Brian Yee

This is back from 2000.  I still think about this every now and then and thought I’d post it (or re-post it):

Postal Experiments from the Annals of Improbable Research.  Experiments include trying to send all sorts of objects (including a $20 bill in a clear envelope, to a ski, to a deer tibia) through the US Postal Service to see what gets delivered and what doesn’t.

This is an interesting project.  Guy with a custom wood-burning weber can get up to 1000 degrees.  Perfect for making pizza.  This inspires me to work on getting better pizza out of my grill.  Reminds me of weber_cam’s firedome.

Home (PizzaHacker).

Just in case you’re sent back in time 1,000 years, here’s all the basics you need to know.  Like heavier-than-air flight and the basics of fighting infections.  Just hang this up in your time machine.

Time Traveler’s Crib Sheet. (from BoingBoing)

(P.S. Apparently, I’m just a transparent proxy for BoingBoing.  Go read that site, they have more content )

This couple from New York paints pictures of the things they want, and sell the paintings for the price of the real item. When the painting sells, they buy that item. Really neat concept.

Wants for Sale (from Kottke)

Great post by NASA’s Wayne Hale on his blog regarding conjuctions, or close encounters between the Space Shuttle and space junk.  When a conjunction is going to occur during the crew sleep period and there is sufficient reason to believe there will not be a collision, mission controllers will set a timer to expire at the Time of Closest Approach and everyone would hope they did their math correctly.  This happened three times during Wayne’s tenure in Mission Control.  His quote:

So as we waited for the clock to count to zero, there was plenty of time to contemplate metaphysical topics:  life, death, courage, risk, achievement, probability, dishonor.  They are all fellow travelers, intimately bound together.  No great accomplishment comes without difficulty or risk.  Miscalculation or failure results in death and dishonor.  But it is what it is; you do the best you can, make the best rational choice you can given what you know, and then wait for the result.

Going to Las Vegas holds no enticement for me.

I follow Wayne Hale on twitter (@waynehale) and I am always impressed with his insights and thoughts on the space program.

This is really cute.  Although, maybe a pregnant mother wouldn’t think so.

Geeky maternity t-shirts

(From Boing Boing)

I tried to stay up to watch the start of the rollout live – scheduled for 12:01AM this morning, but it got delayed about an hour, so I’m glad I didn’t.  The last bit of the rollout is happening right now.

Someone on the nasaspaceflight.com forum this morning noted that the last rocked to rollout from the VAB that wasn’t the shuttle was ASTP (on a Saturn 1B), which rolled to pad 39B on March 24 1975.  It was an interesting sense of scale.  And it’s neat to finally see something new.

Spaceflightnow.com Gallery

Before launches at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Helicopters search the downrange path of rockets to find any nomads in the vast grasslands of Kazakhstan.  If any are found they are warned of the upcoming launches.

Link

This picture of this activity was particularly interesting:

(image from russianspaceweb.com, copyright noted)

The americans launch with ocean downrange. and a similar search is performed for boats that are in the wrong spot.

Great set of photos of an airplane factory in Burbank, CA that was hidden during World War II using netting and fake houses on the roof.  I guess being on the coast, it was much more vulnerable than, say, Willow Run.