Author Archives: Robin

Spider Ship Builder

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Ugo Conti is an old man, which is his excuse for making this thing: he’s at the end of his career and he has nothing to lose if it doesn’t work out.
His concept for a ship is to have flexible legs acting like shock absorbers on small hulls which carry the mass of the ship out of the water, meaning it doesn’t have to go through waves, but slide over them. It can also be used in very shallow water. The prototype is crewed by two and can carry two tonnes of cargo.

Flying Saucer Builder

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This guy has been approached by NASA to give a talk about how he’s going to build a flying saucer – something the engineers haven’t been able to do yet – by using upwards air pressure between contra rotating rotors.
He’s not an engineer, in fact, he’s a construction worker with a serious can-do attitude. If he can raise another $40K the world will know if his ideas for a full scale version can be realised. Considering the low cost compared to other aerospace projects, I’d say it’s a steal for an investor.

UK building Tri-service defence acadamy

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The UK are going to consolidate in St. Athan, Wales, and consolidating a wide variety of trainings from 27 different locations in to 1. Not only will that be a whole lot cheaper in terms of manpower required to run the academy and property expenses, but it will also mean that inter-services jointness could become a core cultural value in a large part of defence, which means a whole load more efficiency due to less unhealthy interservice rivalry and more understanding of the other branches.

BASE Jumping Legal in US

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A NY state judge has ruled that since Jeb Corliss was very aware of the risks involved and attempted to mitigate them as much as possible, his attempt to jump off the Empire State Building was not reckless and endangering behaviour and thus legal.
Of course those namby pamby pussies who get adrenal rushes from watching their garage doors open with a remote control are all up in arms about it, but from me that gets a ‘Top Bloke’ award to that judge.

Stock Market Randomness

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There’s a test people did a few times where they put different stock names at the end different exits of a maze and let a hamster ‘pick’ his favorite stock. It turns out that the hamster is no worse (and sometimes better) than real life stock brokers, showing how the market is random.

The Sun-Times has a monkey who has been picking stocks from a larger portfolio every year for the past four years and has been doing significantly better than the major indexes:

In the four years since Mr. Monk has chaired and inspired this contest, his stocks have posted annual returns of 37 percent, 36 percent, 3 percent and, in 2006, 36 percent

USAF Special Projects

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Aviation Now has an interesting article on the USAF special projects, such as followups to the F-117A in the form of stealth cruise missles that also do recce.
Particularly interesting is the range of hacking projects the USAF has, such as Suter, which in the first guise can ‘see’ what targetted radars are seeing, and has grown to hack into the enemy computer networks and take control of them to manipulate the sensors. The latest version can

invade the links to time-critical targets, such as battlefield ballistic missile launchers or mobile surface-to-air missile launchers

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3D Printers for houses

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This is one hell of a printer – you feed it with concrete and gypsum, you have one single operator, and like an inkjet it prints out your house, speeding up the construction time by a factor of 200 and dropping costs by four fifths. Anyone can become an architect and because bricks need to be layed in a straight line, architecture should flourish as wavy lines become easy.
The US has one they hope will be online in April, the UK one will take a few more years.

France under the British Queen

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Documents have come to light showing how the then French PM, Guy Mollet, approached the then British PM, Sir Anthony Eden on 10/10/56 to ask if there was the possibility of a union between the UK and France. When this failed, he came back later to ask if France could become a member of the British Commonwealth.
These documents have been found in the UK, the French are looking into it, with big surprised expressions.

Pillars of creation toppled by something

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The Pillars of Creation, a gaseous /dusty area which resemble pillars:

are considered the birthplace of planets as many young planets can be seen inside them using IR:

The above pictures were taken in 1995.

In a dramatic turn of events, some huge force has blown the pillars to bits, around 6000 years ago. People are arguing if it’s a supernova or superheated stellar winds which have done this, but it’s strange to see such an imposing structure in the universe being wasted in 10 years time. This is what’s left of them:

Story from the Register

Story from Space.com