Higher thrust from light than photon sails?
Not sure how they’d solve the charge build up problem, though.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
That Spanish Airbus Crash
…was caused by wrongly installed engine software.
Well, that’s an easier fix than if it was a hardware or design problem.
The Rashomon Of Apollo And Shuttle
Stephen Smith has a lengthy review of John Logsdon’s latest book.
As he notes, the dual myths of Kennedy as space visionary and Nixon as space villain don’t stand up to any sort of realistic historical scrutiny. In fact, with Apollo, Kennedy set us up for decades of failure, in terms of making spaceflight economically realistic.
Global Cooling
A study predicts decades of it ahead.
Cold is much more deadly than heat, by an order of magnitude.
I have no more confidence in this prediction than I do of predictions for warming (and particularly predictions of catastrophic climate change). The lesson is a) the climate can always be counted on to change, b) we don’t really know what the future holds for climate, c) we need to be prepared for anything, which means maximizing economic growth and d) (related) we need to stop fantasizing that carbon dioxide is a magical climate-control knob.
An Immunotherapy Breakthrough
Via a new cell-squeezing device.
Faster, please.
A New Alloy
A low-fatigue shape-memory alloy that can handle ten million cycles.
I can think of lots of applications for that. I wonder if it can be printed?
Video Issues
OK, Linux people. Blender will let me make to edit and export a video as an AVI JPEG, but it refuses to export the synched audio to it. However, it will export the audio by itself as a .flac.
Does anyone know any separate tools that would allow me to synch that audio file with the video?
[Update a while later]
OK, VLC sort of works. Problem is that for some reason it really messes up the title when I add audio. If I were to post the MP4 and .flac files, could someone else try to synch them?
[Update late afternoon]
OK, I tried this:ffmpeg -i RoadToMars.wav -i 0001-9000.avi RoadToMarsAudio.avi
Continue reading Video Issues
Old Cells
Faster, please.
Space Settlement
Rick Tumlinson says the concept is taking hold within the space community.
Meanwhile, the Center For American Progress is having a symposium on the past and future of human spaceflight. Interestingly, as Jeff Foust notes on Twitter, NASA isn’t involved. Interesting also that it’s sponsored by a lefty institution. I suspect that this topic may set off a civil war on that side of the spectrum.
Another Private Mars Venture
These people want to set up at the pole. “Looking for alien life” doesn’t seem compatible with settlement, though, unless you don’t care if you contaminate or wipe it out.