Category Archives: Miscellania

The Russians used a pencil

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Fisher AG-7 Space Pen

Fisher AG-7 Space Pen

“In the 1960’s NASA spent many years and millions of taxpayer dollars developing a special ‘space pen’ that uses nitrogen-pressurized ink cartridges to work in zero gravity, in a vacuum and at extreme temperatures ranging from -50 F to +400 F.

“The Russians used a pencil.”

This story keeps cropping up as an example of bureaucratic waste, or specifically as an example of what a colossal waste of money the space programme has been. It has been circulating the internet as fact since the mid ’90s, and even fictional White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry made the claim in a 2002 episode of the West Wing.

This Million Dollar Space Pen story is a pure fabrication however. The space pen was developed not by NASA, but by businessman Paul C. Fisher. It was only adopted by NASA after years of testing and the costs of developing the pen were never passed on to the US government. Furthermore, detritus from wooden pencils presented a potential hazard in microgravity, and Soviet Union would later adopt the Fisher space pen also. Continue reading →

QArt codes

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By now everybody knows that it is possible to slap a logo in the middle of a QR code and — provided enough redundant data remains — the result will still be readable.

It seems it is also possible to engineer the encoded values to create a picture across the entire QR code. This technique not only produces a highly distinctive code image, it also produces completely legitimate codes.

Russ Cox calls these QArt codes, and has developed a web tool for producing them: QArt Coder. All the source code is hosted at code.google.com/p/rsc/source/browse/qr.

Link

GamesDev South Wales started up fairly recently and plan to meet every month. The next gathering is upstairs in O’Neill’s this April 25th at 7.30.

We’re trying to find anyone involved in the computer games industry in South Wales – whether AAA, indie, mobile, social, handheld, desktop or whatever – and get them together. Students and hobbyists are welcome, too!

They are also on Twitter and seem to organise via their Google Group.

I don’t work in game development, but I’d love to! If you’re interested in that, then you’ll probably be interested in this… Continue reading →

“Valve has no formal management or hierarchy at all”

Quote

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Michael Abrash on Valve:

Once Doom had been released, any of thousands of programmers and artists could create something similar (and many did), but none of those had anywhere near the same impact. Similarly, if you’re a programmer, you’re probably perfectly capable of writing Facebook or the Google search engine or Twitter or a browser, and you certainly could churn out Tetris or Angry Birds or Words with Friends or Farmville or any of hundreds of enormously successful programs. There’s little value in doing so, though, and that’s the point – in the Internet age, software has close to zero cost of replication and massive network effects, so there’s a positive feedback spiral that means that the first mover dominates.

Valve: How I Got Here, What It’s Like, and What I’m Doing – blogs.valvesoftware.com

#ScienceSunday

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Let’s kick of a #ScienceSunday hashtag. I’ve been doing this on and off for a couple of months now, and it seems like a very positive way of promoting rationalism.

Here’s the premise:

Find an interesting science story from the previous week and post a link to it, using the #ScienceSunday hashtag. Ideally the story should have a human interest angle, or inspire a sense of wonder. The idea is to highlight the very real miracles that happen (or are discovered) every day in this world thanks to the hard work of scientists everywhere. Continue reading →

Tweets of Note

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Update 2012.03.23: Never mind.

Tweets of Note was going to be a weekly newsletter, created with TinyLetter, that compiled links and other stuff from my Twitterings. I promoted it a bit on Twitter (it got 12 subscribers — thanks!) and put together the first edition. When it was ready (666 words!), I hit send. And…

“Message was not sent because its content is flagged as spam”

Oh. They don’t give me an option to edit my email either. ‘That looks like spam’, yoink. If I hadn’t emailed myself a draft, I wouldn’t have any copy at all.

So the idea has been nixed by an algorithm. While I don’t consider the newsletter (linkletter?) to be spammy, I can’t think of any way to provide an email full of links without it looking spammy.

I’ve included the text from the newsletter below. Consider this the first and final edition. Sorry if you were hoping for more. Continue reading →

Retraction

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This American Life are this week dedicating an entire episode to retracting their earlier episode “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” (an episode that became the most popular podcast in their history).

Ira writes:

I have difficult news. We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China – which we broadcast in January – contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s acclaimed one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products.

Mike Daisey has employed the ‘I’m not a journalist‘ defence: “My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as journalism, and it’s not journalism. It’s theater.”

The blame really does lie with the journalistic entity though, and in dedicating literally a whole episode of This American Life to apologising for and explaining their mistake, they will surely not lose, but gain trust and respect. Continue reading →

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This is clearly a work of genius! Like Falling Down for the me generation.

Loveless, jobless, possibly terminally ill, Frank has had enough of the downward spiral of America. With nothing left to lose, Frank takes his gun and offs the stupidest, cruelest, and most repellent members of society. He finds an unusual accomplice: 16-year-old Roxy, who shares his sense of rage and disenfranchisement.

Out 6 April 2012.

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MPlayerX: A superior alternative to VLC for Mac users

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The best thing about the poor VLC 2.0 is that I’ve discovered the much nicer MPlayerX (free in the Mac App Store).

MPlayerX logo Like VLC, MPlayerX is open source and plays a large variety of file formats, but unlike VLC it looks like it belongs on a Mac. In fact, it looks and behaves a lot like QuickTime. I especially like that all the chrome fades out when your mouse is off the window, leaving just the video.

There are other features that I didn’t realise I was missing out on. For example, it remembers where you are in a video when you close the app so you don’t have to go searching for your place next time you start it up. Also, if you are watching a series that is logically named, it will automatically start playing the next episode for you. You can turn that off, but it’s a feature I appreciate. So far, my only annoyance has been the limitation that you can only resize the player from the bottom-right corner. Still, at least it respects the media’s aspect ratio — something VLC can’t do any more!

MPlayerX screenshot

Continue reading →

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Known locally as “Point Bob” or “The Point”, Point Roberts is a geopolitical oddity, only being a part of the United States because it lies south of the 49th parallel, which constitutes the Canada-U.S. border in that area.

Point Roberts USGS map

Continue reading →