Saturday Stories! Incendiary flying animals as weapons are apparently not new  Speaking of things that seem way over the Tinfoil Hat Line - but we'll see. NIAC funded projects: very cool, but still an example of government picking winners and losers I'm surprised the supreme court isn't getting in on... [Read More]

Some assorted NewSpace 2013 inspired thoughts that I want to put up while they are still fresh and go into more detail in future posts:  Public Perception/Personal Connection – as much as I would like to be wrong, I believe that a most people feel little connection to space.  When... [Read More]

A short post today due to:  A)   Having a lot of fun tuning the control gains on the MTF (microgravity test facility – the official acronym even though I’d rather call it the MTA: microgravity test assembly), that now has vaguely working feedback.  There’s something very satisfying about the ability... [Read More]

I’m a big fan of using things for purposes other than those intended by their creators. I’ve used Legos as a reconfigurable experimental setup, a firecracker case as an electronic Palantir, and cardboard for pretty much everything except packing things (ok, I’ve used it to pack things too.) People repurposing is... [Read More]

Considering how prevalent it is, converting analog data (ie. the real world) to digital form is a piece of our technological portfolio that is still surprisingly difficult to get right.  As much as some CS majors may like to ignore it, computers that interact with the real world need to... [Read More]