brainwagon

Well, I bailed on the six hour drive down to Mojave to see the launch of SpaceShipOne, but somehow they’ve managed to muddle along without me, and I’m currently watching footage on the major networks. Best wishes to all involved in the project, and I’ll post updates here as the day goes on. SpaceShipOne is […]

I woke up this morning with a bit of indigestion (when you are used to a rather spartan diet low in fats, the occasional indulgence doesn’t settle very well) and found Armadillo Scores Test Liftoff Success In Bid For X Prize, along with video of a vertical take off and landing for their test vehicle. […]

A particularly rare astronomical event – the transit of Venus across the solar disk – will occur on June 8 or about sixteen hours from the time of this posting. Unfortunately (for me) it will not be visible from the western United States, so I won’t get a chance to observe it, but it should […]

I recall seeing the plans for a simple walking, balancing robot constructed out of TinkerToys, and while surfing around aimlessly I ran accross it again. I thought I’d go ahead and archive the paper which described it just for fun. It seems like the kind of toy you should just go ahead and build so […]

For some reason I found myself looking for plans for cheap 3D scanners at 1:15AM this morning, and came up with the Lair of the Chrome Cow. Surprisingly, I remember this site being mentioned on an old slashdot posting, but I guess I didn’t look. It’s got some nifty ideas. I’ll have to think about […]

I’m always interested in bizarre remote control applications, so I was pleased to find this informative paper on the development of the Black Widow Micro Air Vehicle, an RC vehicle with a 6″ wingspan, a range of 1.8 kilometers and a live video transmitter. Nifty and informative.

A recent Slashdot article was a rather dull one about fun things you could do with a large Fresnel lenses. I had seen stuff like this before, but in scanning over the responses as I often do, I found a reference to a patent for a spiral Fresnel reflector. You can review this the patent […]

An amateur constructed rocket reached an altitude of 100km and became the first such craft to reach space. This incredible achievement is described here by the ARRL, or the Amateur Radio Relay League. The rocket also carried an avionics package designed by radio amateurs. The rocket apparently transmitted telemetry on the 33cm band and ATV […]

Today the DARPA Grand Challenge was run. The course was shortened to only 142 miles from its original design goal of 250 miles. Fifteen robotic teams were selected to run. The best robot made 7.4 miles before mechanical failure called a halt to its day. The majority of teams made it less than a mile. […]

When I was in at Princeton in the late 80’s, I remember Pat Hanrahan talking about the Visible Human Project, a project to produce detailed 3-D models of both a normal male and female, using CT, NMRI and anatomical images. Yes, anatomical images. They sliced the male up in 1mm intervals to match the imaging […]

Well, Marvin didn’t get this one. Yesterday the Spirit rover successfully bounced to a stop on Mars, linked up with JPL and transmitted pictures back to Earth. You can see the first of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Press Release Images. I was hoping for some higher resolution images, which undoubtably will be showing up […]

As Mars approaches its closest opposition in something like 80,000 years, International MarsWatch is a great website to track for the latest images and information about the Red Planet. Their July images are already pretty arned nifty. Check back periodically.

The BBC is announcing the discovery of a squid thought to be larger than any discovered so far. The so-called giant squid or Architeuthis dux may have a mantle which reaches 2.25 meters, but the new squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) had a mantle 2.5 meters in length, and is thought to be a juvenile. Scientists have […]

I love to watch nature documentaries and the like on PBS, but most of them go over information that has been rehashed a million times. But just when you get complacent, you realize that there are still things out there which are big and yet largely unknown. One of the most unusual is the Oarfish, […]

On February 12, 1809, Charles Darwin was born. I think a strong argument could be made that Darwin is the most influential scientist of all time. He postulated that the complex biosphere we observe is the result of understandable physical processes that we can study and observe at work throughout the long history of life […]