January 4th, 2008 by Shantastic

Cincinnati news station has “Dance Party Friday” to celebrate there being no traffic accidents to report.  It’s good, soooo good, all the way through.

October 26th, 2007 by hiland

Radio Lab is a program on WNYC, NYC’s public radio station.  These two guys investigate where science meets art, religion, and humanity.  Each week they bring stories on a variety of topics that interview lots of interesting people.  They also have great production values on the show that make it highly entertaining to listen to.  Radio Lab is one of the high points of my week, and this week’s episode about space is one of the best- covering the Story of the Golden Record on the Voyager space craft (which happens to be one of the most romantic things I’ve ever heard) to just how big space is, and where art fits into all that.  Here is a direct link to the MP3 you can download and listen to.

July 13th, 2007 by Hiland

Live Hot Puppet Chat was a TV show on a student run station in 2005. It’s hilarious.  Students from te school would call in and have their questions answered by the puppet.  Episode 5 was so raunchy that the entire station was shut down…  it starts with “Berry Bible” discussing how he’d “like the lord in his mouth.”

July 6th, 2007 by Hiland

This might be a little too educational for a Friday, but it really makes things make sense.

June 29th, 2007 by Hiland

Ok, we’re not going to space quite yet, but Bigelow Aerospace just launched their 2nd test space station. Bigelow’s model is to build habitable modules that inflate once in orbit. They had a succsessful test launch last year of a small, never-to-be-manned station, and they just had a second launch just yesterday. Their plan is to have habitable modules in the sky before 2012.

Private aerospace is where it is really at- companies like this have an initiative that NASA doesn’t have, which is to eventually turn a profit. Now that the cold war is over, NASA has become a giant administrative monster that’s turning out some great projects, but doing it in a bulky, expensive way. NASA may be the Big Dog, but their are always going to be stuck under governmental bureaucracy that will slow them down. Smaller companies need to stay lean so their start-up costs won’t be a burden once they start making sales, and they can climb out of the red quickly.

The money needed to land on the moon or mars is still only possible to a government, but that might not be true for long. Instead of taking NASA’s approach of just throwing money at the problem until it works, private space companies have to think harder and make their dollar go further, which will lead to more innovative technologies. Also, the competition between two or three private space companies will also help push them along. Here’s hoping someone comes along and challenges Bigelow in this arena.