Brian Yee

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 )

Here’s 1972′s vision of what 2010 would be like.  Hint: Everyone wears jumpsuits.

2010: Living In the Future | the book. (from BoingBoing)

I’ve always thought it was a little lame to do this, but that never stopped me before.  So…here’s the small list I wrote down last week:

1. INBOX ZERO EVERY DAY

At least at work, get things organized out of the inbox and into a task list of some sort.  It is pleasing to look down to a clean inbox, helps to feel that things are in order.

2. PLAY LESS WOW

As fun as it is, it’s really just a time sink — time I could be using for something more useful.

3. CREATE SOMETHING REGULARLY

Spend some time doing something creative, doesn’t matter what.

4. DON’T WAIT, ACT NOW

Shannon knows I’m a procrastinator.  So I’ll try to work on that a bit.

5. HAVE NO RESOLUTIONS NEXT YEAR

Would be nice to not be able to come up with a list like this.

Sometimes you look at old pictures and think “Awwww”.  I just look at this one and think how beat city my lawn was in 2006.  Yikes.  Eila looks cute, though.

Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day was pretty neat.  It was an astronaut grabbing a rather large satellite in an untethered spacewalk.

The picture doesn’t capture really what’s happening here.  The satellite is rotating while being captured.  The video shows this better. Shannon couldn’t believe what she was seeing.  ”Is he crazy!” seems like what Not surprisingly, NASA stopped the practice of untether spacewalks after the Challenger accident.

This reminded me of an interesting anecdote from Mike Mullane’s Riding Rockets on risks in spaceflight.  The shuttle engineers had found a very rare but potential flaw with the shuttle that might prevent the solid rocket boosters from separating (which would be fatal to the crew).  They had asked the astronauts if they would still launch knowing the risk.  That astronaut’s response:

They might as well have asked a three-year-old if he wanted to eat his candy now or wait until tomorrow.  If the engineers said, “We forgot to install the center engine.  Do you still want to launch?” Hank (astronaut Hank Hartsfield) probably would have said, “No problem.  We’ll just burn the two we have.”  Nothing was going to get in our way.

The business of being an astronaut is extremely risky.  I wonder if I could fly in the face of those risks.

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.

Joe (@szac) turned me on to Flot for a project he’s working on.  I’m helping him out with some php logic.  Flot a pretty nifty graphing library all in javascript.  The examples show that it’s capable of a lot: multiple axes, multiple series, highlighting, and all can be updated real-time using Ajax.  But at its simplest — give it some properties, a data set, and it’s off and running.  Actually forget the properties, it will compute a logical set of axes for you if you want.

That Flot does all of this in javascript (via canvas painting) is all pretty amazing to me.  To me, javascript is still what you use to make those mouseover nav links that change state.  My javascript chops never really progressed beyond the web circa-1998.

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