So, remember that Mk4 heavy lifter I created? The one that got to orbit but spun to death? Well, I went back to the drawing board and created the same thing more or less from first principles using the Heavy Lifter chassis parts, so the chassis that's one down. This created a lighter spaceplane which could still comfortably lift 2.5m diameter ( Read more... )

Under no circumstances should anyone play Kerbal Space Program. Why? Because it's addictive. I just spent the last three days trying to get an oversized Mk4 chassis spaceplane (think something the length of a Boeing 737 crossed with the cargo width of a Hercules transport aircraft) up into orbit. They said it couldn't be done! They said it was ( Read more... )

I was sent a link to the University of Oxford's disability section's request for people to work in a support role for disabled people through one of my mother's friend's daughters (that has got to be one of the most complex sentences I've constructed in a long time ( Read more... )

I started watching both Noein and Claymore over the last week or so. I started Noein first as I didn't feel like watching angsty female warriors battling pseudo-vampire equivalents and angsting about the whole meaning of fighting and being female. Noein was diverting, and because of that and also diverting computer games, I suddenly felt like ( Read more... )

In my fourth year at Oxford, I took a module on a subject that touched on nanophysics, so I know a little about "nanotechnology". And I would like to know what people's perceptions of it are in the form of this poll.

Poll Perceptions of nanotechnology

Today the person next to me had some problems with running a command in a Perl script which I helped her debug. Due to the nature of the command and of the problem, I ended up typing a command that, for the life of me, I thought I'd never use in a context that made sense.

locate sexFor, verily, some physicist has made up a useful astronomical ( Read more... )

Major thanks to chullymonster for this link ( Read more... )

In an act of carefully crafted randomness, I picked up a SciFi book I wouldn't have normally have and read it. I was in search of hard SciFi and I struck paydirt, so I thought I'd recomend the book, as the author is not too well known at all and, quite frankly, quizcustodet has to read it for reasons that will be obvious ( Read more... )

vampire_kitten posted this interesting article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,1627424,00.html

Basically, the physicists on my flist should see it because you know non-physicists are going to ask you about something like this so you may as well be ( Read more... )