1. About The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace & Babbage book.
2. What is your cutie mark going to be? – via Nicole Gugliucci
3. How to study, and how not to study.
4. Eyes on the solar system by JPL.
5. If I made gifts like this, they would all love me…
Finish this sentence, “10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…”
Did you say, “Blast Off!” My wife and I both do. But, I suspect that our children won’t, because they will not grow up in an era heavily influenced by space shuttle launches.
I am an advocate for space exploration, but not necessarily manned space exploration. Still, this made me a little sad or nostalgic or it just made me feel old.
*If you start the countdown at 3, I invariably whisper “Contact” at the end.
Alex Parker is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, focusing on the formation and evolution of planetary systems. His work involves a lot of starry nights. So when cloudy weather gave him a stretch of downtime at the observatory, it seemed like a fun idea to transform some of the stunning images from the Hubble Space Telescope into an homage to Vincent Van Gogh’s famous painting. Continue reading “The Art of Science: Starry Night”
I had a nightmare last night. A very nerdy nightmare*.
During the space shuttle’s ascent in to low earth orbit, I was dropped out of the space shuttle’s cargo bay strapped to an osprey. Somehow, both the osprey and I survived our descent. I know what you are thinking. The poor osprey’s wings should have snapped into pieces the moment it tried to provide lift for the two of us. This, my friends, was a key point in my complaint to the NASA authorities. I also suspected that my publicly stated preference for unmanned space exploration was a factor in the decision to drop me into the upper atmosphere. I have no idea what the osprey did to piss NASA off. Continue reading “Skycranes >> Ospreys”
Point the first: I think NASA should have more funding; but, like everyone else, I’m not going to bother saying what programs I’m going to raid to fund my pet programs.
Point the second: I kind of wish we’d been spending all that money we spent putting people into space on the unmanned, scientific instruments that have actually been illuminating our solar system, our galaxy, and our universe. That is not to say that I really regret the manned space flight program, as I’m not sure all those unmanned scientific instruments would have been built without the big goals associated with manned space flight (e.g., walking on the Moon). I’m just not particularly sad that the shuttle is being retired, nor I am particularly upset that there is no replacement ready to go. Continue reading “A dry eyed goodbye to the Space Shuttle”
The Finch and Pea 