Petri Launiainen's Blog: A Brief History of Everything Wireless, page 9

Finnish translation now published

The expanded and illustrated Finnish translation of my book, “A Brief History of Everything Wireless: How Invisible Waves Have Changed the World” has been officially released. The Finnish title is “Värähtelevä maailma: langattoman viestinnän lyhyt historia”, which translates to “Oscillating World: The Brief History of Wireless Communications”, and the storyline ...

Red Moon rising...

Landing a probe on the Moon in this day and age is no longer a major challenge: the probe can be provided with enough local computational power to find the right spot to settle down on their own. It is being done repeatedly on Mars, for example. Therefore the fact ...

A very different New Year's Celebration

I wrote about the pending Ultima Thule encounter in this blog entry, as well as referred to it in this one. And as the year 2019 was on its first moments, NASA's New Horizon space probe finally passed this Kuiper Belt object. Kuiper Belt ...

The most striking tech image of 2018

Strap an electric car on top of a never-before flown, massive rocket and launch it into an orbit towards Mars. Put a mannequin in a spanking-new space suit on the front seat and make the car stereo loop David Bowie's “Space Oddity”. And do it all with your own money. ...

Saving cents, inconveniencing millions

As I discuss in my book, the issue of connecting headphones to mobile phones was a problem in the early days: anything that radiates radio waves is potentially affected by the wiring attached to it, and hence all manufacturers originally insisted on only allowing custom-designed headphones to be connected to ...

The Power of Prediction

As I wrote in in this blog entry, the New Horizons probe is getting ready to fly past a Kuiper Belt object called “Ultima Thule”. In order to gain more information of this relict from the early days of the Solar System, it was calculated that Ultima Thule ...

Busy day in space - Dec 3, 2018

Finland was celebrating its 100 years of independence last year, and one of the highlights of the celebrations was supposed to be the launch of a CubeSat made by the Aalto University. Unfortunately the Indian PSLV rocket that was chosen for the launch had issues and the lauch schedule was ...

New book out on Amazon worldwide

While I was researching for my first book, I unintentionally stumbled across this growing fad of a flat Earth. To my surprise, folks were even having international conferences over this issue, where they discussed this newly-found form, apparently with a straight face. As a pilot with instrument rating, I have ...

MarCO – another great leap in interplanetary exploration

The landing of InSight was another spectacular success in the series of recent probes sent to Mars, but in a way, it was not such a big surprise any more: after all, technically InSight was based on the Phoenix Lander. Therefore this technology has already once proven its capabilities regarding ...

Digital Radio Mondiale - nice but too late?

The audio quality of AM stations is nowhere near to FM radio, and this has demoted AM into secondary uses in which the coverage is more important than the quality, or where the quality does not really matter: talk radio. Those of us who were interested in DX radio listening ...