January 07, 2004
Typical Snyder - throw lots of money at someone unlikely hoping to solve everything in one heroic move. I mean, c'mon... Gibbs has been out of the game for a long damn time.
The Redskins running game sucked last year, maybe he should offer John Riggins big bucks to come back.
Theismann is available I bet. Or even better, Sonny Jurgenson!!! Throwing long to Art Monk. Jeez, the Redskins have become a parody of themselves. I can't even hate them anymore because they're so pitiful.
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07:18 AM | category: Square Pegs
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If you're eligible, please donate. If you don't know if you can, then please call your local Red Cross or hospital for information.
The pool of eligible doners was slashed in the last few years as tens of thousands of people (many military) were removed from the rolls because of possible mad cow exposure in Europe. Your help is really needed.
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07:06 AM | category: Square Pegs
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January 06, 2004
Thanks to the IB courses and the community college classes she took, after one semester she's now officially a sophomore.
(proud papa mode on) She's majoring in math, with a minor in education, and talking about going on for her Master's at Michigan State so as to teach at college level. (screw it, I'm proud and it's staying on for awhile)
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12:06 PM | category: Family matters
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Posted by: Ted at
08:03 AM | category: Links
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Like it or not, Baseball's Rule 21 says that betting on baseball calls for a 1 year suspension, and that betting on your own team calls for a lifetime ban.
Pete Rose has just (finally) admitted that he bet on his own team.
This asshole is baseball's equivalent of North Korea. He denied for 14 years that he bet on games, even though a special investigator found solid evidence. Now he admits that he did bet, but only after he became a manager. Yeah, right. I believe you, you lying sack of shit. You're admitting it now because you're running out of time to get into the Hall of Fame. In a few more years, you'll be handed over to the veterans committee, and you know full well they'll never vote you in.
The afterlife better have a special place reserved for Pete Rose, one where guys like Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn could stop by and use his head for batting practice. I bet it'd be popular. If the lines get too long, I'd suggest saving a spot for Bud Selig too.
Just knowing I could do that if I went to heaven would make me be a better person here on earth.
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07:15 AM | category: History
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In the 1929 German movie Die Frau im Mond (The Woman in the Moon), film director Fritz Lang* needed a way to increase the drama of a scene leading up to the takeoff of the rocket ship. He came up with the idea of having one of the main characters counting down the last minute before the launch as the tension built.
It was prescient, as the countdown became a valuable tool when real rocketry became a complex and precisely timed exercise.
When asked in an interview if he got the idea from the rocket club VfR**, Lang answered that the they did nothing special when launching a rocket; someone walked up, lit the fuse and then ran like hell.
*Lang also directed the silent classic Metropolis in 1926.
** The VfR - Verein fur Raumschiffarhrt (Society for Space Travel) was a popular German rocketry club whose members included a young Wernher Von Braun, physicist Hermann Oberth, and science author Willy Ley. The group attracted the interest of the German military and with their support and encouragement developed much of the basic technology that eventually culminated in the V2.
Source: Spaceship Handbook, by Jack Hagerty.
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06:57 AM | category: Space Program
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January 05, 2004
Posted by: Ted at
02:23 PM | category: Military
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As he mentioned in the comments here, we had a private email exchange where we were talking about various points in my first post. It was friendly enough, although when someone warns me up front that they’re going to be sarcastic and then closes by telling me they’d better end it before they get really ‘shitty’ about it, well, that fits my definition of ‘incensed’.
I thought that bit about Tijuana was funny. After seeing it labeled ‘that little punch’ by Madfish, I carefully reread it. Sorry guy, I still think it’s funny, and I think you need to take the chip off your shoulder and work on your sense of humor.
Apparently I also didn’t include enough disclaimers about “this is my opinion”, or “to my eye”, or “this means nothing more than what you want it to”, because The Bartender took every bit of it personally.
I visit all the Mu.Nu blogs at least once a day. I consider that the least I can do as part of the Munuvian family. All families have occasional strife, and sometimes the best thing to do is walk away.
ItÂ’s a big internet Bartender, enjoy it. I am. 'nuff said.
Update: my original post is here, and the followup is here.
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01:39 PM | category: Munuvian Daily Tattler
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According to one of the engineering professors involved,
"They could program it with a laptop or a PDA and give it a GPS location, or they may have a map on their laptop or PDA, and they may just select a point on the map and just say, 'Go there,' and then they will take the airplane out, throw it in the air and it would get there."
Future plans call for the ability to launch several at once and flying them in a coordinated manner for maximum coverage of an area.
A year or two ago I read about this concept, and the article likened it to a swarm of bees spreading out through city streets. I had no idea things had progressed this far. Further details (and pictures) can be found in this .pdf document from the BYU engineering department, titled "Unmanned Air Vehicle Testbed for Cooperative Control Experiments".
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07:22 AM | category: SciTech
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Or these cool SciFi designs.
Hmmm... "Space Cadet" or "It's the Law"... "Mad Genius" or Still Life. Too many good choices.
He's got some very nice celtic designs too.
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06:55 AM | category: Rocketry
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January 04, 2004
It's not all techno-speak at his place either, as he uses a little Heinlein to make fun of a few moonbats.
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08:17 AM | category: Space Program
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He drew it a couple of years ago, and it still makes me laugh.
I hope he burns in hell. more...
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08:05 AM | category: About Ted
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The main part of the post is in the extended entry so you donÂ’t have to deal with it if you donÂ’t want to, but I hope you follow along because when we get done youÂ’ll have built and flown your first model rocket. Questions asked from before are answered too. more...
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08:02 AM | category: Build It
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In the SciFi flick Angry Red Planet, the explorers are attacked by a weird giant rat/bat/spider creature thing that was pretty cool.
Towards the end of Attack of the Puppet People, two of the shrunken victims are chased by a rat as they make their way along a city street. A cat comes along and scares off the rat while the people make an escape.
Two great movies, two football games (although the Ravens lost, dammit), and two hockey games in the evening (the Caps... *sigh*). It was a pretty good day, ya know?
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07:30 AM | category: Cult Flicks
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January 03, 2004
Madfish Willie and others asked about my thoughts on color in blog design. Without going into a lot of theory about color and how to use it, I'll just mention a few personal opinions and invite your views.
Exceptions can always be found. If I said that blue should never be used in a blog, someone would point out that blue looks quite nice here.
White is cold and sterile, which is good for serious blogs or professional business sites. It makes for a crisp look, and is easily dressed up with a few small graphics and goes with any contrasting color.
Black is the other extreme, and like white any color can be used for contrast. A little more care should be taken here though because using too many bright colors turns the look into something resembling a Lite Bright, which is hard on the eyes.
In both of the above cases, I feel that using an off-color of white or black is often more effective. An extrememly light dove grey or deep charcoal is more interesting, even if it's not instantly obvious to the eye. As an example, when we painted the master bedroom in our home, I used the palest grey I could find on the walls. You couldn't even tell it wasn't white until I painted the window trim and closet doors pure white. The contrast was remarkable.
And that pretty much sums up my feelings on the subject. Less is more and subtle is better.
That said, it is possible to go too soft on the colors. I'll use our home again as an example, this time the kitchen. My wife picked out a very nice wallpaper full of grey-blue and grey-green. Plenty of color without being too dark or gloomy. There were also small bits of pink in the wallpaper, which I decided to use as the highlight color. My wife freaked out when she saw the paint I brought home for the trim in the kitchen, because it was bright bubblegum pink. It was just enough to jump out and catch the eye as a highlight color. Too much of it would make the room look like an explosion in a pepto-bismol factory.
My blog is another example of how I do this. Mostly soft grey and green, but the blues used for the date line and the banner up top are both pretty bright for contrast. Imagine those same blues (and the reds I use for links) on a straight white background. The page would look entirely different.
To my eye, pastels are easier to look at. Even bright colors like yellow and orange should be softened, especially if they're the primary color. Mookie did that on her blog, imagine the difference if she would have used a bright yellow or purple in her color scheme.
Contrast is important, and there are two ways to get it. First is by light on dark - black on white is the most obvious example, but white on dark grey, or dark blue on light blue work well. The second way is by colors - yellow on blue or brown on light grey - the idea in all cases is to make it easy for the eye to distinguish between design elements.
I've always heard that dark green is the most restful color for human eyes, but I've never been able to make it work as an effective background color. And just because this is Rocket Jones, I'll mention that according to government studies, the best visibility is obtained for rockets when painted black, white and red in large areas.
So there it is. I'm pulling on my flame-proof overalls, so feel free to let me have it in the comments.
* Madfish Willie was rather incensed by my opinions, but being men of the world we agreed to settle our differences the next time we're both in Tijuanna. We're going to meet at Rosarita's Cantina for lunch and the pony floorshow, followed by a switchblade duel to first blood. I expect we'll have enough tequila in our systems that the duel ends up in a draw, both of us managing to cut ourselves with our own knifes while trying to impress the working girls.
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12:30 PM | category: Munuvian Daily Tattler
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more...
Posted by: Ted at
09:45 AM | category: Rocketry Resources
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I've had a few encounters with my HOA over the years, and for the most part they've learned to leave me alone. I know the rules better than they do, and refuse to let them push me around.
The last bit of fun I had with the HOA was when they announced that nobody was allowed to have satellite dishes on their roofs for aesthetic reasons. I threatened to install a dish on my roof and disguise it with one of these fake rocks. I'd make that sucker look like a meteor crashed right through my roof, but the dish would be hidden.
Not surprisingly, they dropped their objections.
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09:20 AM | category: Boring Stories
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January 02, 2004
And thanks to Beth of She Who Will Be Obeyed, we have another little toy to play with: 6+=1!
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10:06 AM | category: Links
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Columbia Disaster
Space exploration is an extremely dangerous business. This lesson was hammered home in 2003 when the space shuttle Columbia broke up above Texas as it was on approach to land in Florida. The lives of seven astronauts were lost in a few firey moments on February 1, 2003. Months of investigation revealed that a chunk of foam fell off the external fuel tank and smashed a hole in the shuttle's carbon-fibre wing panels. When Columbia was returning to Earth at the end of its mission, the open hole in the wing allowed hot gasses to penetrate the shuttle's heat protection. The Columbia Accident Investigation board placed the blame on the foam, but said that NASA's lack of safety allowed the accident to happen in the first place. While NASA is implementing the safety recommendations to get the shuttles flying again, the US administration is said to be planning a bold new program in space.
Chinese Space Launch
Previously unknown, astronaut Yang Liwei became an instant celebrity on October 15, when he became the first human the Chinese space program sent into space. Liwei was launched from the Jiuquan desert launch site and orbited the Earth only 14 times in 21 hours. Only the United States and Russia have ever been capable of sending humans into space before this year. Riding high on their accomplishments, the normally tight-lipped Chinese revealed more details of their space program this year: additional human launches, a space station, probes to the Moon, and eventually humans on the Moon. NASA was one of the first to congratulate the Chinese on their accomplishment, but some space industry experts believe that this will spur the agency on to a new spirit of competition.
SpaceShipOne Goes Supersonic
The space community was expecting US President George Bush to make some announcement about the future of US space exploration on December 17, the 100th anniversary of the first Wright Brothers flight. He didn't, but on that day Scaled Composites - an aircraft manufacturer in California - made news with the first rocket test flight of SpaceShipOne; their suborbital rocket plane. The unique-looking aircraft was carried to an altitude of 14,600 metres by the White Knight carrier plane and then released. It fired its hybrid rocket engine and blasted up to an altitude of 20,700 metres; breaking the sound barrier as it went. SpaceShipOne is considered the top contender to win the $10 million X-Prize which will be awarded to the first privately-built suborbital spacecraft which can fly to 100 km.
Disappearance of Beagle 2
In a perfect world, this would be a tribute to the successful landing of Beagle 2; Britain's $50 million, 70-kg Mars lander which traveled to the Red Planet on board the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft. Unfortunately, it looks like Mars has swallowed yet another spacecraft, and at the time of this writing the lander has failed to communicate home; either through Mars Odyssey orbiting above, or Earth-based radio observatories.
Beagle 2 was supposed to land in the relatively safe Isidis Planitia region of Mars and then search for evidence of microbial life for 180-days with a suite of sensitive instruments. The best opportunity to communicate with Beagle 2 comes in 2004, though, when Mars Express reaches its final orbit and will attempt to make contact. Maybe the recovery of Beagle 2 will make one of the top stories in 2004.
Mars' Closest Approach to the Earth
Mars took centre stage this summer when it made its closest approach to the Earth in over 60,000 years. Because of their orbits, the Earth and Mars get close every two years, but on August 27 they were only 55,758,000 kilometres apart. The mainstream media picked up the story, and for a while it was Mars mania. Astronomy clubs and planetariums that held special Mars observing nights for the public were totally overwhelmed by the number of people who showed up to have a peek through a telescope. And they weren't disappointed. Even with a relatively small 6" telescope and good observing conditions, it was possible to see details on Mars like its polar caps, dust storms, and darker patches. If you missed it this year, don't worry, Mars will be even closer in 2287.
Biggest Solar Flare Ever Observed
Our Sun showed a nasty side this year, with a series of powerful flares and coronal mass ejections. On November 4, 2003, the Sun surprised even the most experienced solar astronomers with the most powerful flare anyone had ever seen. It was so powerful that it momentarily blinded cameras designed to measure flares, so it actually took a few days for astronomers to calculate just how bright it was. In the end, it was categorized as an X28 flare. But this was just one of a series of powerful flares, many of which were aimed directly at our Earth, sending wave after wave of material our direction.
Incredibly, there were very few problems on the Earth - contact was lost with a Japanese satellite, and some communications were disrupted - but we got through it largely unharmed. The auroras, however, were awesome.
SOHO website
Farewell Galileo
On September 20, 2003, NASA's Galileo spacecraft finally ended its 14-year journey to the Jovian system with its triumphant crash into the giant gas planet. Galileo was plagued with problems right from the start, including a series of launch delays, and a failure of its main antenna. But NASA engineers were able to overcome these obstacles, and use the spacecraft to make some incredible discoveries about the Jupiter and its moons. Photos taken by the Galileo gave scientists proof that three of the moons might have liquid water under their icy surfaces. Passing through Jupiter's massive radiation took its toll on the spacecraft, and various instruments started to fail, including its main camera, which went offline in 2002. With the spacecraft failing, controllers decided it would be best to crash Galileo into Jupiter, to protect potential life on the Jovian moons from contamination.
Age of the Universe
This is the year we learned how old we are - well... how old the Universe is. Thanks to a comprehensive survey of the sky performed by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), astronomers were able to calculate that the Universe is 13.7 billion
years old, give or take 200 million years. WMAP, launched in June 2001, measured the sky's cosmic background radiation, which was unleashed 380,000 years after the Big Bang - when the expanding Universe had cooled down enough for the first atoms to form. This wasn't the first survey of the cosmic background radiation, but the WMAP is so sensitive, it was able to detect extremely slight temperature changes in the radiation.
Spitzer Space Telescope
The last of great observatories, the Spitzer Space Telescope (previously named SIRTF) was finally launched into space on August 25, 2003. Almost every object in the Universe radiates heat in the infrared spectrum, which Spitzer is designed to detect. So objects which might be hidden to visible light telescopes, like Hubble, can be seen in tremendous detail with Spitzer. The observatory completed its 60-day on-orbit checkout period and calibration, and just before the end of the year the operators released four incredible photographs that demonstrated the potential of this instrument. Spitzer will help astronomers look at the dusty hearts of galaxies, young planetary discs, and cool objects like comets, and brown dwarfs. Spitzer may even help astronomers understand the nature of dark matter.
Mars Express Arrives
The search for the missing Beagle 2 lander overshadowed the success of the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft, which went into a perfect orbit on December 25, and then performed additional maneuvers flawlessly. This is the Europe's first mission to the Red Planet, and it's got an important job to do. In addition to helping out the search for Beagle 2, Mars Express will begin mapping the surface of Mars with a powerful radar system which should reveal underground deposits of water and ice.
(end Universe Today article)
I would also add the tragic accident that cost the lives of many Brazilian technicians and scientists when their rocket blew up on the pad in August. I wrote about it here and here.
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08:58 AM | category: Space Program
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January 01, 2004
New Redskins coach Deion Sanders.
New Redskins coach Deion Sanders.
New Redskins coach Deion Sanders.
New Redskins coach Deion Sanders.
New Redskins coach Deion Sanders.
Whether you hate the 'Skins, or just because you love Science and Discovery, repeat along with me.
New Redskins coach Deion Sanders.
New Redskins coach Deion Sanders.
New Redskins coach Deion Sanders.
New Redskins coach Deion Sanders.
New Redskins coach Deion Sanders...
Posted by: Ted at
12:14 PM | category: Square Pegs
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