Solar sails suck. In a 2002 paper, Laser Elevator: Momentum Transfer Using an Optical Resonator (available at your local school/library, possibly electronically — J. of Spacecraft and Rockets 2002), Thomas R. Meyer et. al. talk about a neat way to get a lot more speed out of light reflection than with a regular solar sail. …
Yearly Archives: 2008
Aliens?
Space has been a little disappointing for the last few decades. Since the moon, everything has turned out kind of barren. Every SETI-related result of the past 30 years has been disheartening — “there was once water on Mars” doesn’t really do it for me. There are two big exceptions. One is Jupiter and Saturn’s …
LimerickDB.com
Remember limericks? They were huge in the mid-20th century, but fell on hard times over the last couple decades. Now so many dirty limericks are a generation out-of-date, and the really clever ones lie neglected and un-retold. I want more limericks, and I want the cleverest ones collected somewhere. It strikes me that a certain …
Buttercup Festival
Good news, everyone1! After three years, David Troupes has restarted the comic Buttercup Festival. If you aren’t familiar with the strip, you may enjoy poking around the old archives at random. There are some delightful things there. 1 Protip: it’s helpful to imagine that every blog post everywhere is preceded by the Professor announcing this.
Politics
Okay, politics time. I’m a political junkie, but I’ve largely kept that out of xkcd (other than occasional cracks about science and net-related issues). So this will be a one-time thing — after this post, you’ll hear no more political advocacy on this site for the rest of the election. But I think we’re at …
ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Attacking Noise in Chat
Edit 2: Oh God Oh God 4chan has Robot9000. soup /r9k/. Have fun with the bot and do one last barrel roll for me. Edit: As expected, with the huge flood of new traffic after this post went up, the channel is full of new folks coming in and playing with the bot. This is …
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