Short Wired piece with a fantastic video of a precision take off flight and landing of the Xombie test vehicle.
Video of Xombie flight…wow. | Wired
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Author Archives: Sci Fi Engineer
Trip the LED fantastic
3D Printed rat skeleton, no longer: yucky, fragile, tiny…. | Wired
Another use for low cost 3D Printing, think about it, exact models of all sorts of biological specimens: surface, organs, bones, shells, exoskeletons, etc, scaled to a size that students or scientists can use for discussion, learning, planning, etc.
More on Carriers R.I.P.
This ain’t your cousin’s Prius! | SAE
John Deere hybrid front loader, YeaHawwwww!
Very cool! All snark aside.
How deeply felt | Atlantic review of C.Chavez bio
Simply remarkable book review / self awakening memoir of the UFW, Caesar Chavez, and the sixties.
There seems something ineffably right about this piece, it captures the sadness one feels looking back at the 60’s 70’s and the soaring optimism that so rapidly became a disastrous fall into ruin, ruin most tragically for those the movements believers sought to help.
Cool, quite literally
New type of solar structure cools buildings in full sunlight | phys.org, new technology based on nano tech material that tunes reflective / radiative properties of a surface, so efficient that its as effective as air conditioning powered by a similar sized PV panel. But this passive tech does not need to face the sun, radiating the heat back to space through the narrow band of frequencies that provide a window through our atmosphere.
The Dragon Returns!
Government Power VS Individual’s rights, which comes first…
Interesting article in the HuffPost by Roger Pilon (vice president for legal affairs at the Cato Institute and director of Cato’s Center for Constitutional Studies,) discussing the libertarian view on gay marriage. But on a more general note, this quote really struck home as a fundamental point we need to think about when discussing the gov’t doing this, that or the other:
In truth, principled equal protection starts at precisely the other end, not with government’s power but with the individual’s right — with the idea that we’re all equally free. And it continues by recognizing that because government belongs to all of us, it must treat us all equally — unless there is some serious, compelling reason to do otherwise, to draw distinctions among us. That gets the presumptions and the burdens right.
Just because it’s beautiful.
The Virtues of Stubbornness: Mules at War
The Virtues of Stubbornness: Mules at War
Lance Cpl. Tyler Langford, anti-tank missileman, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, leads his pack mule during a hike at Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center Bridgeport, Calif., Oct. 13, 2012. Langford used skills he learned in the Animal Packers Course, taught four times a year at MCMWTC. The 16-day course teaches Marines how to use animals in the region they find themselves in as a logistical tool to transport weapons, ammunition, food, supplies or wounded Marines through terrain that tactical vehicles cannot reach. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Ali Azimi
Why DARPA has been working BigDog and other legged support robots, problem is that robots don’t eat grass, and can’t be grown on a farm.
This World and Others 