Ars Technica has an good story on the Soviet mission to rescue Salyut 7, which was left floating dead in space due to a power malfunction with nobody on board. It’s a tale of engineering know-how, luck and hard work, largely based on the high level of experience of Soviet cosmonauts and the mission control […]
This little app will neatly chop you message into multiple linked tweets – http://little.porkchop.io/
There’s a great article in Vanity Fair covering the Air France Flight 447 disaster, and it asks Should Airplanes Be Flying Themselves?. It details the events leading up to the fatal impact and also covers the changes that have taken place in cockpits over the years with increased automation leading to increased safety, but also […]
Who said poltics was going to be reformed? Oh, wait, Fine Gael did. In their election manifesto for 2011 they aimed for a ‘New politics’ to eliminate cronyism and the like. Fine words, but then along came a Seanad by-election, and as Eamon Delaney notes, (“Art museum appointment shows political cronyism has not change”) a […]
Apparently this letter appeared on September 5th in the Daily Mail. It could be the best summary of the Middle East situation you’ll ever see. Via @kingdomman66
Ello is a new ‘social network’ which claims to be free, while not selling you ads or selling your data to any third party. Laudable goals, indeed. But it costs money to run services like these, and that money has to come from somewhere. Traditionally (if the commercial internet is even old enough for tradition), […]
As Randall says, “In the 60s, Marvin Minsky assigned a couple of undergrads to spend the summer programming a computer to use a camera to identify objects in a scene. He figured they'd have the problem solved by the end of the summer. Half a century later, we're still working on it.”
Via screenshotsofdespair.tumblr.com. Hat-tip to @James_Hatley.
When I was eight years old they taught us in school that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were causing the world to warm up. However, they said, it would be thirty years before the effects would be felt, and this would be plenty of time for us to reduce our carbon emissions […]