We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Carl Sagan
The Tim Cook Interview Part 1
12-September-2014
“There are products we are working on that no one knows about. Yes. That haven’t been rumored about yet. Yes.”
http://www.thebeatles.com/news/out-today-mono-vinyl-collection-released
I can’t wait for this to come out on iTunes.
Unless you have been living under a rock … a rock without internet, cell phone, TV, cable, satellite or radio access … you know that Apple announced the Apple WATCH today. What you may not have seen are the videos. WATCH is a thing of beauty which mere words cannot do justice.
Clicking the image below (or the link below it) will take you to the official Apple site. WATCH the videos
http://www.apple.com/watch/films/
iWANT
Via Twitter
I was fortunate to travel to Norway (Stavanger) on business several times in the early 2000s. It is an extremely beautiful country. I wish I could afford to live there. I was also fortunate to know a native Norwegian whom I had previously worked with in the States. He was kind enough to take me on a day trip to the Norwegian country side. I was amazed that most of the back roads are effectively one lane wide, as can be seen in the video.
See also SUPERCHARGER
… on MARS
Monday’s XKCD (above) made me go find the original theme song on YouTube (top).
In the late 80′ – early 90s TMNT were all the rage. The boys were little and between Christmas and birthdays we acquired every form of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle paraphernalia know to man. You name it we had it: action figures, weapons, vehicles, home-made VHS recordings of the TV shows, comic books (new and old). The show was on every afternoon after school around dinner time and I watched many an episode with the boys. We also saw the first several movies. The theme song was unquestionably catchy, humor childish but not always so, the plots predictable. But heck, I enjoyed it as much as the boys did.
It was a classic.
Nineteen Seventy-One, the year I graduated from high school. Badfinger is riding high in the charts. Heir apparent to the Beatles, backed by George Harrison, published by the Beatles’ Apple Corps (no relation to Apple Computer, but that is another story), with a number of hits already playing. No Matter What, Come and Get It, and Day After Day had been or were playing regularly on AM radio. Come and Get It debuted in the 1970 Peter Seller / Ringo Starr movie The Magic Christian.
Via USA Today and YouTube
The SpaceX three engine F9R development rocket exploded during a test today at the McGregor, Texas test facility.
In a post on Twitter, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said: “Three engine F9R Dev1 vehicle auto-terminated during test flight. No injuries or near injuries. Rockets are tricky”
Related
This video predates Dragon V2, but the basic concepts remain the same.
Crew capability was the very reason SpaceX was founded, so we will do whatever it takes to make this happen. – Elon Musk
Related:
It’s the first five metres that count …
Boeing’s answer to the SpaceX Dragon V2 (although technically unveiled first).
The next space race will be commercial.
In case you have never seen this …
Copyright © 2014 by Christian Bergman, All rights reserved.
All people, places, and events are fictional … except when they aren’t.
• • •
In the distant past, a forgotten shepherd stares up at the sky, studying the bright red dot that drifts night to night among the background of stars.
Yet More Transparent Aluminum News
From last year …
I’m surprised that Apple doesn’t just buy them outright and be done with it.
Transparent Aluminum
I first told you about Transparent Aluminum* here.
I have talked about it several times since.
GT Advanced Technologies (GTAT) has the technology to make thin, very thin sheets of it.
Apple has a large plant in Arizona where GTAT is making Transparent Aluminum for them by the ton (literally).
Last February 2014
* in case you have forgotten transparent aluminum is sapphire, Al2O3
The creation of the Apollo AL7 Pressure Garment is one of the great American stories of the past forty-plus years. […] NASA turned the creation of the spacesuit into a competition (largely dominated by military contractors)—and it was assumed a military contractor would win the day.
Instead, pitted against the military-industrial complex, Playtex created the 21-layer spacesuit, each layer distinct yet interrelated in function to the rest of the whole—a masterly combination of elegance, complexity, and form. […] Traditional engineering firms could not figure out how to meet all the mission requirements and create a functioning suit that would keep the Apollo astronauts alive. The seamstresses at Playtex, with their years of experience fashioning girdles and bras, could, and did.
It was the same materials. It was bras in space. It was literally the same materials that were used in the bra-making process. The straps from bras were reused to hold the thing into shape and the Nylon fabric that a bra-cup is made of was used to give strength to the Latex so that it didn’t expand under air pressure. Then the Latex itself was the same, as they say it started out as exactly the same Latex as went into the girdles […]
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
President John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1962, speaking to incoming freshman students at Rice University, Houston, Texas
SpaceX Soft Lands Falcon 9 Rocket First Stage
Following last week’s successful launch of six ORBCOMM satellites, the Falcon 9 rocket’s first stage reentered Earth’s atmosphere and soft landed in the Atlantic Ocean. This test confirms that the Falcon 9 booster is able to consistently reenter from space at hypersonic velocity, restart main engines twice, deploy landing legs and touch down at near zero velocity.
After landing, the vehicle tipped sideways as planned to its final water safing state in a nearly horizontal position. The water impact caused loss of hull integrity, but we received all the necessary data to achieve a successful landing on a future flight. Going forward, we are taking steps to minimize the build up of ice and spots on the camera housing in order to gather improved video on future launches.
At this point, we are highly confident of being able to land successfully on a floating launch pad or back at the launch site and refly the rocket with no required refurbishment. However, our next couple launches are for very high velocity geostationary satellite missions, which don’t allow enough residual propellant for landing. In the longer term, missions like that will fly on Falcon Heavy, but until then Falcon 9 will need to fly in expendable mode.
We will attempt our next water landing on flight 13 of Falcon 9, but with a low probability of success. Flights 14 and 15 will attempt to land on a solid surface with an improved probability of success.
This message was sent from SpaceX to […]. It was sent from: […], SpaceX, 1 Rocket Road, Hawthorne, CA 90250. For more information on SpaceX, please visit http://www.spacex.com
Interested in the history of space travel?
Tired of the same old tunes, news, or talk radio during your drive time commute?
Want to expand your knowledge of the most exciting (and fearful) decades in the history of humanity?
Then the Space Rocket History podcasts are for you.
I discovered them on iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app. I listen to Mike’s 20 minute podcasts to and from work. I thought that I knew all there was to know about the early history of space flight – boy was I ever wrong. Mike has done his research. Of course Mike has the advantage of having access to post-Soviet information that I never had as a kid growing up.
As you can see the iTunes reviews are 5 stars! I am one of those 5-star reviewers.
Related posts
Not to be confused with Cowboy Bebop
This is one of the YouTube videos linked to by my Brunton Hydrogen Reactor post. I thought it was worth posting separately.
You must watch it.
It’s a HYDROGEN REACTOR … c’mon!
In case you missed my link in https://contrafactual.com/2014/07/13/brunton-hydrogen-reactor
Totally Sci-Fi. The Brunton Hydrogen Reactor is my latest gadget, and it is really cool.
The Hydrogen Reactor is a reactor that converts hydrogen and air into electricity and vapor. It’s all a bit hocus pocus, and since I’m not a scientist, I really can’t explain it in bigger detail.
In the package you get a reactor and 2 hydrogen cores. Each hydrogen core contains 4.500 mah which is equivalent to 3 iPhone charges. I’ve researched this fact very carefully, because some sites claim it to be 9.000 mah. My phone and Brunton tells them wrong. The core is made of solid metal that binds the molecules. It’s NOT nuclear, so there is nothing to be afraid of.
You screw the core in, hear a funny little *puff*, wait for the blue light, and then you connect your device. It’s quit easy and straight forward. You can boost the output if you…
View original post 368 more words
This high-science device combines hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity on-the-move and under any condition. Simply lock the Hydrocore fuel into the Hydrogen Reactor™ to power USB devices like smartphones, tablet computers, UV water purifiers, rechargeable lights, portable game consoles, GPS transceivers and more.
Remember when fuel cells cost millions of dollars, could only be afforded by NASA, and were powered by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen that was known to explode? Of course not, you weren’t born yet. Well maybe you were since the Space Shuttle used them.
The Roskilde Festival is the largest North European culture and music festival and has existed since 1971. They are a non-profit organisation consisting of about 50 full-time employees and thousands of volunteers. It is held in Roskilde, Denmark in late June.
http://roskilde-festival.dk/about_roskilde/
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roskilde_Festival
• • •
It is also famous for the Roskilde Festival Radio Nøgenløb (Naked Run) held on the Saturday of the Festival (this Saturday just past). The Nøgenløb is a foot race around the Festival grounds where the participants, men and women, run totally naked (shoes are allowed). It has been run every year since 1999, with a ticket to the next year’s festival awarded to the male and female winner.
The Danes obviously don’t have the phobia of public nudity common in the U. S. and some other countries.
• • •
And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
~ Genesis 2:25, King James Bible
• • •
The Roskilde Festival Radio Nøgenløb serves as an example of what a pack of Zs might look like as they run naked across the countryside.*
WARNING THE IMAGE BELOW LINKS TO A VIDEO THAT SHOWS NAKED MEN AND WOMEN RUNNING IN THE NØGENLØB. IF YOU ARE OFFENDED OR ASHAMED OF THE NAKED HUMAN FORM, DO NOT CLICK THE IMAGE BELOW.
* Except maybe for the body paint and the GoPros
Late last year I had the epiphany that industrial sapphire was in fact the Transparent Aluminum presaged in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
The first sample has escaped into the wild.
Tell me again why UBS and Canaccord Genuity just downgraded GT Advanced Technologies (NASDAQ:GTAT)???
F9R 1000m Fin Flight | Onboard Cam and Wide Shot
From the YouTube details section:
Jun 19, 2014
Video of Falcon 9 Reusable (F9R) during a 1000m test flight at our rocket development facility in McGregor, TX. This flight was our first test of a set of steerable fins that provide control of the rocket during the fly back portion of return. The fins deploy approximately a minute and 15 seconds into the flight, and return to their original position just prior to landing. The F9R testing program is the next step towards reusability following completion of the Grasshopper program last year. Early flights of F9R will take off with legs fixed in the down position, however we will soon transition to liftoff with legs stowed against the side of the rocket with leg extension just before landing. Future test flights of F9R at our New Mexico facility will include higher altitudes, allow us to prove unpowered guidance and to prove out landing cases that are more flight-like.
See also
UPDATE
Technical problems scrub SpaceX launch attempt
An issue with pressures in the Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage propellant tanks resulted in a scrub today. […] awaiting confirmation on timing of the next launch attempt, possibly within 24 hours.
Source http://www.floridatoday.com/
😦
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Screen shots from email (the links don’t work, but touching either of the images will take you to the webcast sight).
The Register is reporting that Elon Musk expects to have space-farers on Mars within the next twelve years. Only when the “interplanetary mission gets underway” does he expect to “float [SpaceX] on Earth-bound stock exchanges.”
Read the full story at The Register.
Previously posted videos
In case you missed them … or just want to watch them again.
I feel like a kid again.
Elon Musk is my hero.
Introducing SunPower® X-Series Solar Panels
Unmatched Performance, Reliability and Aesthetics
Can you guess?
How many nuclear devices has humanity detonated since the first one at Trinity New Mexico?
I’ll give you a hint …
1 – Trinity NM
2 – Hiroshima
3 – Nagasaki
4 – that one in the Pacific
10 – a few more in the Pacific (Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands)
50 – a bunch at the US Nevada Test Site
100? 200? 500? (All of the testing by all of the nations)
1091?
A video rebuttal to G2 Research RIP
Mmmm, did someone say chicken and ribs?
Oh, not BBQ, never mind.
Seriously FFF*
Note: Video is a compendium of speakers exhorting the goodness of Thorium and the badness of the alternatives. Much food for thought and history.
*Free Fuel Forever
Also Watch:
Google’s Latest Self-Driving Car
молодец!
Contrafactual 