Kerbals in Space

Lately I've been obsessing over a unique game, Kerbal Space Program. This game lets you design rockets and launch your creations into orbit around the planet Kerbin, carrying your three brave/foolhardy Kerbal astronauts - Bill, Jeb, and Bob, the Kerman brothers.


What has me so enthralled with this game is the physics engine. Game developer Squad has incorporated very good physics, and this game is a good first-order approximation of orbital mechanics - first-order because it doesn't solve the n-body problem. The game is still in Alpha, and version 0.13.3 is available for free download. There is also an option to pay $15 for the game, in which case you get the most recent version (0.15) and all subsequent updates for free. Each time they update the price goes up, though version 0.13.3 will always be free.

There's more to the game than just building a rocket and getting to orbit. In the free version, it is possible to land on the moon of Kerbin (Mun) and return your kerbonauts home. The paid version features a second moon and spacecraft persistence, allowing multiple objects to be sent into space, forming a moon base and so forth. There are also extensive mods available, some as part of the newer versions and some as part of player-made extensions to the game. Version 0.15 also includes spaceplane parts, for exploring suborbital space.

All 135 Shuttle launches on one screen

With a tip of the hat to The Original Rocket Dungeon:

Obama's Watergate

China launches first female taikonaut

This was China's first manned launch in four years.

False-color Vesta

Beautiful BEAM robot

BEAM robots are a special kind of mobile robot; they have no microprocessor of any kind, only analog electronics such as amplifiers, transistors, resistors, diodes and capacitors. This video shows one of the most elegant designs of a BEAM robot I've ever seen, the W-3 from Mechanical Mutants. (hat tip to Hack a Day)



This is a remarkably robust design. The inner wheel oscillates back and forth around the vertical axis, the outer wheel pivots along an axis on the direction of travel. Simple touch sensors provide feedback influencing turns. The outer wheel also acts as a collision barrier. You can build your own! The circuit diagrams are here.

Alberta provincial election

I live in the beautiful province of Alberta, Canada. Today we are having a provincial election. This is usually a ho-hum affair. In the 107 years Alberta has been a province, only four political parties have formed the government.

The Progressive Conservative party has won a whopping eleven straight majority victories and have governed for an incredible 41 straight years. My prediction is that this string of victories - virtually unheard-of in other longstanding representative democracies - is about to come to a crashing end.

The name of the party, "Progressive Conservative", seems like an oxymoron. It is essentially the marriage of two earlier centrist parties, the Progressives on the center-Left and the much stronger Conservatives on the center-Right. The PCs have governed as a centrist-slightly-Right party for four decades. Over the years the party slowly drifted Left with each passing year. The party made one readjustment back to more conservative values in 1993 to stave off election defeat, and during those early years under Premier Ralph Klein were governing once again from the Right. The period from 1993 to 1999 saw the Province of Alberta completely pay off its debt.

But time moves on and people retire and once again the PC party has slid well over to the left. On the other side, promising to govern from a more Libertarian conservative angle is the Wild Rose party led by Danielle Smith.

You have to admit, it's an amazing advertising gimmick, and news of this bus virally spread as far as Jay Leno.

When I went to vote this afternoon, the ballot boxes were already so full of ballots from earlier voters that there was hardly room for my ballot. Such high voter turnout in a Provincial election bodes poorly for the incumbent - it means people are passionate. We'll see how it goes as the night progresses.

Update: Looks like the polls were all wrong, and the PCs won another majority government.