Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.
SpaceX has made history. Its privately developed rocket has made it into space.
After three failed launches, the company founded by Elon Musk worked all of the bugs out of their Falcon 1 launch vehicles.
The entire spectacle was broadcast live from Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific. Cameras mounted on the spacecraft showed our planet shrinking in the distance and the empty first stage engine falling back to Earth.
As the rocket ascended, cheers rang out during every crucial step of the launch sequence, and at the final stage their headquarters in Hawthorne, California erupted in excitement. (Wired.com viewed the launch over the Internet on SpaceX’s live webcast.)
The tensest moment came just before stage separation. At that critical juncture, the third launch attempt had failed. This time, it worked out perfectly.
Eight minutes after leaving the ground, Falcon 1 reached a speed of 5200 meters per second and passed above the International Space Station.
Earlier in the week, China put more astronauts into space (they’re only the third country to put a person into space independently, after the Russians and Americans). But for a first, they sent one of them on a spacewalk. From CNN:
A Chinese astronaut has completed his country’s first-ever spacewalk as part of an ambitious program that is starting to rival the United States and Russia in its rapid expansion.
Mission commander Zhai Zhigang waves Chinese flag after emerging from his spaceship.
State broadcaster CCTV showed live images of Zhigang as he floated out of the orbiter module’s hatch. “Greetings to all the people of the nation and all the people of the world,”
Zhai Zhigang waved to an external camera as he emerged from the hatch of the Shenzhou-7 spaceship on Saturday.
He later held a small Chinese flag, waving it in space.
Zhai returned to the interior of his capsule and closed the hatch after less than 20 minutes outside.
Any BSG fans out there? Then you know what “toasters” are.
Huh? This:
These are, in fact, the original Cylons form the original Battlestar Galalctica TV series. What, you didn’t know there was an original series? There was. And I date myself in admitting that I watched it as a kid, back in the day.
Cylons, in the newest series (from 2003) were robotic helpers of the Twelve Colonies. But going against Asimov’s Rules for Robots, these guys decide to try to wipe us humans off the face of the galaxy, and so much carnage ensues.
(Clever students of mine will notice that NXT number 15 is named Cylon to honour that mission.)
The new cyclons are a much nastier breed than those form the 1970:
Much of what you see in the current series is CGI (that is, computer generated), but they do have some life sized mockups for props and such.
And if you’re interested in learning a bit more about the true history of cyclons, you’d do worse than click on that link.
nBot is a two wheeled, self balancing little robot built by David Anderson, at the Southern Methodist University.
The basic idea for a two-wheeled dynamically balancing robot is pretty simple: drive the wheels in the direction that the upper part of the robot is falling. If the wheels can be driven in such a way as to stay under the robot’s center of gravity, the robot remains balanced. In practice this requires two feedback sensors: a tilt or angle sensor to measure the tilt of the robot with respect to gravity, and wheel encoders to measure the position of the base of the robot. Four terms are sufficient to define the motion and position of this “inverted pendulum” and thereby balance the robot. These are 1) the tilt angle and 2) its first derivative, the angle velocity, and 3) the platform position and 4) its first derivative, the platform velocity. These four measurements are summed and fed back to the platform as a motor voltage, which is proportional to torque, to balance and drive the robot. Here is a diagram of the algoithm with some code and implementation notes.
Chantal Petitclerc is perhaps Canada’s most successful Olympian. She won five gold medals at the Sydney Paralympic Games four years ago. And she has now won her fifth gold medal at Beijing.
Ten gold medals in wheelchair track events, the most recent in the 1500m race, which she finished in three minutes 39.88 seconds.
All together, that makes 21 medals through five Paralympic games, including 14 golds.
On her first race, over 20 years ago, she raced with a home made wheel chair. She came in last. This will be her last Paralympics, but he’s not giving up. She moves now from the track to competing in marathons and road races.
The idea of power can have many different meanings. One of them is the physical, raw, focused power of an elite athlete, like Chantal.
An exoplanet is a planet that orbits a star other than Sol. There are many, and many have been photographed, the first good photograph coming from VLT (the Very Large Telescope) array in Chile.
The star has a very romantic and endearing name: 1RXS J160929.1-210524, and it’s about 500 light years from us, somewhere in the region of Scorpio. The star is yellow (like Sol) and just a little bit smaller (85% of Sol’s mass). The planet, though, is massive – eight time bigger than Jupiter. And even though it looks close, it’s about 330 times the Earth-Sol distance away from its star.
For a sense of Solar scale, Neptune is about 30 times the distance from Earth to Sol. This planet is ten times further than Neptune is to Sol.
Now, if you look at the photo above, it looks kind of close to its star. That’s because in order to get a picture of the planet, the star had to be overexposed a bit. Well, a lot. The scale gets a bit wacky.
Previously, the only photographed extrasolar planets have belonged to tiny, dim stars known as brown dwarfs. And while hundreds of exoplanets have been detected by noting their gravitational tug on their parent stars, it is rare to find one large enough to image directly.
“This is the first time we have directly seen a planetary mass object in a likely orbit around a star like our sun,” said David Lafrenière, an astronomer at the University of Toronto who led the team that discovered the star. “If we confirm that this object is indeed gravitationally tied to the star, it will be a major step forward.”
THREE hundred feet below the outskirts of Geneva lies part of a 17-mile-long tubular track, circling its way across the French border and back again, whose interior is so pristine and whose nearly 10,000 surrounding magnets so frigid, that it’s one of the emptiest and coldest regions of space in the solar system
The track is part of the Large Hadron Collider, a technological marvel built by physicists and engineers, and described alternatively as heralding the next revolution in our understanding of the universe or, less felicitously, as a doomsday machine that may destroy the planet.
If you wanted to understand a bit about why we’d spend eight billion dollars on the Large Hadron Collider, you would do worse than to read this new article from Brian Greene. A physicist.
As the REM song goes, it’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.
At issue is the Large Hadron Collider (the LHC part of the title) located at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire research site (that would be the CERN part) near Geneva, Switzerland.
Now I’m betting you’re confused as ever. But this is important enough (potentially, Earth shatteringly enough) for you to know about that I’m willing to try again.
This is the LHC:
It’s basically a big racetrack. But instead of racecars, we’re racing protons, and at pretty near the speed of light. And just like a racetrack, were crashing them (those protons) into each other. Sounds like fun, eh? But don’t take my word for it, go listen to Brian Cox over at Ted.com, where he gives an inside tour of the world’s biggest supercollider.
(Unfortunately, the WordPress platform won’t let me post videos from TED, so you have to trust me and go watch it over there.)
But this is what it looks like from the inside:
So, why is this in the news right now? Well, it’s just started up (you can read about it over at NewScientist), and there are fears amongst the scientifically illiterate that the thing is going to destroy the Earth. Something about black holes or something.
Alright then, so now you have your brand new thumb drive. Or USB key. Or memory stick. If it’s a stick, I hope it looks like this… kinda funky.
So now, what to do with it.
When you stick (your stick) into the USB of any computer, it shows up as a drive. On a Mac, it will actually look like a hard drive icon. If you click on it, a window will open up showing you the contents – what’s on it!
On a Windows machine, it will either open up as a window automatically, or else you’ll need to find it. Click on “My Computer” and you should see it a “Removable Disk”. Double click on it and you should have a window, just likeon a Mac machine.
These drives are usually transferable between Mc and WIndows without a problem.
So what to do with that window?
First thing you should do is name your drive. From the desktop, click once to highlight the drive. then click again on the words (underneath the icon) to edit the drive name. May I suggest that you name it with your last name and your homeroom? Good, that would be great!
Next, create a new folder. Go: FILE –> NEW FOLDER. Name it “Robotics.” Or “Photography.” Heck, create a folder for every class you think you’ll be using this memory stick for.
Then (and this is the important part) save every document for that subject in that folder. Always, unequivocally. Like the Nike ad, “Just Do It!”
Some of my class were looking back on postings from last year, and made the discovery that we were now into the fourth month of the Mars Phoenix Lander mission. The weather report from that page lists a high of -31˚C, and we were wondering if there was much of a difference now that we’re in summer (well, that they’re in the summer).
Here’s today’s weather for Sol (Martian day) 91:
What do they have in common? They’re scientists. It helps that Brian Cox plays guitar in a rock band, or that Lisa Randall rock climbs. Yes, that makes them more human, doesn’t it?
