Petri Launiainen's Blog: A Brief History of Everything Wireless, page 8
April 16, 2019
Media visibility in Finland
After the Finnish translation of my book “A Brief History of Everything Wireless” came out, I received an email from Kalle Haatanen, who runs a weekly radio show on topical subjects on the nationwide YLE Radio 1 channel - the leading news and facts-oriented channel in Finland. He had read ...
April 11, 2019
"Nuke them from orbit"
Hayabusa-2 has been orbiting the asteroid Ryugu for months now, and last week its expedition moved to the next step: creating a crater with a diameter of several meters on the surface in order to be able to sample the internal composition of the asteroid. The sci-fi meme of “nuke ...
April 4, 2019
737 MAX – the new DC-10?
Airplane crashes are amazingly rare these days: on my way to work in Castelldefels, I can easily count that about 2,000 people land at the nearby Barcelona airport during my brisk morning walk. This endless stream of happy arrivals goes on and on without a hitch, day after day, at ...
March 28, 2019
Época's review on my book
In a very critical story on the apparently continuing expansion of the Flat Earth Movement, the distinguished Brazilian journalist Helio Gurowitz reviews my book, "Flat Out Wrong: The Overwhelming Evidence Against Flat Earth". He writes: " One of the most surprising things is that the book by Petri ...
March 21, 2019
Equinox – the Flat Earthers' nightmare
In my book, “Flat Out Wrong: The Overwhelming Evidence Against Flat Earth”, I explain the many discrepancies that can be detected between the Flat Earth Model and the observable Universe around us. Yesterday's equinox comes with many of them: enough to fill a full chapter in the book. Here's one: ...
March 7, 2019
Just add crew
The Space Shuttle entered service when I was in high school. It promised something that no rocket had done before: a reuse model, in which the launch costs were supposed to come down dramatically. I wrote an enthusiastic article about this novel technology and got it published in a now-defunct ...
February 25, 2019
The perils of being bold
As I discussed in this blog entry, it looked very unlikely that United Internet would have entered the incoming 5G auction in Germany. The reason for their hesitation was the hard requirement for national coverage stated in the rules of the auction. But to the surprise of many, ...
February 14, 2019
Opportunity lost
NASA's Opportunity rover was intended to work for 90 days after its landing on Mars in 2004. That amount of operational time would have been enough to deem the mission a complete success. But like its sister probe, Spirit, which lasted up till 2010, Opportunity kept on breaking longevity records: ...
February 7, 2019
North is moving east
Ever since the existence of the North Magnetic Pole was detected, it has been observed to be moving towards Siberia from its original location in Northern Canada. Due to this movement, the World Magnetic Model that is used to calculate true north has been updated every five years, and the ...
January 31, 2019
Autoland gone wrong
As I explain in my book, the application of radio waves is behind a major part of our current aviation safety record: thanks to VOR, ILS and GPS technologies, the planes can safely stay en route and land in zero visibility. Experiencing the sudden transition of first being surrounded by ...
