It's all carbon composites, no sheet metal involved :)

Burt Rutan, the designer of the Spaceship One and Two, has been a hero, perhaps the hero, of my life. A passionate, innovative aircraft designer; unbelievably aggressive in trying new things, pushing boundaries that nobody even knew existed.

His first plane design, the VariViggen was an astonishingly different design than anything out there before; designed while a student at Cal Poly and built in his garage. And it flew beautifully. I saw that plane, his later VariEze and LongEz flying in formation at the Oshkosh Fly-in in 1980.

He set up a shop at the Mojave Airport, called Rutan Aircraft Factory (RAF). In the middle of nowhere, nothing there but space to build new planes, and he built many. Each one more exotic than the last. His Boomerang, his last personal plane, is so far from the standard boring airplane designs that most people wouldn't believe it could fly; but it does fly, efficiently, safely, and every apparently crazy design idea has absolutely solid engineering and aerodynamic backing.

I took my 14-year-old daughter to see the first flight into space of Spaceship One in 2004. Burt's long-time co-worker and chief test pilot, Mike Melville, flew it that day. As it was climbing to space, it started to spin, pretty fast (about 60 rpm.) Melville said that he was scared for a second, but then decided to wait until he was "in the safety of space" to arrest the spin. A test pilot, flying an experimental winged spaceship, who has never flown to space before, in a plane spinning at Mach 3, decides in a second to wait until he was in the safety of space. And of course, it worked out; he was able to use the reaction control system to arrest the spin; took out some candy to float around the cockpit, took some photos out the windows, and enjoyed the five minutes of weightlessness. Just one of a thousand, maybe ten thousand adventures in Burt's long career.

I've wondered my whole life about how Burt responds when people die flying planes of his design. In 1983, while at Oshkosh, a VariEze crashed approaching the airport (it looks as if the linkage between the control stick and the elevator failed.) Burt, up on stage, described his trip out to the crash site. As professional as he could be, but I felt it must have been tearing him up inside. He gave the gift of flight to thousands of enthusiasts, but those great planes took the lives of some of those people. How do you reconcile that? I'm not sure I could have, or can today.

Burt got out of the homebuilt airplane business after being sued too many times by the survivors of crashes. In the last suit, the guy built the plane incredibly wrong, instead of using the 10 layers of fiberglass to attack the fins to the wing, he just glued them on. Astonishingly, it held up for years, but finally broke during a low-high-speed pass. Burt won all the lawsuits, but it was clear that he would spend years defending himself instead of doing what he loved, so he closed the shop.

Burt retired a few years ago, and lives up in Idaho instead of Mojave. Sadly, for all the innovation he created over the years, there were no commercial successes. This looked like it might be the one, but it's never going to happen.

This is not the first death in the program; sadly. While testing a previous engine about 5 years ago, the nitrous oxide detonated, killing three of his engineers. I mourned for them, and for the pilot today. My joy over my whole adult life in seeing the achievements of Rutan and his team are about evenly matched by the heartache I feel for them today. They haven't announced the name of the pilot who died today, but may he rest in peace.

It depends on how you use it. You could wear-out a SSD in six months if you're continuously writing and re-writing to it; but for 99.9% of people the SSD will probably last longer.

HBO announced some time ago that some of their shows would be available without a cable subscription, but they would be delayed three years. Even that was enough to get the cable companies nickers in a twist.

Today's announcement is a revolution, if that one was an evolution.

Listen the the podcast on 5x5 called "overtired". In episode 15, the incredible Christina Warren describes the shit that she gets every day, and how she deals with it. I have some hope that a younger generation of women like Ms Warren will be able to react to attacking idiots without disappearing from the 'net.

He meant 10 thousand CNC machines...not that they were $10K. That's an almost unbelievable number; and array of 100 x 100 CNC machines.

I had forgotten about the gridded fins...you're right, that should provide substantial cross-range capability.

A big challenge for water landing will be wind during the descent of the rocket. If the wind is blowing 100 miles an hour for a minute as the rocket is falling, then it's going to be dragged a mile from the ballistic landing point. (When things move quickly through the air, the lift generated by wind is extremely high; bullets move with the wind.) I don't believe that the booster will have the capacity to fly horizontally too far, and it won't be firing at all for the bulk of the descent.

If the wind could be predicted accurately, it would be easy enough to steer the rocket to the right place -- or move the landing platform to the right place.

If you're landing back at the launch pad; there will have been a rocket that could have sampled the wind speed just a few minutes previously, so you could have very precise wind speed vs. altitude data.

It's harder than you think, unfortunately. Nuclear weapons have a few kilograms of radioactive material, reactors have more than a few tons. The Yucca Mountain repository, the best that nuclear engineers could come up with, had to be certified to be safe for 10,000 years...but literally after 10,000 years things could have gotten out of control. It's a tough problem.

That said, it means that we have to try harder. The problem is not going to go away; we have to pursue better approaches.

It turns out that the software used in VFX rendering is pretty darn expensive. Licenses of RenderMan, for example, were several thousand dollars a node (RenderMan just lowered their prices, it's true). Nuke, Maya, and other tools were similarly expensive.

The companies that created the software typically wouldn't consider licensing on shorter terms than six months; which made scaling up for a big movie very expensive. Zync managed to negotiate deals that would allow them to license software on an hourly basis. That is their real innovation.

Curious. Back in the stone ages (12 years ago) we had a 53 GB 12-platter drive (The box said "Solve your disk space storage problems forever!") that had a head fail. I was able to recover 22/23rds of the data, but it was clear that the data was recorded from one platter to the next all the way through the stack, and then the heads moved. Back in that day (I don't know if it's still true) one side of one of the platters just contained alignment information.

We have two ears, but you might notice that the ears have fairly complicated geometry. Why would that be? Well, it turns out that the various parts of the ear bounce sound, and sound coming from different directions, both azimuth and elevation, bounces differently. Your brain is very good at figuring this out. This wikipedia page on Sound Localization is quite informative.

It turns out that humans have among the best direction-sensing hearing of any animal.

[disclaimer -- I work for Dolby, but in their imaging group]

I drove across the country with a good friend, who is severely red-green colorblind. About once a day, he would offer me peanuts, even though I'm deathly allergic to them, and then he'd laugh, and say "oh, these are really good." After five days of this, as we were driving across Colorado after a storm, I stopped to look at a stunning rainbow, and he's like "ooh, ok, fine, whatever"

He's a very successful computer animator and landscape painter. It helps that he is super-smart, but I still can't imagine how he does it.

"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."

Bill, this advice "make the ad as incipid[sic] and vapid as possible, to save on non-converting clicks." makes so much sense, and is so obvious, that it must be happening already. This was pioneered by the the Nigerian scammers (originally snail-mail, now mostly email.)

It does make me disheartened about the future of the ad-supported internet.