Tag: technology

  • You Have Mail

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    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    Who remembers when AOL used to announce that to you? Old millennials, am I right? Anyway, your humble author is using up some more holiday time the next several days and will be on holiday for Thanksgiving. Not that I will be travelling anywhere to see anybody. And for my American audience, you really shouldn’t…

  • All the Little Spacecraft

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    Brendan Barry
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    Early tomorrow morning, weather permitting, NASA’s Perseverance rover will blast off from Cape Canaveral on a six-plus month trip to Mars. There, hopefully it will land successfully and join all the rovers that have come before. And so this piece from the New York Times feels appropriate. It’s a great illustration of all the spacecraft…

  • Mapping the Growth of Cities

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    Brendan Barry
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    This is an older piece from back in August, but I was waiting for a time when I would have some related articles to post alongside it. To start off the series of posts, we start with this piece from CityLab. As my titles implies, it looks at the growth of cities, but not in…

  • Put Your Phone Down

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    This isn’t really a graphic so much as it is an x-ray photograph. But I also can’t get it out of my head. We all know that mobile phones has changed the way we live. But now we have evidence that our use of them is changing us physically. Young people are growing horns or…

  • Phone Calls

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    It’s Friday, everybody, and that means we all made it to the end of the week. As a millennial, I was surprised to learn that my mobile can actually be used to make telephonic calls. Phone calls, as they are often known, are like direct messages or text messages, but made without cat gifs or…

  • The New Longest Flight

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    Brendan Barry
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    You might recall that back in March I wrote about the use of spherical maps to show great circles. This helps illustrate the actual routes that aircraft take in flight. (Yes, actual flight plans deviate based on routes, weather, traffic, &c.) At the time I wrote about how there was a soon-to-be Singapore–New York route.…

  • The James Webb Telescope: Delayed Again

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    Brendan Barry
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    A few weeks ago it was announced that NASA’s James Webb space telescope would see its launch delayed again. The successor to the Hubble telescope was originally supposed to launch several years ago, but now it won’t fly until at least 2021. Thankfully xkcd covered this slipping launch date. Credit for the piece goes to…

  • Onwards and Upwards

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    Brendan Barry
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    Yesterday SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy rocket on its maiden voyage, and then recaptured several, though not all, of its reusable rockets. The Falcon Heavy represents the most powerful rocket available to mankind today, though NASA’s Saturn V of the Apollo programme era was considerably more powerful. That was all the stuff you could read…

  • All Your Base Are Belong to Internets

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    Brendan Barry
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    Over the weekend news broke that since November, plans for military bases around the world were available to anyone and everyone on the internets. How? Why? Well, it turns out that soldiers using wearable tech to track their rides or cycling routes had forgotten to disable that feature whilst on military installations. And so when…

  • The Sinking of the Vasa

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    In 1628, Sweden launched one of its largest and most powerful warships not just in Sweden, but in all of Europe. She was to participate in the wars with Poland and Lithuania as Sweden sought to expand her growing empire. After two years of construction in Stockholm’s naval yard she set sail into a calm…