Tags: space

6, 97: Why scorpions?

A fascinating and inspiring meditation on aerodynamics.

Flexibly Centering an Element with Side-Aligned Content – Eric’s Archived Thoughts

This is a great little tip from Eric for those situations when you want an element to be centred but you want the content inside that element to remain uncentred:

max-inline-size: max-content;
margin-inline: auto;

And I completely concur with his closing thoughts on CSS today:

It’s a nice little example of the quiet revolution that’s been happening in CSS of late. Hard things are becoming easy, and more than easy, simple. Simple in the sense of “direct and not complex”, not in the sense of “obvious and basic”. There’s a sense of growing maturity in the language, and I’m really happy to see it.

The lost thread

Twit­ter’s only con­clu­sion can be abandonment: an over­due MySpace-ification. I am totally con­fi­dent about this prediction, but that’s an easy confidence, because in the long run, we’re all MySpace-ified.

What Robin said.

Utopia - an introduction - YouTube

James and Trys have made this terrific explanatory video about Utopia. They pack a lot into less than twenty minutes but it’s all very clearly and methodically explained.

Awesome astrophotography from the South Downs | Science | The Guardian

To mark the start of the Dark Skies Festival today, here are some fantastic photographics taken not that far from Brighton.

Science Fiction-Media in Transition

Chip Delaney and Octavia Butler on a panel together in 1998 when hypertext and “cyberspace” are in the air. Here’s Octavia Butler on her process (which reminds me of when I’m preparing a conference talk):

I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.

So, I guess, in that way, I’m using a kind of primitive hypertext.

The internet that disappears - Embedded

The internet, it turns out, is not forever. It’s on more of like a 10-year cycle. It’s constantly upgrading and migrating in ways that are incompatible with past content, leaving broken links and error pages in its wake. In other instances, the sites simply shutter, or become so layered over that finding your own footprint is impossible—I have searched “Kate Lindsay Myspace” every which way and have concluded that my content from that platform must simply be lost to time, ingested by the Shai-Hulud of the internet.

Space Elevators: How a sci-fi dream could be built today

Surveying the current practical and theoretical factors for and against space elevators (including partial elevators—skyhooks!).

The Linear Oppression of Note-taking Apps

I think this explains why Kinopio resonates with me.

Earth Restored — Toby Ord

Beautifully restored high-resolution photographs of the Earth taken by Apollo astronauts.

So your grandmother is a starship now: a quick guide for the bewildered

Useful FAQs.

Your grandmother is not just a starship, she’s a highly individual starship with her own goals and needs!

Interplanetary Lobbing

League tables for the game of probe-throwing currently underway in our solar system.

The league covers expensive hardware lob matches held between planets in the Solar System. Two dwarf planets have recently been admitted to the league and lost their first matches against league champions Team Earth.

Eleanor Lutz - An Orbit Map of the Solar System

A lovely visualisation of asteroids in our solar system.

Project Orbital Ring

An Orbital Ring System as an alternative to a space elevator.

Representing nothing short of the most ambitious project in the history of space exploration and exploitation, the Orbital Ring System is more or less what you would imagine it to be, a gargantuan metal ring high above the Earth, spanning the length of its 40,000 kilometer-long diameter.

Rainbow spacecraft and how humanity might end (Interconnected)

I too am a member of The British Interplanetary Society and I too recommend it.

(Hey Matt, if you really want to go down the rabbit hole of solar sails, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed of Centauri Dreams—Paul Gilster is big into solar sails!)

The People’s Space Odyssey: 2010: The Year We Make Contact

This is an epic deep dive into the 1984 sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

For all its flaws, I have a soft spot for this film (and book).

Just a Beautiful Photo of Earth Taken in 1967 from 18,000 km Away «TwistedSifter

Pandemic Time: A Distributed Doomsday Clock - NOEMA

A meditative essay on the nature of time.

The simultaneous dimming of Betelgeuse and the global emergence of COVID-19 were curiously rhyming phenomena: disruptions of familiar, reassuring rhythms, both with latent apocalyptic potential.

Time and distance are out of place here.

We will have left a world governed by Chronos, the Greek god of linear, global, objective time measured by clocks, and arrived into a world governed by Kairos, the Greek god of nonlinear, local, subjective time, measured by the ebb and flow of local patterns of risk and opportunity. The Virus Quadrille is not just the concluding act of pandemic time but the opening act of an entire extended future.

NASA Collection

Back in 1985, Ian wrote to NASA to get some info for a shool project (that’s how it worked before the World Wide Web). NASA sent him a treaure trove in response. Here they are, scanned as PDFs. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the Space Shuttle, and more.