All of the commenters to this blog are awesome, but since I get more comments on twitter, facebook, and google plus, I wanted to say a special thank you to Sean, JRD, Robin, Tek, and Janey. You all are awesome, thanks for the support. I do wonder about these stats, I feel like there were more than they listed, perhaps they don’t count multiple comments on a single post?
Follow their blogs if you will:
Along with Marc Cabot I hosted the Lunchbox on CHSR fm, I’d toss it into the Nutty Bites podcast feed, but I can’t cover the same license that the radio station does.
This weekend Tek and I will be Biking for Breath this weekend. If you can, please donate towards our cause. I’m on the right, he’s on the left. I will be doing 25km he will be doing 66km. I hope to not embarrass myself with my time and Tek should do his in a good time. We’re both beginners of a sort, but biking is fun.
Thanks for your time
A beautiful view of Mars, from Wikipedia and NASA
“What would the wingspan of a glider on Mars be?”
Flying on Mars is tricky. I know, I’ve done it. Well, that is to say, I’ve done it in a simulator. Because a flight simulator is nothing but a giant physics engine with a bunch of mathematical constants plugged in, its possible to have the simulator spit out the atmospheric conditions of almost anywhere, and then re-create it. X-Plane, by Laminar Research is perhaps the best such flight sim available on the commercial market, and using some NASA atmospheric and geographical data, allows you to recreate flying on Mars in a pretty believable way.
Wings (airfoils) only work when the air current flows over them at a certain speed. That speed is dependent on the airfoil shape, and is subject to a lot of heavy math well above my humble head to try and figure out. If the speed of the flow over the airfoil gets too low, it stops generating lift. This is called a stall, and is generally bad news for whatever the airfoil is attached to, that is: the rest of the plane with you in it. So a certain speed needs to be maintained in order to stay in the air. With a powered airplane, the engine provides that forward speed. In a Helicopter, the rotation of the blades provides the lift, and in a glider it is gravity pulling the plane downwards that provides the lift. Let’s throw a theoretical number out there. Imagine that Glider X needed to maintain a minimum speed of 20 miles per hour in order to stay airborne.
Most of my readers will be familiar with the Geek & Sundry youtube channel, if you’ve not watched shows on it you’ve had your friends break out a new game they heard about on tabletop or your mother asked you about that steampunk thing you like that Felicia Day vloged about on the FLOG (because of course your mother is just that cool).
When Tabz told me to check out Written by a Kid though, I had my doubts. I don’t have kids, and while I like kids books and am a bit of a kid myself, I’m often less than impressed by projects focused around ‘They say the darndest things.’ This is anything but that. They interview a kit, the kid tells them the idea for a story and as the viewer hears about the story we see a visual representation of this story. Whether it be animation, live action, a mix of both, or played by Joss Whedon and Dave Foley, it’s always fun to see.
You could watch this with your child, or just on your own and get a lot out of it. Evil robot families, goth babies, a S.Q.U.A.T. team, half vampires taking out pirate witches, what’s not to love? In addition to the main movies/stories the behind the scenes videos are really interesting. Normally, I skip behind the scenes videos on youtube, it’s a lot more extra than content, but on this channel they talk about things that are interesting to me, animation, how they got Joss Whedon to perform, painted clothing (I really want to make some and wear it for real), different video effects and a Buffy Mustache.
Enough of me blabbing, go, watch the videos. Oh and it’s work safe, kid safe and everything safe :)
PS: thanks Tabz for being right again about something I thought sounded like it wasn’t my cup of tea but in the end was right up my alley.