Monbiot comes clean

It took him a decade, but Guardian author George Monbiot has finally realized that environmentalism doesn't work - at least, not as it has been practiced and promoted for decades.

This is a guy at the core of the whole Green movement - it is from his name that the derogatory moniker "moonbat" derives - and if he is finally coming around, then maybe there's hope for others, too. Of course, next it will be some other nonsense ten or fifteen years down the road.

Fossil Hunter's guide to Mars

I worked directly with Charles Shults as he wrote the book A Fossil Hunter's Guide to Mars, critiquing everything, proofreading, and even came up with the name for the book. So, I am very glad to see that he's getting some mainstream media exposure for his work. When he first told me he had found fossils on Mars in the Spirit and Opportunity images, I was skeptical but at least willing to see the evidence. The clincher for me was this image, taken by the rover Opportunity on Sol 111. In the bottom left corner of that NASA image you see the image at the right. That rock exhibits fivefold radial symmetry. That is, if you rotate that rock in increments of 72 degrees the pattern facing us looks the same. There is no geological process that produces rocks of this kind, no mineral with this kind of symmetry occurs in nature (although such quasicrystals are possible in tightly controlled laboratory settings, they are microscopic). The only way for such a rock to ever appear is if a life form (such as a starfish) becomes fossilized. Therefore, fossils exist on Mars. Not convinced? You can buy the book and check the evidence (presented in exhaustive detail) for yourself.

Spacex: a man on Mars in ten years

Here's an interview with Elon Musk by the Wall Street Journal. Time frame for a man on Mars? "Best case, ten years. Worst case, fifteen to twenty."

Delta Robots in LEGO

I love LEGO. The title of this blog might indicate some interest in robots. A few days ago I posted some free software for simulating Canfield Joints in POVray.

So, it pleased me enormously to see the LEGO Delta Robots via Hack A Day.



A Delta Robot isn't exactly the same as a Canfield joint. The parallelograms formed by the arms force the end effector to have the same orientation as the base on top. In contrast, a Stewart Platform behaves more like a Canfield joint, in that the end effector's orientation can be different than the base.

The beauty of the Canfield joint is that two such joints connected in series can act as either a Delta Robot or a Stewart Platform, with loads evenly distributed no matter what the orientation.

Here are some more videos of commercial Delta Robots in action:

Carnival of Space 193

Welcome to the 193rd edition of the Carnival of Space.

We'll start out the Carnival with the most exotic objects in the universe: Black Holes. Last week's host Vega 0.0 explains the main features of a Kerr black hole.

Discovery Space news tells of a new visualization tool that helps to model the extreme nature of spacetime in colliding black holes.

Is it possible for life to exist within a black hole? Next Big Future says that it's possible.

Moving to only slightly less exotic objects, astroblogger Ian Musgrave looks for Nibiru while explaining some practical astronomy.

On the Road to Endeavour there is an eerie synchronicity in two photos, one taken on Mars and the other on Earth.

Closer to home Next Big Future has news of Moon Express, a Silicon Valley startup building robots capable of mining the surface of the moon for precious metals and rare metallic elements.

In other space commerce news, Urban Astronomer cheers on SpaceX for winning the contract to launch the next generation of Iridium satellites.

For a bit of space history, Vintage Space talks about the Saturn V - its genesis and why it was "lost".

Finally, Steve's Astro Corner looks through a Galileo telescope at Saturn, with surprising results.

That's it for this week's Carnival of Space. Carnival #194 will be held at the Planetary Society blog; if you want to be involved you can either send your entries to Emily at PSB or enter them in the Carnival of Space articles spreadsheet at Google Docs.

Canfield Joints in POVray

Last June, Kirk Sorenson wrote a blog post at Selenian Boondocks about Canfield Joints. These devices enable pointing a rocket nozzle or solar panel anywhere within a hemisphere.

Part of the problem he had in describing the Canfield Joint is due to the fact that the thing operates in three dimensions, making visualization difficult with 2-D images. Over the last several years I've been using POVray to do 3D designs and animations, and I realized that a character skeleton system I published last year (bones.inc) would also work well for Canfield Joints.

So, I did a little math (OK, a LOT of math) and came up with a short POVray program that can do 3D animation of Canfield joints. The program is included in the bones.inc zip file, and the results are shown in the video below.


Given the three base angles for a Canfield joint, the software automatically calculates all the rest of the angles and the position and orientation of the distal plate. An arbitrary number of Canfield joints can be linked in series and manipulated. Now anyone with POVray can design and visualize their own Canfield joints in operation.

open source hardware

Open Source Ecology
Global Village Construction Set