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!).
Link tags: sky
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Figures in the Stars
A lovely bit of data visualisation from Nadieh showing the differences and commonalities in constellations across cultures. As always, she’s written up the process too.
Exploring the Linguistics Behind Regular Expressions
Before reading this article, I didn’t understand regular expressions. But now, having read this article, I don’t understand regular expressions and I don’t understand linguistics. Progress!
No Planes Go (Upsideclown)
A near-future tale of post-Brexit Kafkaesque isolationism in the skies.
It turned out that taking back control also meant creating an aerial deadzone. Nothing can fly in here without a Library of Alexandria’s worth of paperwork, and nothing can fly out without the same.
SKYLON Users’ Manual (PDF)
Tech specs for a spacecraft that doesn’t exist (yet).
Star Axis is a profound meditation on the sky – Ross Andersen – Aeon
A beautiful exploration of the Star Axis sculpture—an artwork of the Long Now.
The ancients had pyramids to tame the sky’s mystery. We have Star Axis, a masterpiece forty years in the making.
ServerSky - Server Sky
Orbiting data centers. Fuck yeah!
Earth can return to what it is good at – green and growing things – while space can be filled with gray and computing things.
SkyCube: The First Satellite Launched by You! by Tim DeBenedictis — Kickstarter
If this Kickstarter project gets launched, it will literally get launched.
YouTube - Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity Rover) Mission Animation
The plan to get Curiosity Rover onto the surface of Mars (ignore the cheesy sound effects in space).
Tom Taylor : Projects : Clarke
A sweet little Skyhook/FireEagle desktop app from Tom. It updates your FireEagle location every five minutes by pinging Skyhook's API to triangulate your position. A small piece, loosely joining two small pieces.
Who Framed George Lakoff? - ChronicleReview.com
A detailed look at the troubled history of George Lakoff, the father of conceptual metaphor.
Translation From MS-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Joel Spolsky’s “Martian Headsets” [dive into mark]
Mark Pilgrim fisks Joel Spolsky. He's not greedy either: there's still plenty of straw men left in Spolsky's screed for the rest of us to skewer.
Sussex Police Uncovered - H900 - The Eye In The Sky
Click on the "What's the helicopter doing over my house?" link to get the latest eye-in-the-sky reports. The latest is: "Person trampled by cows" on the South Downs.
Type the sky | Slanted
Finding letters everywhere.
callto: tel @ Make Data Make Sense
A greasemonkey script that allows you to call telephone numbers in web pages (marked up with hcard) using Skype.
How Skype and Kazaa changed the net
An interview with Niklas Zennström.
DittyBot - An Applescript Adventure
Coolest use of Automater ever. Send an SMS form your phone to your POP account and your Mac will call you back over Skype to play you an MP3.