A bit of wonder for this #ScienceSunday.
Sander van den Berg downloaded raw image sequences from NASA’s Cassini and Voyager missions and set them in motion and put them to music. The results are worth watching in fullscreen.
Most of these shots are of Saturn’s rings, but Jupiter makes an appearance too.
(via @Space_Jockey / Banner image from APOD)
Fisher AG-7 Space Pen
“In the 1960′s NASA spent many years and millions of taxpayer dollars developing a special ‘space pen’ that uses nitrogen-pressurized ink cartridges to work in zero gravity, in a vacuum and at extreme temperatures ranging from -50 F to +400 F.
“The Russians used a pencil.”
This story keeps cropping up as an example of bureaucratic waste, or specifically as an example of what a colossal waste of money the space programme has been. It has been circulating the internet as fact since the mid ’90s, and even fictional White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry made the claim in a 2002 episode of the West Wing.
This Million Dollar Space Pen story is a pure fabrication however. The space pen was developed not by NASA, but by businessman Paul C. Fisher. It was only adopted by NASA after years of testing and the costs of developing the pen were never passed on to the US government. Furthermore, detritus from wooden pencils presented a potential hazard in microgravity, and Soviet Union would later adopt the Fisher space pen also.
The Soviets and Americans did originally use wooden pencils
The Soviets and Americans did originally use wooden pencils, but there were always concerns that particles of wood and graphite floating in the atmosphere of the spacecraft would cause problems — especially as graphite conducts electricity and could find its way into the circuitry. Wood is also flammable, a detail NASA was very concerned with after the Apollo 1 tragedy.
NASA did get into some trouble over excessive spending when in 1965 it ordered 34 mechanical pencils from Tycam Engineering Manufacturing, Inc for Project Gemini at a total cost of $4,382.50 ($128.89 per pencil). They quickly backtracked and found a cheaper alternative.
The Soviets used grease pencils on plastic slates as an early substitute for wooden pencils. Ballpoint and felt-tip pens have also been successfully used in space.
The AG-7 “Anti-Gravity” Space Pen was patented in 1965 and offered to NASA, who were originally hesitant to use it because of the earlier mechanical pencil controversy. Eventually though, after two years of intensive testing, approximately 400 pens were purchased by NASA for Project Apollo. NASA called it the “Data Recording Pen”.
The Soviet Union also purchased 100 space pens in February 1969, for use on its Soyuz flights.
However, even these details don’t tell the full story. As late as 1967 Fisher was trying to get the official NASA stamp of approval on his product, without success.
Both the Russians and the Americans continue to use these pens in space, and the Fisher Space Pen Co. continues to sell and market them as the writing instrument that went to the Moon.
Yesterday Valve updated Portal 2 to add the Perpetual Testing Initiative. As the video above suggests, the PeTI is an easy-to-use level editor and a place to share the levels you create and play, rate and comment on levels by others. IGN has a great video tutorial that’ll get you started.
Portal 2 has been reduced to £5.09 on Steam until May 11.
The editor is a lot of fun to use. All the ingredients that make up a typical Portal level are there to place and combine in whatever clever combinations you can dream up.
I called my first level Bouncy Bridge (a big hint in the title there). I’d love to get some feedback on the design, either here or on the Steam page. By all means subscribe to my workshop, as I’ll probably create a few more puzzles using different elements.
Portal 2 is one of my favourite games, but it’s fair criticism to say that the puzzles weren’t as challenging or numerous as they could have been. Already though Steam claim there are over 4,000 maps in PeTI, with undoubtably many more to come. The quality wil vary considerably, but of the dozen that I have played so far, half have been satisfyingly head-scratching and rewarding. I expect to spend many more hours in test chambers… for science.
Apple has been prompting me to add some additional security to my account for a while now, and I’ve actually put off some purchases simply to avoid answering these questions…
Answering questions like these honestly can be a bad idea
Firstly, I tend to feel like answering questions like these honestly can be a bad idea. I doubt it would take much interrogation for even a complete stranger to strike up a conversation about first cars, worst jobs or how you celebrated the millennium. Other answers, like what your childhood nickname was or where your parents met, might be common knowledge to some of your friends. Worse still, information about your previous employment, childhood friends and musical tastes might already be on the web for anyone to find, thanks to LinkedIn, Facebook, LastFM etc.
Then I question how memorable the answers to these questions even are. I can’t think of good, memorable answers to most of them. Others I’d simply rather not think about every time I buy something from Apple (school, ugh).
I don’t drive, so scratch all the car questions. I don’t remember infant school, and at primary level I had lots of teachers, so who was my first? My first album was probably Alvin and The Chipmunks or some crap. And there’s no way I could single out any one job I’ve had as the worst.
My trick for these things is to come up with completely fabricated answers, and keep a note of them in LastPass. Sometimes I’ll even generate some more random passwords and use those, though sometimes they wont be accepted (looking at you HSBC!).
Anyway, my point is, be careful.
Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers by Tom Scott:
If you liked this, you may also enjoy two novels that provided inspiration for it: Jim Monroe’s Everyone in Silico, where I first found the idea of a corporate-sponsored afterlife; Rudy Rucker’s trippy Postsingular, which introduced me to the horrifying idea of consciousness slums.
Lawyers and marketers, I’d say. I can totally see this happening.
There’s some lovely, crisp imagery in this short NASA documentary.
Although the moon has remained largely unchanged during human history, our understanding of it and how it has evolved over time has evolved dramatically. Thanks to new measurements, we have new and unprecedented views of its surface, along with new insight into how it and other rocky planets in our solar system came to look the way they do. See some of the sights and learn more about the moon here!
This video is public domain and can be downloaded at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?10929
The Monmouthpedia project has been getting a lot of coverage lately, but you know they’ve made it when Next Media Animation feature them:
Monmouth is now a “Wikipedia town,” which means it’s riddled with QR codes that bring information to smartphone users with the click of a button. Monmouth, birthplace of King Henry V, is the first town to play host to project, hence the title, “Monmouthpedia.”
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he was excited about the project. “Bringing a whole town to life on Wikipedia is something new and is a testament to the forward-thinking people of Monmouth,” raved Wales.
The QR codes are printed on long-lasting plaques to ensure they’ll be around for a while. Wikipedia will be using QRpedia, a mobile Web based system that uses QR codes to deliver Wikipedia articles to users. As articles can be instantly edited and updated, some believe this will be a good replacement for tour guides and maps.
Guy English has some suggestions for Apple. If Apple aren’t working on fixing film and TV distribution, I hope someone else is working to make this vision a reality:
[…] If I watched the first season of Community via Netflix streaming and now want to rewatch it on my TV as fed from an Apple TV? Make it work. I don’t care how. If you want to pop up a dialog thats asks if you’ll charge me $4.99 to $9.99 for the privilege, I’d pay. Let me pick what I want to watch, regardless of the source, and let me watch it. I have very little allegiance to the network that funded the show — I want the content. Figure out how to make that work.
If you can’t figure out how to make that direct connection to the creatives then you’ll always be stuck with a middleman that doesn’t have to be there. If there’s a syndication avenue you can explore then do so.
Fans want to watch their shows. They’ll pay to make that happen. Everything else is mired in entrenched interests. Find a way to make that happen and we’ll all agree that Firefly jumped the shark during its seventh season.
Films and TV shows need to be apps and websites, primarily. I’m never going to buy another cable package and pay for hundreds of channels I don’t care about to get the few shows I want, with adverts, weeks or months after they have already been broadcast elsewhere.
I just want to watch my show.
Tardigrades (commonly known as water bears or moss piglets) may reach a length of 1.5 millimetres. The name water bear comes from the way they walk, reminiscent of a bear’s gait. They can be found across the world, from the highest peaks to the deepest oceans, and scientists now think they may even be able to survive interplanetary space travel:
Researchers in 2007 launched anhydrobiotic adults into orbit above Earth to see if they would survive. Those animals endured naked exposure to space for 10 days, and a few even made it through an excessive dose of ultraviolet radiation while back on Earth.
Other laboratory experiments show that adult tardigrades can survive cold near absolute zero (-459 degrees Fahrenheit), heat exceeding 300 degrees Fahrenheit, pressures dozens of times greater than at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, and intense blasts of radiation.
But what of tardigrade eggs? Some flew on the 2007 mission, but they weren’t exposed to the extreme temperatures and radiation found outside Earth’s protective magnetic shield.
To learn how the eggs would fare, NASA and astrobiologists in Japan devised three extreme stress tests for the eggs of a tardigrade species called Ramazzottius varieornatus.
In one set of tests, more than 70 percent of anhydrobiotic eggs survived temperatures as low as -320 degrees Fahrenheit and as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Eggs exposed to vacuum-like conditions hatched just as well as normal eggs. Finally, more than half of anhydrobiotic eggs endured 1,690 Grays of radiation. A human would die in days if exposed to one percent of that dose.
Tardigrade Eggs Might Survive Interplanetary Trip – wired.com
Matt and Asia’s Minecraft wedding:
They built a house together in the digital world and have been inseparable ever since, both in the game and in real life. Matt even proposed to Asia up on stage at MineCon with the help of the game’s creators. So it was no surprise that Matt and Asia would plan a Minecraft themed wedding, and wow, did they ever.
I made this stylised miniature football pitch a while ago to be used in an iOS game, but I ended up not being involved in that. Shame really, as I had a lot of neat ideas for different directions the game could have gone.
I was quite happy with how it came out though, especially the textures.
The model was made with LightWave 3D, which I learned does not play well with Unity. I’ve been thinking about learning another 3D app that’ll fit into more workflows so I can more easily do work for computer games and general motion graphics. Lightwave is excellent for film and TV visual effects, but it doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact outside of that industry.
This weekend I’ve been learning Apple’s Motion 5, which is a very impressive piece of software for £35! I also knocked out this Minecraft-inspired image, which I’m not entirely happy with truth be told:
After writing this post I learned that my model had been used after all:
I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.
Ray Bradbury
R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles – io9.com
Talk about stunning!
ISS Star Trails, a set on Flickr from NASA_JSC_Photo
Expedition 31 Flight Engineer Don Pettit relayed some information about photographic techniques used to achieve the images: “My star trail images are made by taking a time exposure of about 10 to 15 minutes. However, with modern digital cameras, 30 seconds is about the longest exposure possible, due to electronic detector noise effectively snowing out the image. To achieve the longer exposures I do what many amateur astronomers do. I take multiple 30-second exposures, then ‘stack’ them using imaging software, thus producing the longer exposure.”
(via petapixel.com)
On August 6, 2012 the Curiosity rover will attempt a completely automated landing in Gale Crater on Mars. Curiosity is about five times larger than Spirit or Opportunity, so it can’t just deploy a huge beach-ball and bounce to safety — instead it needs to pull off a much more precise (and dramatic!) landing.
Challenges of Getting to Mars: Curiosity’s Seven Minutes of Terror
Team members at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory share the challenges of the Curiosity Mars rover’s final minutes to landing on the surface of Mars.
That video is all the more impressive when you have a mental image of exactly how large the Mars Science Laboratory is:
Actual size
And here’s another video with less drama (ie. no Inception music) that also shows how Curiosity will take readings and samples.
Watch this in fullscreen!
A time-lapse made from photographs taken from aboard the ISS. Could use a little stabilisation in some shots, but still — pretty incredible.
See also: Long exposure photographs from the International Space Station
Ah, the Tory brain. Never mind the super-rich, it’s paying plumbers cash-in-hand that’s truly immoral. This week we’re all being called lazy.
Whenever I read one of these Tory stories — which seems to be about every week — I’m always reminded of Buckminster Fuller, who had this to say about the ‘value’ of hard work:
We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
— Buckminster Fuller, New York Magazine, 1930
A man well ahead of his time, and ours.
I was asked on Twitter today if I would mind updating my minimal iPhone 4 wallpapers to the new iPhone 5 size. It turns out that I would not mind at all, so here they are:
So, this is what I did with my weekend…
Proof that Zack Hemsey’s amazing ‘Mind Heist’ theme – aka the Inception trailer music – can make any movie look epic, even the worst movie of all time.
I put this together mainly as an exercise to help teach myself Final Cut Pro X. I have a little experience with Premiere and Avid, but I’ve really wanted to tackle a proper editing project with FCPX.
Beyond that, I just wanted to put together something entertaining and dramatic, while staying true to the character of Plan 9.
Criswell
I also did a little work in Motion 5, though not anything too complex. I wanted to find typefaces as close to those used in the opening titles of the film as possible, but had to settle for Bebas Neue and Pacifico – both excellent free fonts, but they do feel a little too modern.
For comparison, this is a still from the actual opening titles:
I’m sure there must be closer matches out there, but I was eager to get on with the actual editing. However, I liked the original typeface so much I used a cleaned-up grab of the main title for the end my trailer.
If this project taught me anything, it’s that I need to learn more about sound. The audio levels could use some work, and I’ve no idea how to clean-up unwanted background noise and make voices come through clearer.
The dreadfulness of the source material kept me amused during this edit. A particular favourite moment I wanted to dwell on was Tor Johnson’s shaky rising from the grave. It reminded me of the classic Inception Cat video, which if for some inexplicable reason you haven’t seen yet – do so now!
In fact, I loved pretty much any shot of Johnson and Vampira staggering around. They make quite the undead duo.
Movie fans may have noticed a not-very-subtle use of the Wilhelm scream towards the end. Although the scream does predate Plan 9, it wasn’t used in the film. I included it here purely for my own amusement.
I just backed my first Kickstarter project, ‘Sir, You Are Being Hunted’:
Survival and stealth in a procedurally-generated world! Sir, You Are Being Hunted is tweedpunk robo-horror from Big Robot Games.
I think the environments look amazing already, and if they develop the strategy element so I can play as I like (more stealth and caution than reliance on sharpshooting skills and lightning reactions) then I’m sure I’ll get my money’s worth! They’re already raised £72,790, bypassing their minimum goal of £40,000, so now I just have my fingers crossed that they reach their final stretch goal of £80,000 so they’ll include a multiplayer mode.
Here’s a gameplay video:
Thanks to Steve for the heads up.
The notion that captured our imagination, and focused our decision-making, was the idea of AI hunting a player. Sir is founded on this idea. The title tells you everything. We loved the feeling of being on the back-foot in games: fleeing as much as fighting, knowing that escape, rather than victory in combat, was the true goal. The fear from being vulnerable. Mix this with a strong stew of British sci-fi and our indigenous terrain and accompanying folklore – moorland, tweed, robots, pheasants, rain, poachers, hunters, hounds, horror – and we had a heady mix. We couldn’t resist plunging into it.
An Essay About Sir, You Are Being Hunted, Kickstarter – rockpapershotgun.com
I’ve worked on a number of procedural world generation tools before, but this particular engine is unique in that the intention was to generate a vision of “British countryside”, or an approximation thereof. To approach this we identified a number of features in the countryside that typify the aesthetic we wanted, and seem to be quintessential in British rural environments. Possibly the most important element is the ‘patchwork quilt’ arrangement of agricultural land, where polygonal fields are divided by drystone walls and hedgerows. These form recognisable patterns that gently rise and fall across the rolling open countryside, enclosing crops, meadows, livestock and woodlands. This patchwork of different environmental textures is something that is very stereotypically part of the British landscape. I looked for a mathematical equivalent we could use to simulate this effect and quite quickly decided upon using Voronoi diagrams.
If I May Speak Procedurally, Sir: Building The British Countryside Generator – big-robot.com
Dr. Carmella’s Guide to the Introverted is a very astute webcomic by Schroeder Veidt.
Below the comic I’ve also embedded a TED talk by Susan Cain who talks about how extrovert behaviour has come to be considered the norm and how introverts can (often unknowingly) make self-negating choices in an effort to fit into society better.
As someone who has definitely forced myself along to pubs and parties because I’ve felt like it was the ‘normal’ thing to do, it was actually pretty liberating when I realised that preferring my own company most of the time was also normal.
Anyway, here’s that TED talk:
Finally, this excellent article by Jonathan Rauch for The Atlantic is also worth reading if this whole notion is new to you.
Science has learned a good deal in recent years about the habits and requirements of introverts. It has even learned, by means of brain scans, that introverts process information differently from other people (I am not making this up).
I didn’t bother to look for research on this, but it makes perfect sense to me. This however is the main paragraph for busy extroverts to pay attention to:
The worst of it is that extroverts have no idea of the torment they put us through. Sometimes, as we gasp for air amid the fog of their 98-percent-content-free talk, we wonder if extroverts even bother to listen to themselves. Still, we endure stoically, because the etiquette books—written, no doubt, by extroverts—regard declining to banter as rude and gaps in conversation as awkward. We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts’ Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say “I’m an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush.”
The follow-up article — Jonathan Rauch comments on some of the feedback he’s received for “Caring for Your Introvert”… — is also valuable reading.
