Space Program Mega Archive

Space Cowboy Saloon
Massive (and I mean MASSIVE) archive of pictures, videos and audios of anything and everything related to the US Space program, from the JFK speeches that charted the course in 1961 all the way to Rutan's SpaceShipOne of just a few months ago.

Fave vids:
Apollo 11 Liftoff (14 MB), at this page. The announcer, Jack King, sounds like he's ready to shit. From Jack King: The Voice of Apollo:

His adrenalin was flowing like a waterfall as the countdown approached zero. Indeed his consuming passion for space exploration comes through when one carefully listens to the tapes of his narrative, “…10...9...ignition sequence start! 6…5...4...3...2…1...ZERO, All engines running. LIFTOFF ON APOLLO 11!”

That's for sure.


Saturn V Stage Separation (26 MB), at this page. The silent serenity of watching stages detach and fall to the Earth below is relaxing for some reason. These films were ejected from the interstages and had to be recovered from the ocean afterwards.

Backlinks; Pi Digits; Text Obsession

MSN vs. Google Backlinks
Random observation: it seems that an MSN "link:" search almost always produces more results than a google "link:" search. Here's an MSN example compared to a google example. I'm not sure why that would be, but it boils down to two possibilities:

1. Google wants to show all backlinks, but they can't because they're incompetent;

2. Google is competent, and they have the links, but they've decided not to show them all.

One of those things that make you go "hmmm." If I had to fomulate a conspiracy theory, I'd say that google wants to prevent people from reverse engineering the details of their PageRank system.

Digits of Pi
The first 50 million digits of pi in gzip files. What I want to know is, why does everyone pay attention to the first digits of pi? Where are the calculations of the last digits of pi? Come on, pi-ophiles, try to overcome your cultural fixation that "being first" means "being the best". Lets see a few of the final digits!

The first 65536 hexadecimal digits of pi, plus the code to generate them.

Fetishizing the Text
Good; now I don't feel like such a loser for owning a redundant pile of writing instruments and several empty journals... but it's just so hard to find the perfect (i.e. flawless in all respects) pen, or pencil, or journal, or graphpaper, or eraser, or pencil leads, or hiliter, or....
(I'm not sure which page this is via; that's one of the perils of opening tabs 20 at a time. You lose track of which page lead to which tab.)


Tornado Mechanical Pencil

Aluminum squares are deeply etched into the surface of this very unique mechanical pencil. Nice balance; handsomely proportioned chrome accents; beefy eraser.

kEwL, maybe THAT will be the Perfect Pencil. It's only $23, which isn't too expensive....

Wolfram; Skulls; Amateur Rocketry

Wolfram Axiom
Heh, Wolfram (of New Kind of Science "fame") has his own axiom:
.
More info on super-simplified axiom systems for Boolean algebra here.

WILL'S SKULL PAGE
His A Closer Look section shows skulls of animals that were either killed or injuried in various ways:

CONTENTS
Small-bore rifle
Large-bore rifle
Shotgun
Fractures
Lucky, The Greenland Dog
Railway Casualty
Slaughter

Hey, Our Rocket Melted Again!
Latest glitch from the rocket scienticians at Armadillo Aerospace. (A comedy of errors if there ever was one.) They made a rocket engine out of aluminum, and it melted. Now they're going to make one out of copper. Someone should show them this table. Then they would learn interesting facts like the melting point of aluminum being 1218°, and the melting point of copper being 1981°, which pales in comparison to cheaper and stronger steel, with a melting point of 2400° - 2750°.

And what's with the rocket tests melting the jig? (The rocket points downwards and destroys the base.) Why is this even a problem? There's no need to re-engineer the jig with temperature-resistant materials--just do what the genii at XCOR do, and point the engine sideways. DUH!

USAF Museum Rocket Engine Gallery
Exceedingly slow-loading gallery of rocket engines.

South Pointing Chariots

The ancient Chinese south-pointing chariot was a cart that used a differential gearing so that the chair on top always pointed south.

South Pointing Chariot
The page that started my several-minute-long love affair with SPCs.

South Pointing Things
The be-all, end-all site on SPCs.

South Pointing Penguin
A small model (ride, penguin, ride!) with a clean design and clear pictures.

DR Gears SPC
Short one-pager.

The Fifth R
A detailed Lego SPC.

SPC: Audio Episode
Short radio "article" (3 minutes) about the SPC.

Interview with Kit Williams
A pompous artist brags about the one he built.

South Pointing Cart
A human-ridable version at some museum somewhere.

Mechanical Compass Notes
There's another Lego one in this page.

Knuth Vids; Bugs; Gaussians; Vacuums

Don Knuth: Musings and More
Video lectures by Knuth. The video is accompanied by a larger JPG display of presentation slides.

SOFTWARE HORROR STORIES
Messy disorganized page of 100+ software glitches and disasters.

Fourier Transform--Gaussian
The Fourier transform of a Gaussian (normal) curve is... another Gaussian!

Human Exposure to Vacuum
Detailed explanation of what would happen if you were exposed to the cold hard vacuum of outer space. (via decafbad)

Soviet Rocketry

Soviet N1 Lunar Rocket
The N1 was the competitor to the Saturn V during the space race. Four were launched; all four crashed. The final crash obliterated the only launch pad, delaying the Soviet moon program for 18 months, which decisively let USA win the race. The N1 compensated for unreliable engines via massive redundancy. It had 30 engines on the main stage and a failsafe system known as KORD to shut down failed engines. On the first launch, KORD itself failed and mistakenly shut down all the engines.

Encyclopedia Astronautica: N1 Rocket
The interesting part of this page is the footnotes. Many excerpts from the Soviet point of view:

Kamanin's thoughts on first Saturn V launch: The first Saturn V and Surveyor 6 have been launched by the Americans. Kamanin catalogues why the Americans are beating them: bad organisation, on the parts of Ustinov, Smirnov, Pashkov, Malinovskiy, and Grechko; technical errors and an undisciplined approach to the fulfilment of government decrees concerning the Soyuz and N1 on the parts of Chief Designers Korolev and Mishin; lack of coordination between the institutes and design bureaux compared to the United States; and finally, the Americans are spending several times more money than has been dedicated to the Soviet space program.
............
The second successful launch of the Saturn V stunned the Soviet engineers. They could not believe the variety and volume of data telemetered back in real-time to the launch centre. They viewed with jealousy the launch room set-up at Cape Canaveral - where each engineering speciality could sit in their own comfortable chair, viewing data as the booster ascended on a computer screen.
............
Kamanin considers the Apollo 13 mission: He believes it was a 'true test' of American technical capability in space. The saving of the American astronauts demonstrated the robust redundancy in the American Saturn V - Apollo design, as compared with the Soviet N1-L3. The latter, Kamanin remarks, is a bad launch vehicle, boosting a bad spacecraft.
............
The VPK Military-Industrial Commission and the Central Committee of he Party discussed the matter of delaying further N1 tests until completely redesigned engines became available. Back came the ritual reply -- a Soviet manned lunar landing must be achieved by the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Lenin (April 22, 1970). On that date a Soviet man would plant the Red Banner and unveil a bust of Lenin on the lunar surface.

Nedelin Disaster
The Nedelin disaster was the worst space-related disaster of all time. Among the dead were seven leading dignitaries of the Soviet space program. 92 people were killed when a toxically-fueled rocket exploded on the launch pad during preparations. The dignitaries were lounging around on the tarmac, "supervising" the workers (which violated every safety code on the Russian books) when one of the engines on the second stage ignited, with predictable results. Remarkably, the disaster was was kept secret for 40 years until the 1990's.

Soviet Buran Space Shuttle
Good one-pager (actually, many of the one-pagers at aerospaceweb are quite good) about the Soviet Buran shuttle.

20/20 to Diopter; FFT's; WATOR; Code Search

20/Something vs Diopters
A google answers answer on the conversion between doipters and 20/Whatever vision measurements.

Benchmarked FFT Implementations
Speed comparisons of lots of Fourier transform packages on lots of different platforms.

WATOR Predator-Prey Simulation
WATOR was interesting to watch back in the 80's when computers were so slow. Now, with multi-GHz PCs, it looks a combustion simulation.

Koders Source Code Search Engine
One example: here's a search for finding C++ Fourier transform implementations with a GPL license.

Atomic Rockets: Sci-Fi Uber-Resource

Cross-section of Discovery from 2000: A Space Odyssey

Atomic Rocketships of the Space Patrol
This site is really hard to explain. It's a profusely illustrated guide (I estimate 200 pictures) about fictional spaceships and anything and everything related to them. It includes equations so you can calculate things like fuel consumption and travel times. There are comparisons between fictional technologies and actual existing ones. There are snippets of dialog from stories to put things in context. It talks about life support systems, side arms, interstellar empires. It's got a bit of everything. In short, it's awesome!


Hey, they forgot the Star Destroyer!

Spamming Scumbags

For the longest time I had "catch-all" email at antiquark.com. Any email to any user, fictional or not, would end up being forwarded to me. At first I thought it was useful for organizing my various registered accounts. For example, I used "weedlover@antiquark.com" for my account at hemp-online.org, I used "kingofcrack@antiquark.com" for my account at plumber-pictures.net, et cetera. It got pretty cunfusing after awhile, I just couldn't remember which name to use for which site. Of course, I hadn't bothered to write them down somewhere -- my memory is infallible you know.

About 6 months ago the spammers decided for me that a catch-all wasn't all that useful. They started using random names, like qxcehfbe or xqpitrre@antiquark as the return addresses for their wares. Suddenly I was getting bounced emails from expired accounts, people on vacation, and automatic spam filters. They were arriving at the rate of several dozen per day.

So I turned off the catch-all, and everything was fine.

Then, a few days ago, I decided to switch hosting companies. Just to do some testing, I turned on the catch-all. I left it on for a few hours, because I was forced to do some normal-people things, like venture outside and interact with my relatives.

When I got back to checking my email, I was surprised to see that I had 3000 mails in my inbox. All of them were bounces to fictional antiquark users. And all of them the result of spammers. It it turns out that I was getting one bounced spam every eight seconds. That works out to:

450 spams an hour, or

10800 spams a day, or

FOUR-F**KING MILLION SPAMS A YEAR!!!

Luckily, thanks to some quick thinking, I was able to turn off the catch-all before my CPU turned into molten slag. The only casualty was my pride as I explained to my wife why I was sitting in a puddle of my own urine.



Future anti-spam toolkit (portable version).

You know, a few years ago, the subject on Slashdot veered towards appropriate punishments for spammers. I posted as an AC, stating that spammers deserve nothing less than an instant roadside castration. The mods gave me a -1, saying it was a rant. It was far from a rant actually. A rant is an emotional outburst; the castration idea was the product of pure logical thought.

Many people think spammers deserve the death penalty. I think castration would be far more effective. Think of it -- a dead spammer (as appealing as the concept may be) is unable to convey a personal message. At least eunuch spammers could travel the high-school circuit, begging students, "please don't become spammers, look at what happened to me" in thier high squeaky voices. The effect would be earth-shaking. Spamming could be wiped out in a generation.

Plus, I love irony, and this idea is so ironic it would make Alanis Morrisette weep. Penis-enlarger salesmen who actually have no nuts? Now that's irony.

TECHNICAL NOTE

I'm switching hosting companies, so things might not work properly for a little while. Email doesn't seem to be working yet.... working on it.

Moby Dick

A while back, after reading a lucid book review by a Mr. Defective Yeti, I thought to myself, "I think I will read Moby Dick, perhaps it will enlighten me, and for sure, people will think I'm smart." So I got a cheapo version at Chapters and start reading. About one-third of the way through, I pondered a bit, and made the conscious decision to abandon the novel, my reasoning being "GAHHH, THIS STORY IS SO STOOPID AND I CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT ANYONE'S SAYING!"

Well, Moby Dick didn't make me smarter, but at least I found a bunch of links in the process:

Here's an online copy you can read for free.

Here's a list of Assassinations Foretold in Moby Dick! This is based on the decoding technique used by the Bible Code hoaxters.

Here's a factual account that inspired Melville: Mocha Dick: Or The White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a Manuscript Journal. (More here.)

Here's a nice QUEEQUEG Scrimshaw on antique sperm whale tooth. Queequeg was one of the main characters of Moby Dick.

How Capitalism Saved the Whales. The invention of kerosene eliminated the need to use sperm oil candles for indoor lighting. (Kerosene is what made Rockefeller one of the richest men in history, links here and here.)

Whaling Ban and Lubricant:

Sperm oil not only works as the best quality lubricant, but also does not freeze down to minus thirty degrees. Both the USA and the Soviets used it for missiles and space ships, and huge amounts of oil were in stock in preparation for possible future war in Siberia. When the US government enacted the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1971, and banned its own whaling, and also banned imports of whale products, the Japanese defense policy people wondered how the US would supply sperm oil. But the problem had already been solved for the USA through the development of a new lubricant by Sun Oil, as well as a huge stock of sperm oil.

Num Words; Zuse; Relay Logic; Web Ref

Backlog, clearing out of...

How Many Words Are There In The English Language?

Of these, about 200,000 words are in common use today. An educated person has a vocabulary of about 20,000 words and uses about 2,000 in a week's conversation. (These estimates vary widely depending on who is doing the counting, so don't take them as absolute.)

The Life and Work of Konrad Zuse
Zuse invented the first computer.

Harry Porter's Relay Computer
A simple computer whose logic elements are electromechanical relays.

The Web Programming Bookshelf
References on PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, DHTML.

Vision Through Sound Documentary

Pat Fletcher with her tiny camera hidden in her sunglasses

CBC's Quirks and Quarks: Seeing with Sound
In depth audio documentary (20 minutes, mp3 and ogg) about blind people who can see through their ears using vOICe technology.

The coolest part is a vOICe user describing, in detail, how she interprets and converts the swishy sci-fi sounds into images in her mind's eye. Amazing.

Another coolest part is the same person explaining what she "saw" the first time someone took her to the desert. Wow.

Yet another coolest part was a neurologist explaining how the visual centers are activated in the vOICe users.

This is a really cool, mind expanding documentary. Astonishing.

Harmonic Series and Bricks

A summation of the form

1/1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 ...

Is called the harmonic series. This series diverges. On other words, if you keep adding terms of the series, the sum will grow without a limit. This was proven by Nicole d'Oresme back in the Medieval times. (Believe it or not, people were concerned about this stuff back then.) He grouped the terms of the harmonic series like so:

(1/1) +
(1/2 + 1/3) +
(1/4 + 1/5 + 1/6 + 1/7) +
(1/8 + 1/9 + 1/10 + 1/11 + 1/12 + 1/13 + 1/14 + 1/15) + ...

And noticed that every "chunk" was bigger than the chunks in the following series:

(1/2) +
(1/4 + 1/4) +
(1/8 + 1/8 + 1/8 + 1/8) +
(1/16 + 1/16 + 1/16 + 1/16 + 1/16 + 1/16 + 1/16 + 1/16) + ...

And each of these chunks happen to add up to 1/2.

Therefore, the harmonic series diverges, because it's like adding 1/2 (plus a bit) an infinite number of times.

Now, this fact about the harmonic series produces a counterintuititive reality in the physical world.


A mathematical stack of bricks.

Imagine that you were stacking bricks, and you wanted to create the biggest overhang possible -- you wanted the topmost bricks to jut out sideways. What is the theoretical limit of that overhang? If you analyze the bricks mathematically, the maximum overhang is related to the harmonic series. But the harmonic series has no limit! Conclusion: there is no maximum overhang! You could stack bricks so the top juts out as far as you want.


Theory meets reality.

(PDF document with in-depth mathematical discussion here,
and one more picture here. Via Chris Sangwin's Home Page. Also, here's the Mathworld page on the series.)

Misc Updates

- I updated my Slide Rule Calculations By Example page to explain the usage of log-log scales for exponentiation.

- Someone from Italy emailed me and asked if he could translate that page to Italian. I said "sure," and here it is.

- I won a contest at Mathpuzzle.com because I found some really keen numbers!

- I scanned a short supplemental manual for the Pickett N3 slide rule. It's formatted as 4 gifs in a zipfile. You can download it here: Model-3-Powerlog.zip (600K).

If you want to look at the pages separately, here they are as JPGs:
Model-3-page-00.jpg
Model-3-page-01.jpg
Model-3-page-02.jpg
Model-3-page-03.jpg