British schoolkids’ teddies win space race 6 Dec 200818 Sep 2017 I just love this: Cambridge University’s Space Flight club got local school children to make space suits for these teddy bears, which were attached to a helium balloon that rose to 30km, enough to see the curvature of the earth. All teds were recovered safely. I expect Prof. Steve Steve to take the next flight up… Education General Science Humor Technology
Censorship Political censorship of internet linkage begins in Australia 5 May 2009 The host ISP of Electronic Frontiers Australia has been served a take-down notice for linking to an R-rated “blackbanned” site, itself not in Australia, in a page that was a political comment on the merits (or demerits, rather) of mandatory internet filtering in Australia. I put the entire text of… Read More
General Science OK, so Ares works 28 Oct 2009 I’m not proud. Well, not too proud. I admit I was wrong about the Ares 1-X – it seemed to work fine without excessive vibration and probably will work as a human rated booster. I still would have liked to see a shuttle derived main core, but given that time… Read More
General Science Thoughts on the periodic table 4 Feb 2010 Eric Scerri has written the definitive history of Mendele’ev’s periodic table and how it came to be formulated. He also has a paper in which he proposes a new formulation, based on historical considerations of what it was that Mendele’ev was trying to do, and on more theoretical considerations of… Read More
Can’t you see the curvature of Earth just by standing on the beach and looking at the horizon – or by going out at sunset and looking east to see the shadow of Earth on the sky? Having said that, I remain envious of the teddies!