MarsBlog.net

A simple illustration of the difference between old media and new media:

The camera on the left was used by C-SPAN to tape (on a separate tape deck and 8″ CRT) the appearance by Ambassador Paul Bremer at the recent Leadership Program of the Rockies annual retreat. In regular definition. For later uploading to the DC headquarters for editing and broadcast.

The camera on the right is a consumer camcorder, which we at People’s Press Collective use to broadcast events like last week’s Congressional District 4 Debate live to the internet. In high definition. And did I mention we do it live?

Posted on March 19th, 2010 under Miscellaneous, PPC. Tags: colorado, CSPAN, Grassroots, new media, Paul Bremer, People's Press Collective. Comments: None

I guess someone must have missed the lesson of the Hindenburg: Giant hydrogen airships could herald a new era in luxury travel

Image: Seymourpowell/PA

Set aside the obvious problems with floating bags of hydrogen large enough to lift nearly 400 tons of payload over major cities, and their obvious appeal as terrorist targets, and the fact that obtaining that much hydrogen would not be as green as the creators imagine.

I want to know how they’re packaging this monster.

The windows at the lower apex suggest most if not all of the accommodations are there…which makes sense, since you want the mass on the bottom (think Weebles). But what about the hydrogen cells? Is an octahedron with concave sides really the best way to package large volumes of gas that want to assume a spherical shape? Oh sure, the thing could be fitted with conformal cells, but how structurally efficient would all of this be compared with other, less eye-appealing shapes?

On the other hand, I do like the rendering of tethered airships against the backdrop of Hong Kong – it makes me think of the floating cities from the Ringworld books.

[hat tip: JB]

Posted on February 4th, 2010 under Miscellaneous, Useful Technology. Tags: weird. Comments: 1

Despite my relief at the Scott Brown victory, I’m going to be a voice of sobriety here: important though it may prove to be, this is one victory.

One.

Brown’s win may or may not derail the nationalization of healthcare, depending on whether Obama, Pelosi, and Reid “double down” in an all-out push to ram through their abominable bill with procedural tricks, but it could very well do so. But keep in mind that first, it should never *ever* have gotten this close in Congress, and second, the future is still balanced on a knife’s edge, even with a 59-41 Senate.

I’ve heard today’s victory called “the Scott heard ’round the world” – but like the events of Lexington and Concord this needs to be the first step towards reining in the statists and restoring our liberty, and not mistaken by those in the grassroots who helped to make it happen as the arrival at that still-distant destination. Much work remains, what with caucuses, primaries, and midterm elections coming up, and aside from boosting the confidence of the grassroots in its efficacy in influencing major elections, this victory in Massachusetts does nothing to change that fact in other states.

Republicans, too, should avoid drawing the wrong lessons from this win – it was not an embrace of Republican policies or Republican leadership, it was for many a rejection of creeping socialism, fiscal irresponsibility, and government power-grabs in favor of liberty, and a repudiation of arrogant but clueless elitists endowed with an sense of entitlement to political office…all of which the Republicans have themselves been guilty lately. The GOP still needs to acknowledge these failings and its responsbility if it expects to rebuild the public trust, and would be wise to articulate a positive, pro-liberty platform for rolling back the nanny state rather than simply restraining the pace of its growth.

Posted on January 19th, 2010 under Economics, Miscellaneous, PPC. Tags: double down, Grassroots, health care reform, health reform, Martha Coakley, Massachusetts, Scott Brown, Senate, Ted Kennedy. Comments: 2

It seems the Women in Black Silent Vigil For Peace (who I last observed observing something less than a moment of silence) have given up their first-Saturday protest outside Colorado Mills in Golden…

Did President Obama end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and neglect to tell anyone (except the Women in Black, apparently)? 

(The local chapter appears to have folded.)

Posted on January 9th, 2010 under Miscellaneous, PPC, democratic national convention. Tags: colorado, moonbats, protest. Comments Off

Part of the reason that posting on MarsBlog has been so lackluster over the past year is that my other project, People’s Press Collective, has been claiming nearly all of my time outside of work. Since I live about forty minutes from downtown Denver, and end up down there for events 2-3 nights a week, it’s been awfully hard to find the time (or motivation when time is available) to blog from my trusty deskbound desktop PC at home.

For that and other reasons, I finally invested in a new HP dm3 laptop yesterday. Or maybe it’s a netbook. I’m not really clear on the distinction, and this one seems to be in a gray zone in between, having a dual-core 64-bit processor and faster bus than an obvious netbook and a slightly larger size, but similarly missing the optical drive of a laptop and a typical laptop’s voracious appetite for battery power. Oh, and it has a slick magnesium case, which makes it look much more hardy than the toy-like netbooks (or medical-equipment-like white Apples, for that matter).  

So, with any luck, this should make posting a lot easier, and thus somewhat more frequent.

While I’ve had limited time thus far to play with it (that will come in the airport this week), I have tried out some video from the HD camcorder I picked up last month, and it is truly amazing. The desktop didn’t have enough memory to view native .MT2 files without a lot of choppiness  (and since it was RDRAM, was not cost-effective to expand), but the little laptop was all set up and ready to go, with all the right codecs already installed for Media Player. If you haven’t played around with HD video, it’s incredible how much sharper and more “real” it is than what you may be used to from YouTube or online television watching. I still may need to get a new desktop at some point to process video, but for viewing it, I don’t think I could ask for much better.

Posted on December 20th, 2009 under Meta, Miscellaneous, Useful Technology. Tags: Add new tag, blogging, camcorder, HD video, laptop, marsblog, netbook, technology. Comments Off

I finally finished scanning all 500-odd of my uncle’s old slides yesterday, and found a couple more aerospace shots in the mix, including this:

I’m not a plane expert, but I believe this is a C-124 Globemaster II. One thing that struck me about looking at the plane from this angle is the vague resemblance to the forward fuselage of a 747 — which is interesting given that the C-124 was a Douglas product.

If anyone is interested, the scanner used is a Nikon Coolscan 5000ED with the slide autofeeder attachment. I honestly can’t say enough good about the thing.

Oh, and among the slides not related to aerospace — puppies!

(Also known as “shameless link bait”.)

Posted on December 20th, 2009 under Entertainment, Miscellaneous. Tags: 1950s, airplane, beagle, C-124, Douglas, Globemaster II, military, nikon coolscan 5000, photography, puppies, transport. Comments Off

While visiting family in Michigan over Thanksgiving, I happened to mention to my uncle that I had bought a slide scanner a couple of years ago, and that I had scanned in my grandfather’s (his father-in-law’s) old slides from the early 1960s. This led to him dropping off a box the next day, with around 300 slides he took in the mid-1950s, for me to take home and scan for him.

A number of them are of aerospace interest, as they show various then-current planes, including  a tarmac filled with C-97 Stratofreighters and a Flying Boxcar:

What I didn’t expect was this slide:

It appears to be a shot of WWII hero and actor Audie Murphy during the filming of The Guns of Fort Petticoat, a movie taglined at IMDB thus: “GOOD WOMEN…BAD WOMEN…BRAWLING WOMEN…BRAVE WOMEN! They were all soldiers in skirts! “  I cropped the slide down to about half size, but there is a boom microphone to the right and a camera in a blimp to the left (above the shoulder of the guy in the white hat).

You just never know what you’re going to find.

Posted on December 14th, 2009 under Entertainment, Meta, Miscellaneous. Comments Off

Rand’s observation that the impending end of the decade, um, isn’t actually, any more than 1999 was the end of the last decade/century/millennium, dovetails in a way with an experience I had last week.

While visiting family in Michigan for Thanksgiving, I arranged to speak to my nephews’ middle school on space exploration, space settlement, and math and science. (Yes, a little shilling for Orion was involved, but mainly as an excuse to entertain the kids with cool space-y animations.) At least three times, in Q&A, the subject of the world ending in 2012 was raised.

Naturally, I explained it as a misunderstanding of the Mayan calendar and associated legends, and as a repeat of the Y2K end-of-the-world hysteria from ten years ago. Nonetheless, it was a little disappointing to have it come up at all…I blame Hollywood.

On the other hand, it would have been entertaining to see their reactions to an explanation of the Singularity, which I remember once upon a time being forecast for the same year…

Posted on December 2nd, 2009 under Entertainment, Miscellaneous, Settlement, Space Science. Tags: 2012, education, emmerich, mayan calendar, Orion, singularity. Comments Off

This guy clearly has a lot of media cards for his camera.

More at rossching.com. And details of how he did it can be found at Digital Photography School.

What surprises me (and perhaps it shouldn’t) is that it took roughly 15,000 still frames to generate the film. I bought a Nikon D80 two and a half years ago, and since have taken it on two trips abroad, on two trips to Moab, up eight Fourteeners, on at least five significant hikes, four trips to Michigan, one cross-country trip, four moonbat rallies, two tea parties, and numerous other events, and still have only taken just shy of 14,000 pictures with it (not including RAW/jpeg pairs).

Posted on November 10th, 2009 under Entertainment, Miscellaneous, Useful Technology. Tags: photo, photography, time lapse. Comments Off