Year: 2007

A couple of years ago I wrote an entry about old Russian satellites leaking oil and the possibility that there was enough space junk out there that a chain reaction of collisions would eventually render space unusable.

This week, The New York Times reports that mankind just took one giant leap closer to that future when China tested an anti-satellite weapon against one of its old weather satellites. With 10,000 objects being tracked that are 4 inches are larger, China just added another 1,000 with all the debris from this weapon and the satellite that it struck. What is worse is that they chose a satellite with a fairly high orbit, well above the orbit of the space station. But that means the debris will be in orbit for many more years and eventually will threaten the low orbit where we built the space station.

Space.com also reported on the same issue, with more technical detail.

This weekend I got an e-mail from a guy in Scotland concerning battery packs. He said he was looking for one for an Archos video player. I said the Archos looked interesting and asked how he liked it. He said it had some advantages over the 5G iPod (larger screen) and disadvantages (it’s bulkier). He wrote “it’s swings and roundabouts.”

I knew what he was saying but looked up that unusual phrase anyway. It’s a British idiom that means there are tradeoffs and is short for “What you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts,” which doesn’t make it any clearer.

Tonight I was reading up on video games on Wikipedia and wound up reading about the Atari Computer that we used to have (the Atari 400) and before too long I found the Coleco Telstar Ranger. This was the first video game system we ever had. It was a little more advanced than PONG, including six games, including a pretty cool old West “gun” that you could use to shoot targets on the TV screen.

Just seeing a picture of the console brought back memories. The controllers were just dials that you could rotate to make something go left and right or up and down. There wasn’t even a button. They either sat in the console or you could connect a wire to them (which was a neat concept; early Coleco models didn’t have a detachable controller). I have no idea how the gun worked, but it was pretty neat technology, even if it didn’t make for a great game.

They had “tennis” where you would bounce a ball back and forth with the other player and try to get it past them.

With “hockey” you tried to get it past the person and into a goal. You had a goalie and a forward that moved in unison. I remember that being a pretty good game. When you changed levels your player would get smaller and the ball would move faster. At the highest speed it was pretty much impossible.

They had “handball” where both players were at one end of the screen and bounced the ball off the other end, taking turns for responsibility of keeping the ball from going past.

I think “Jai Alai” was just handball with two people on your team. That was the first I had ever heard of jai alai.

“Skeet” sent a ball across the screen from left to right that you had to shoot.

“Target” allowed the ball to bounce off the edges until you hit it.

That same year, 1977, Atari released the 2600 which had much better games that were in color. Wikipedia says that the 2600 was an early 2nd generation home video game, whereas the Coleco was 1st generation (today’s Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Nintendo Wii are 7th generation). I remember Jeb and I (and Grant sometimes) going up to the Northlake Sears to play Combat. Eventually, after the 2600 was obsolete, Grant bought one from one of his friends and we played that for a while.

Several years ago I watched a series of PBS specials about the development of the Boeing 777 airliner. Some searches on the internet found the title to be 21st Century Jet: The Building of the 777. It isn’t available on Amazon, but can apparently still be purchased from the Boeing Store. The film makers had an amazing amount of access as they filmed meetings, talked to engineers, suppliers, etc. It was a perfect case study in project management.

Boeing’s goal was to develop a long-range plane to fill a niche just below the capacity of a 747. With a 5-hour series the documentary was able to go into detail about certain issues (for instance the difficulty in getting a 2-engine aircraft certified for trans-ocean flights or how they test turbine blades). It was fascinating to watch the pieces come together. One way to save money was to do virtual testing of the engine instead of using a flying test platform. The engineers thought they wouldn’t even need to do the real-life tests because their models were so good. But the decision was made to do the test on a full-scale prototype anyway and on the first flight the engine flamed out (they used a 747 so they still had 3 other engines). The engineers went back and found a flaw in their computer model.

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