Recently, the American Medical Association defined obesity as a disease. Obesity is defined as having a BMI greater than or equal to 30.  Your BMI is defined as your mass in kg divided by the square of your height in meters.  All of these definitions kind of make sense when... [Read More]

Here’s yet another Kickstarter for a small, possibly awesome space project.  The proposal has received a stamp of feasibility from colleagues who have cubesat and cubesat propulsion knowledge that I trust.  Also note the images of actual developed hardware rather than just pretty graphics.  A thought on the bigger picture:... [Read More]

A busy weekend, while awesome, didn't leave me much quality blog-post-type-thinking time. However I did discover an delightfully detailed description of Ditch Day at Caltech written up by Ilya Nepomnyashchiy.   I've briefly described Ditch Day in the past, and should probably emulate Ilya and write up a fun and detailed description of my... [Read More]

Saturday Space Stories! *Historian Engineer Hat* Did you know they had Mechanical Semaphore Telegraphs?!?</p> Basically any modern technology can be used as a weapon. While rocks can't be used as WMD's they also can't get you to space. While there are a lot of qualifications, stuff like this just shows... [Read More]

While I agree that Paypal Galactic has me scratching my head a little. My first gut reaction was to dismiss it as just a way-over-the-tinfoil-hat-line publicity stunt. However, I’m keeping my mind and eyes open because honestly I don’t know enough about it to be dismissive – I suspect that... [Read More]