In October 2012, Felix Baumgartner leapt from a balloon floating 24-miles high and fell to Earth, breaking the sound barrier on the way down. Now, newly released footage shows in unprecedented detail what Baumgartner saw on his record-breaking descent.
    
|
We can debate all day about whether the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie is going to be awesome. But there is no argument to be had about these customized Donatello sneakers. They will make you want to yell cowabunga!
|
|
When Michael Arndt was replaced as the writer of Star Wars: Episode VII last fall, we were told it had to do with timing concerns. But according to a new report in the Hollywood Reporter, the real reason was a disagreement over who the film should be about: Luke, Leia and Han, or the next generation.
|
|
Dance MagersThe twitter username article is a good read.
Dance MagersCan't wait for the bad spin on this one
Dance MagersUmmm
If beef is red and chicken is white, what kind of meat do we humans carry about on our bones? Of course you want to know.
|
|
There are a number of arguments against building the Keystone XL Pipeline, but there is only one that counts. We have to keep the carbon in the ground. Building the pipeline is not that.
There is now short video ad from Keystone Truth that makes a more specific argument. It isn’t really an argument against building it (see above for that) but rather, a more detailed look at what Keystone XL involves, putting a finer edge, perhaps, on why it should be opposed by Americans. The ad, titled “Sucker Punch – Keystone Truth,” is designed to inform Americans that they are probably getting suckered by the builders of Keystone. Keystone supporters claim that by linking the Canadian Tar Sands to the Gulf Coast of the United States we would become “energy independent.” But there is good reason to believe that the whole point of Keystone is to provide an efficient way to move the tar sands gunk through, not to, the United States for sale overseas. Furthermore, the ad claims, probably correctly, that one of the major financial backers of this effort, perhaps even the major backer, is China. (China has invested 30 billion of the 100 billion invested so far. I believe this is the largest single investment.) It makes sense that a plan to move Canadian tar sands gunk out to the rest of the world would involve foreign investors, and it also makes sense that China would be one of these, if not the Big Panda in the room, because China has the cash to do this. And, probably, the thirst for the gunk itself.
Here is the ad:
It is possible to see the ad as “Red Bating.” This is where we prey on American anti-Asian racism, which often involves the tropes of the clever Oriental Entity and/or the Red Scare. It makes China a bad guy using themes that reach back into American cultural history to exploit long established and deep racialized hatred and mistrust.
This may be true. But it is also true that the ad does not really invoke any of the traditional symbols of this sort of thing. Yes, it shows a lot of red along with the China part of the story, and the red flag with the stars on it, and it even highlights, using a B&W vs. Color contrast, the red in the Chinese Flag and the red in the Canadian flag. But, it is also true that red is the color of China and is used abundantly by the Chinese in pro-China patriotic depiction and decoration, especially in places like … well, like Red Square. Also, that is the Chinese flag and that is the Canadian flag. And China really is investing a lot of money to get the tar sands gunk to a particular market where they will benefit.
One could say that the Chinese, the Canadians, the pro-Keystone Americans, and the Keystone corporate structure are all depicted as the capitalists they are. Running dog capitalists even, if I may borrow a phrase. But yes, the ad not so subtly allows for viewers to make the link to deep seated fear and distrust.
So here we go again. Progressive liberal left wingers (left wingers!) heavily analyzing our own message (because this is a message that works for our side) and possibly even fighting over how to make the argument to the extent that we weaken the argument ourselves. But we keep our integrity. The reason the right wing wins so many of these battles of rhetoric is because they almost never do that.
Suckers. We are. But perhaps we like it that way.
UPDATE: We may be hearing more about Keystone XL on Thursday.
Here’s a trailer for the HBO documentary about evolution and religion that I mentioned a while back:
The film was made by Antony Thomas, who is a very prominent documentary filmmaker from England. I was one of the talking heads interviewed for the film, and Antony wrote to tell me that some of my interview made it into the final cut. Yay me! I have not seen the finished film, but from our conversations I am confident it will not suggest that creationism has any scientific credibility whatsoever.
In the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers recount the fascinating case of an electrician who, after sustaining a 14,000-voltshock to his left shoulder, presented with "bilateral stellate anterior subcapsular opacities of the lens." Translation: Starburst-shaped cataracts.
|
|
Dance MagersWhoa.
This is an emergency brake test of a German Leopard tank behind a group of 23 humans (possibly slaves/prisoners). I assume the people standing in the middle drew the shortest straws. I would have run into the woods. Also, what's the purpose of a tank with an emergency braking system anyways? I don't want a tank that can stop, I want a tank that is UNSTOPPABLE. I want a tank that only stops when it runs out of gas, which is never because it runs on the sound of crushing things. After the world ends it's just gonna be cockroaches and me in my magic tank.
Keep going for the video.
Thanks to Dunc, who's always dreamed of commandeering a tank and driving it through an enemy's house.
Dance MagersSo this could be true, or so could anything else written way back then.
Which got me thinking: god I hope future humans find Kluck's writings and believe they were true.
A recently deciphered 4,000-year-old clay tablet from ancient Mesopotamia is providing new details about the mythological tale of Noah and his ark, including detailed instructions on how the massive, round floating vessel was to be built.
|
|
Dance MagersChange that curriculum Kluck
Yikes, as if we didn't already think the First World War claimed enough victims: A French historian says the number of soldiers killed in the Great War has been vastly understated — a death count too low by as many as one million.
|
|
It sounds like something out of a horror movie. Mike Seay, whose daughter died last year in a car accident, received a piece of junk mail from Office Max addressed to "Mike Seay, Daughter Killed In Car Crash." How did OfficeMax have this information? The more he investigated, the more the story became science fiction.
|
|
In the centuries leading up to the New Kingdom of Egypt that rose in 1500 BCE, many kingdoms in the region warred with each other. Now archaeologists have discovered evidence of one of these lost kingdoms, complete with the tomb of one of its leaders.
|
|
Dance MagersInteresting
An apparent discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules inside neurons is rekindling a 20-year old debate on the nature of consciousness. Called the Orch OR model, it suggests there's a connection between the brainʼs biomolecular processes and the basic structure of the universe.
|
|
Dance MagersCrazy
This is an older video of a motorcyclist laying his head on the track in a high-speed turn. I would not do that. The only way you're getting me to lay down on a motorcycle is in a bikini for a calendar shoot.
Keep going for the video, head on the track happens about 20-seconds in if you have zero patience.
Thanks to my buddy c-nasty, who claims he can't ride a motorcycle without his penis dragging on the ground and getting run over by the car behind him.
Dance MagersI'm down
Grab that figurative grain of salt, and then throw it immediately away. Because while the rumor that Pixar has been assigned its own Star Wars movie is indeed only a rumor, it's frankly too perfect an idea to waste our time worrying whether or not it's true.
|
|
Dance MagersWhoop
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” -Antoine de Saint Exupéry
It’s the end of the week here, so it’s time for another Ask Ethan column! Today’s question comes from longtime reader and fan Jeremy F., who wants to know about the feasibility of the planned Mars One mission. In particular,
I hope 4 people don’t just fly to their death, that would be terrible for my chances of getting to Alpha Centauri or Vega before I die.
No kidding. Let’s go back to the beginning and tell you just what Mars One is all about.
Image credit: NASA.
The dream, of course, is to build a human colony on Mars. It’s been over 40 years since humans walked on the Moon, and we were able to do that in an era where the most technologically powerful computer on Earth was less than 10% as powerful as an iPhone. This has long been a dream of manned spaceflight advocates everywhere, and as my favorite Mars advocate has been stating for decades,
“We are much closer today to being able to send humans to Mars than we were to being able to send men to the moon in 1961, and we were there eight years later. Given the will, we could have humans on Mars within a decade.”
And I firmly believe that this is true. But we don’t have the will, and more importantly, neither does Mars One.
Image credit: Mars One / Bryan Versteeg.
Think about the things that need to happen to have a human colony achieve some measure of success on Mars. All-inclusive, we need:
Studies done through NASA have continuously come back — since the 1990s at least, and possibly even earlier — showing that this could be done with existing technology. All it would require is an investment of approximately $50 billion over a 10 year timescale.
Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.
The launch part is easy enough. The greatest limitation to launching a spacecraft to Mars is the launch window, which means there’s about a two month window every 780 days where we should be launching our missions. Because of the relative orbits of Earth-and-Mars, if you want to both minimize the amount of fuel needed to reach Mars and also the amount of time spent in transit to Mars — getting the journey down to around 8½ months — you need to launch just prior to Earth passing Mars in its orbit, which is where the 780 day period comes from.
Image credit: Winchell Chung of http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/mission.php.
Launches — particularly of heavy payloads — are expensive and not without risk, but that technology already exists, and has a decent enough success rate that, based on Mars One’s current plans, I think is likely to succeed. In fact of the 51 total missions ever sent to Mars, only nine have failed on launch, and only three of those failures have come in the past 20 years.
If you were an astronaut chosen for the Mars One mission, especially given the fact that the first unmanned launch is currently planned for 2018 and the first manned mission isn’t slated for another three launch cycles, you’d have every reason to believe that your spacecraft would successfully launch with very good odds of success.
And honestly, the second part of the journey — the 8½ month journey to the red planet — should be pretty straightforward, too.
Image credit: NASA / Tracy Caldwell Dyson.
We’ve already had humans survive in outer space for very long periods of time, for consecutive stretches considerably longer than 8½ months aboard Mir and with non-consecutive stretches aboard the International Space Station. So long as the same precautions — a basic level of shielding in the hull — were taken aboard the Mars One manned transit capsule (or whatever they wind up calling it), there should be no problems.
Yes, there’s always the risks that in-flight resources will be poorly managed, that technically problems will occur, and that someone on the crew will go crazy; they’re planning on financing this on a reality-TV-show model, after all. But realistically, it’s certainly not a stretch to think that they can make it all the way to Mars without a problem.
Unfortunately, that’s where my optimism for the mission ends.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech, overlay of lander/rover sites via Wikipedia.
These are the landing sites of all the previous successful landers and rovers on Mars. All of them. There are eight, including Mars 3, which failed 15 seconds after landing, and Mars Phoenix, which surprisingly failed spontaneously after 5 months. Even including these as “successes,” that’s fewer than half of the attempts to land on Mars.
Landing on Mars is tremendously difficult for a number of reasons, some of which are:
It’s worth stating that the technology capable of landing a spacecraft carrying the weight of multiple humans on Mars has not yet been developed.
Image credit: NASA.
To land the Curiosity rover on Mars — an inanimate object about half the size of a Smart Car — an entirely new landing technology needed to be developed, and was tested for the very first time on the mission itself. That it was a success was fantastic, but that alone cost over a billion dollars to develop, and that was for a rover that weighed about 900 pounds, landing in the most precise ellipse ever: 20 km by 7 km. (Dark ellipse, below.)
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/MSSS.
The methods used for the other rovers — which was to drop them in giant airbags that would bounce — wouldn’t have worked for something this massive, much less for a capsule with a bunch of sensitive meatbags inside.
What Mars One is counting on is that they can safely land a heavier payload than ever before, that they can do it more precisely than ever before (as in, within just a few hundred meters of previous successful landings), and they can do it for only 12% of the projected costs, with a total estimated budget of just $6 billion instead of the $50 billion price tag to do it right.
It’s an ambitious plan, but looking at it through my eyes, I see it as an opportunity to to be the first humans to be launched to Mars, to travel around 100 million kilometers to journey to the red planet, to descend through the Martian atmosphere, and to die, in short order, on the desert-like surface. And I don’t see very much opportunity for it turning out any better than that.
But others do, and maybe they know something that I don’t. Maybe they’re sitting on a new technology that they haven’t unveiled to the world. But I’d be very cautious here. Going to Mars is the obvious first step in our journey to the stars, something that seems all but inevitable as part of our dreams for reaching out into the Universe.
Image credit: Battlestar Galactica. Hey, why not?
I just don’t think hoodwinking and exploiting a bunch of naive explorers, killing them horrifically in short order because you sold them a false promise of what they could’ve achieved, is the way to do it. There’s a right way to get to Mars — by investing the time and resources to do it rigorously and to the best of our ability — and then there’s the Mars One way: make it into a spectacle. Sometimes you flip a coin and it lands on its side, I get it; I just wouldn’t bet on those odds. As far as I’m concerned, Jeremy (and everyone else), yes, the Mars One crew is doomed from the get-go, and most likely, a lot more quickly than anyone involved with the organization is willing to admit.
Have a question or suggestion for what you’d like to see? Ask away! And if you’ve been missing out on all the great content on the new Starts With A Bang at Medium, there’s never been a better time to catch up!
Dance MagersCrazy
"Supposedly this is a picture of a CT scanner sans casing," writes io9-reader Monica, "but it looks more to me like a first-generation Stargate." We heartily agree – and just wait until you see what this beastly contraption looks like in motion.
|
|
Processed foods are notorious for their jaw-droppingly long lists of chemical-laden ingredients, each one sounding worse than the last. But as these detailed infographics show, even the simplest of foods are anything but.
|
|
There's a star about 8,500 light-years away that's spinning so fast its surface speed exceeds 620,000 mph. Astronomers are familiar with these kinds of stars, but this one's wholly unique in that it has a rather strange companion: a black hole.
|
|
Okay, so I'm in between doctor's appointments while the country's best (cheapest) medical teams try to figure out what the hell new disease I'm patient zeroing. Hopefully not one from eating cat shit. These are a bunch of impressive Zelda universe creatures imagined in real life by Nate Hallinan (of real life Smurf and medieval X-men fame). I thought Skulltulas were scary enough in the game, but goodness gracious (I've been hanging out with your aunt too much). As much as I always say I do, I'm not even sure I'd want to live in Hyrule with these things hanging around.
Zelda: GW, you've got to enter the great Deku tree and retrieve the Fairy Slingshot!
Me: Are there going to be Skulltulas?
Zelda: Of course!
Me: *dropping sword and shield* I'll have your and Ganon's wedding present sent to the castle.
Hit the jump for a rock-solid(!) Goron, but check out some higher res concept work for the Skulltula and an upcoming Deku HERE.
Thanks to Marty S and Luc, who both know Nate, easily making them infinitely cooler than I'll ever be.
Michael Hindes of West Springfield, MA, was sorting through boxes of his grandparents' old photographs when he happened upon 26 harrowing photos of the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster of 1986. To his knowledge, these photos have never been publicly released.
|
|
Dance MagersComcast and Verizon have both said this ruling won't change their practices at all from what they are now
In a somewhat obscure legal ruling, a judge has declared that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission does not have the power to prevent network carriers like AT&T from regulating the content that goes over their wires. Here's why this could mean the infopocalypse.
|
|
Dance MagersCool
It took the Human Genome Project ten years, and close to three billion dollars, to sequence the first human genome. Now, in a major milestone for biotechnology, a company has introduced a machine that it claims can sequence an entire human genome in a matter of hours, for less than $1,000.
|
|
Dance MagersThose Tall Whites!
Citing a report based on documents leaked by Ed Snowden, Iran's semi-official news agency Fars claims the U.S. government is being controlled by a secret regime of aliens called the "Tall Whites," who were also instrumental in the rise of Nazi Germany.
|
|
Dance MagersLooked through these earlier; pretty great.
Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in the original Star Wars, took to Twitter Thursday night and unleashed a veritable trove of annotated behind-the-scenes photos from the original trilogy. Some of these shots you'll no doubt recognize, but many of them were new to us – like this ridiculously adorable photo of 11-year-old Warwick Davis!
|
|
Dance MagersHmmm
The Expanded Universe as we knew it will soon be no more. Disney has created a special committee whose job it will be to figure out what is and isn't part of a complete Star Wars canon — meaning all the EU material created over the years will be judged, and either become official or deemed invalid.
|
|
Dance MagersHoly crap
It seems like only a few hours ago that the glory of Armor Cat was bestowed upon us, but now there is a new challenger to the throne of January 9th, 2014's greatest cat cosplay! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... Mewbacca.
|
|
