how now brownpau
The elusive source of the Space Station’s air pressure drop — a leaking window hose — appears to have been found and fixed, or at least temporarily plugged up. (Was it the big window, perhaps?)
If this were the starship Enterprise, the ship’s automated Damage Control would have registered a minor hull breach and activated localized force fields. We have a long way to go.
LGF recently linked a firsthand photo of Saddam’s capture from Military.com, which I figured was of doubtful authenticity; but now, Radley Balko has received a whole bunch of “Candid Captured Saddam” pics showing not only Saddam Hussein’s capture, but the scenes immediately afterward. The Formula 409 shot is especially striking, if only for its anachronistic domesticity. And cool hairstyling.
(I really think I’m turning into a conservative. Must be my apartment’s close proximity to Fox News’ DC office.)
Low of 11° tomorrow. And just so we’re clear, that’s in fahrenheit. New York is getting it even worse.
Obliterating Animal Carcasses with Explosives. It’s in a “laugh” directory, but it looks like it was a serious page. Hey, it worked (kind of) for whales.
In addition to SpaceFlightNow’s live status reports, also check out the Mars Rover Mission Blog. (Found via adot’s notblog.)
Latest news is that the rover has stood up and gotten its thermal spectrometer running.
So the latest buzz is that Bush is about to announce a return to space. (Isn’t that the funniest possible photo to accompany that headline?) I was just reading a Wired article on NASA emergency escape systems, which mentions on page 2 that the Apollo spacecraft computers ran on “just 5,000 integrated circuits and … a feeble 74 KB of hard-wired memory and 4 KB of what might be called pre-RAM.”
Hey, if we got to the moon on slide rules and scotch tape (of course I exaggerate), I think we could try and shoot someone to Mars on what we have today. Except human astronauts might not bounce so well.
Over on Transterrestrial Musings (a mostly-astro weblog which I must add to my link list), Rand Simberg has some sobering thoughts.
Childcare with Wyclif. Beautiful. I can’t remember where I first read that you should never “negotiate” with kids, but it’s good advice: you can give the child choices, you can train the child towards freedom, but don’t give the child the idea that he has bargaining power over you. (Of course, I say this never having been a parent myself. Things could be different in the future, when I’m desperately trying to juggle screaming toddler triplets on a crowded subway train while everyone stares.)
Ludicrous Speed Nerd Test Result: 42.857142857142854%
Inner Geek Test Result: 57.59369%
Peter Merholz on the National Park Service’s brochure design. I’m currently working on an NPS-related project, and was a bit annoyed at a recent redesign which broke a bunch of URLs. Now I see why the new look came about: to match consistency with their excellent print work. Living just steps away from NPS jurisdiction, those brochures catch my attention pretty often, and I was surprised to find that they’ve been using the same design system since 1977. They certainly look newer than that — or perhaps retro trends in modern design are just now harking back to that time. In any case, it’s a great example of versatile, strategic, forward-looking design. I brim with envy.
