More links

Yeah, I'm doing it again.
I decided to search for Space Odyssey references on the NASA Technical Report Server to see what came up. Then I decided to widen the search to other movies.
Here's 2001: A Space Odyssey
Here's Star Wars
Here's Alien
Here's Extra Terrestrial ('ET' got no results)
Here's Star Trek
Here's War of the Worlds (actually I search 'War Worlds', since the NTRS gave me everything with 'of' and 'the' in the title)
'Flash Gordon', 'Battlestar Galactica', and 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' gave up nothing; and 'Buck Rogers' told me there is a guy called Roger Buck. De la Terre à la Lune seems to have caused a conniption. If the ISS falls from the sky, don't blame me.
It seems that the two most influential Sci-Fi things at NASA are Space Odyssey and Star Trek, which is probably because they concentrate on the techie stuff more than the others. Kubrick's obsession with accuracy means that Space Odyssey is the only movie that people have considered as literal inspiration, while the Trek references are mostly to guest appearances by the Cast, or the shuttle prototype being called Enterprise, which probably means the folks at NASA like Bill Shatner a whole lot. Star Wars gets little mention, considering it was once a Reagan administration policy. Papers on actual aliens only appear at the end of the searches for Alien and Extra Terrestrial which is a tad odd. This one paper called 'the Interstellar Conspiracy, keeps popping up, and with a title like that, who can resist?

And here's a photo of a planet orbiting another star (actually the researchers aren't sure if its a planet or a planet-like object, whatever that means).

Let me know if any of the links don't work.

I can't believe its come to this

So I'm going to defer to the last refuge of the blogger, the page of links.

First up, up a follow up on everybody's favourite car, the Citroen DS. This may well be the greatest car chase captured on film. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVhx9iZNSmk (Edit: Thanks to Travis for telling me this link was broken. Its fixed now. Edit: Now it is)

Secondly, with all the Hadrons flying about, some of you have heard me talking about a thing called Heim Theory. Its an alternative unified theory that hasn't gotten any peer review, but seems pretty promising, not least because it may allow some form of hyperdrive (Also it supposedly predicts all the fundamental paticles... HYPERDRIVE!). Check out the wiki page here, but also have a look at the reference down the bottom to the AIAA paper on the hyperdrive application (then explain it to me).

Talking of space, the harderst part of space travel is the first hundred miles up. Jonathon Goff over at Selenian Boondocks has just finished an incredibly well written series of articles on getting up there. You can read it here.

And back to cars again. Here's a nice set of photos taken behind the scenes of the Mercedes Benz museum. I'd have the white 300SL, and the blue curvy transporter with the Silver Arrows racer on the back.

Oh, and here's climb dance.

Alright, that's enough for now. Let me know if any of the links don't work and I'll try and think of something other than cars and spaceships to write about next time.

LHC's Eve

So tomorrrow the Large Hadron Collider is going to have a particle stream inject for the first time; and to all the theoretical physicists waiting for confirmation out there, I just want you to know: Your all wrong, probably.