From Popular Mechanics. He’s not the only one.
I had an invitation to the award dinner, but unfortunately, a trip to the Big Apple isn’t in my budget right now.
[Update a few minutes later]
Sorry, link is fixed.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
If I Had A Dog
Here’s what I wouldn’t build. I don’t mind playing fetch. I probably would build a robot to walk him, though.
Phone Upside Downers
A surprising dichotomy. I can’t say which camp I’m in, because a) I have a Droid and b) I keep it in a holster. But I keep it there right side up.
Aircraft Carriers In Space
What does Battlestar Galactica get right?
[Update a couple minutes later]
I liked this:
FP: And the worst shows for realistic space warfare?
CW: There are so many that are so bad. Star Wars is probably the worst.
I know that’s heresy for a certain generation.
China’s Aircraft Carrier
They’re about to find out just how hard it is to run one. It has this amazing statistic that I’d never seen before:
Between 1949, when the U.S. Navy began deploying jets on a large scale, and 1988, when the combined Navy/Marine Corps aircraft accident rate achieved U.S. Air Force levels, the Navy and Marine Corps lost almost 12,000 aircraft and more than 8,500 aircrew.
Emphasis mine. That’s accidents, not combat. And what they mean by getting the rate to Air Force levels, is reducing it to that rate. In other words, those are the casualties of learning how to fly combat-proficient aircraft from carriers, and it didn’t really occur until the introduction of the F/A-18 Hornet.
Here’s a related link: the U.S. Navy’s transition to jets.
And yet we obsess about safety in spaceflight.
[Via email from Jim Bennett]
A Bridge To The Future?
No, a bridge back to 1933.
It’s a never ending source of hilarity and irony that these people fashion themselves to be “progressive.”
From Lunar Return To Colony
This isn’t exactly a new question. The Space Studies Institute has been thinking about it for a third of a century. And of course, one always finds the inevitable “it’s obvious that the first colony should be on Mars” comment.
A New Way To Fly
Well, this is interesting. My most immediate question is, even though it says it won’t stall, what happens if it loses power? Can it glide?
Randall Munroe
[Via Sarah Hoyt]
Justice And Irony
The slow-speed rail in California is being killed by green tactics.