Estes Model Rockets: A Brief History

Posted at 12:23 Permalink

Thursday, February 4, 2021

CONTINUITY: Curiosity’s Trek across Mars

Posted at 16:42 Permalink

CONTEXT: The Dance of Earth and Venus

Posted at 14:30 Permalink

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Another Sixty Starlink Satellites Head for Orbit

Posted at 13:20 Permalink

Wednesday, February 3, 2021

CONTEXT: “A Simple Model of Grabby Aliens” Now on arXiv

Robin Hanson, Daniel Martin, Calvin McCarter, and Jonathan Paulson present a novel solution to the Fermi paradox in “A Simple Model of Grabby Aliens”, now posted on arXiv. Spacefaring civilisations which become “grabby”—suppressing the emergence of other spacefaring civilisations in the volume they control—might occupy around a third of the universe today while undetected so far by humans. If humans are on the threshold of becoming such a grabby civilisation, today is a typical origin date for a grabby civilisation. This explains why, despite the “hard steps” model, an advanced human technological civilisation emerged so early in the history of the universe: later-emerging civilisations are precluded by the expansion of grabby alien competitors into the volume where they might develop.

The model has only three parameters, each of which can be estimated with around a factor of four. Here is a visualisation of a simulation of the growth of grabby alien civilisations.

Source code for this simulation is available on GitHub.

Posted at 16:14 Permalink

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Scott Manley's Analysis of the SpaceX Starship SN9 Test

Posted at 15:22 Permalink

THE HAPPENING WORLD: SpaceX Plans to Launch Two Starlink Missions in One Day

Update: (2020-03-03 20:03 UTC)

Posted at 14:54 Permalink

CONTEXT: Forgotten Number Systems

Posted at 14:23 Permalink

Tuesday, February 2, 2021

CONTINUITY: SpaceX Starship SN9—Great Flight, Landing Not So Much

Starship SN9 had a perfect flight but then crashed and exploded on landing. It looks like only one of the two Raptor engines re-lit before the landing attempt.

Update: 2020-02-03 20:27 UTC

Posted at 20:34 Permalink

THE HAPPENING WORLD: SpaceX Counting Down to Second Starship Hopping Flight

Posted at 19:32 Permalink

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Boston Dynamics: Spot's Got an Arm!

Posted at 15:23 Permalink

Monday, February 1, 2021

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Now—Your Text Can Rival the Copy-Editing Standards of The Grauniad!

Source code, including thirteen thousand regular expressions (!), is available on GitHub.

Posted at 20:15 Permalink

CONTEXT: Forty-nine Years Ago Today: The Hewlett-Packard HP-35 Calculator

This is the first item of personal electronic technology I really salivated over owning. I couldn't afford one, and didn't own an H-P calculator until I bought an HP-45 around 1974. If you want to savour the magic this was, here is a highly-authentic HP-35 Emulator in JavaScript that runs in your Web browser.

Posted at 16:00 Permalink

CONTINUITY: Plate Tectonics: The Last Billion Years

Posted at 14:03 Permalink

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Chinese Private Launch Company iSpace's Hyperbola-1 Fails

iSpace's Hyperbola-1 failed to reach orbit on its second launch attempt. Its first launch, in July 2019, was the first successful orbital launch by a “private” Chinese space company. Why do I say “private”?

Companies have also received support in the form of policy support, assistance from giant state-owned space contractors, provincial and local government deals and Military-Civil Fusion (MCF).

Posted at 12:52 Permalink

CONTEXT: Which European Language Am I Reading?

Posted at 12:03 Permalink

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Completely Fake Circuit Breakers

Posted at 00:23 Permalink

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