Patrick Chiles's Blog, page 18

History Ain’t What it Used to Be

So this little snippet of world-shattering news slipped under the old e-mail door yesterday: Wright Brothers Not First to Fly As determined by Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft. I doubt they’d put their considerable reputation on the line for a crank theory, so read and discuss. I predict the hardest hit will be North Carolina [...]

Layovers

This whole “Inspiration Mars” free-return mission is getting a lot of well-deserved attention, and one analysis I stumbled into today is worth pointing out. A recent piece by Dennis Wingo at SpaceRef offers what may look like some convoluted routes to Mars, except that the peculiarities of orbital mechanics actually reduce the trip time in [...]

Good Riddance

Totalitarian Socialist Hugo Chavez has assumed room temperature. Maybe, just maybe, Venezuela now has a chance at actual prosperity. Wish I could get my hopes up, as any prosperous nation in our hemisphere is a good thing for everyone, but the history of that region doesn’t bear much faith in a good outcome. I hadn’t [...]

Sequester Track

Since flight delays are one of the most over-hyped metrics of Sequestrageddon (no doubt to be followed next year by Sequestrageddon II: This Time, it’s Personal), let’s use a little modern technology to follow the decline of American civilization in real time: Wow. Just look at the path of fiscal destruction wrought upon our national [...]

Pack the Air Freshener

In case you’re thinking about signing up for that Inspiration Mars trip, there’s a little something you should know… Radiation is a substantial risk to humans once they’re beyond the protection of Earth’s magnetic field. There are lots of ideas for mitigating this, most of which involve some form of just rearranging the stuff they’d [...]

Vacation Plans

If anyone (and their significant other) is looking for a once-in-a-lifetime trip in a few years, then bazillionaire Dennis Tito has just the deal for you: The Crazy Plan to Fly Two Humans to Mars “Crazy” is PopMech’s choice of words, not mine. This seems eminently doable, though not without significant risk. We know how [...]

Friday Time Waster

Finally, a viral YouTube video that I can get excited about: FA-18 Carrier Ops. Set your screen resolution to “awesome” and crank up the volume, ’cause it also features music from Foo Fighters and Metallica.

Neighborhood Watch

Last night I had cobbled together a lot of interesting stuff about today’s cosmic near-miss with asteroid 2012 DA14 (a pretty innocuous – even boring – name for something that had the potential to do so much damage). I know the professional astronomers have to catalog this stuff in ways that make sense to them, [...]

And So It Begins

I encourage everyone, regardless of your political leanings, to read this and draw your own conclusions. As multiple vehicles close off the street and announce over a loudspeaker for all your neighbors to remain indoors (and are prohibited from leaving), the lead agent calls your house and directs your wife to come out of the [...]

I Only Read The Articles

One of my coworkers picked this up at a garage sale. Just when you think you’ve seen everything… Inside it’s all white pages, filled with – you guessed it – braille text. This is right up there with caffeine-free coffee and non-alcoholic beer in the “what’s the point?” department. Kind of like the first time [...]