You can think of flying to Mars like one of those art films where the director has to shoot the movie in a single take. Even if no scene is especially challenging, the requirement that everything go right sequentially, with no way to pause or reshoot, means that even small risks become unacceptable in the aggregate.
I’m not a fan of Nicholas Carr and his moral panics, but this is an excellent dive into some historical media theory.
What Innis saw is that some media are particularly good at transporting information across space, while others are particularly good at transporting it through time. Some are space-biased while others are time-biased. Each medium’s temporal or spatial emphasis stems from its material qualities. Time-biased media tend to be heavy and durable. They last a long time, but they are not easy to move around. Think of a gravestone carved out of granite or marble. Its message can remain legible for centuries, but only those who visit the cemetery are able to read it. Space-biased media tend to be lightweight and portable. They’re easy to carry, but they decay or degrade quickly. Think of a newspaper printed on cheap, thin stock. It can be distributed in the morning to a large, widely dispersed readership, but by evening it’s in the trash.
This special in-depth edition of Quanta is fascinating and very nicely put together.
Maciej rips NASA’s Artemis programme a new one:
Advocates for Artemis insist that the program is more than Apollo 2.0. But as we’ll see, Artemis can’t even measure up to Apollo 1.0. It costs more, does less, flies less frequently, and exposes crews to risks that the steely-eyed missile men of the Apollo era found unacceptable. It’s as if Ford in 2024 released a new model car that was slower, more accident-prone, and ten times more expensive than the Model T.
When a next-generation lunar program can’t meet the cost, performance, or safety standards set three generations earlier, something has gone seriously awry.
Rosemary and her dad are regular attendees of Brighton Astro so everyone is pretty excited about this news!
Everyone is quite rightly linking to this great interactive explainer on colour. It does a great job of describing complex concepts in a clear accessible way.
A delightful ode to a once-divisive design.
Five lovely monospaced variable fonts.
Suppose you had a luxury spacecraft spinning at 1RPM to create 0.5g using centripetal force, as is often depicted in science fiction:
I believe that the perpetually spinning views would be extremely nauseating for most humans, even for short visits. Even worse, I suspect - when it comes to the comfort of the experience - would be the constantly moving light and shadows from the sun.
Oh, this is a nice addition to the Utopia set of tools: when you don’t need a full-on type scale but you still want to figure out fluid clamp() values, the clamp calculator has you covered.
It’s got permalinks too!
In space travel, “Why?” is perhaps the most important ethical question. “What’s the purpose here? What are we accomplishing?” Green asks. His own answer goes something like this: “It serves the value of knowing that we can do things—if we try really hard, we can actually accomplish our goals. It brings people together.” But those somewhat philosophical benefits must be weighed against much more concrete costs, such as which other projects—Earth science research, robotic missions to other planets or, you know, outfitting this planet with affordable housing—aren’t happening because money is going to the moon or Mars or Alpha Centauri.
Considering the average website is less than ten years old, that old warning from your parents that says to “be careful what you post online because it’ll be there forever” is like the story your dad told you about chocolate milk coming from brown cows, a well-meant farce. On the contrary, librarians and archivists have implored us for years to be wary of the impermanence of digital media; when a website, especially one that invites mass participation, goes offline or executes a huge dump of its data and resources, it’s as if a smallish Library of Alexandria has been burned to the ground. Except unlike the burning of such a library, when a website folds, the ensuing commentary from tech blogs asks only why the company folded, or why a startup wasn’t profitable. Ignored is the scope and species of the lost material, or what it might have meant to the scant few who are left to salvage the digital wreck.
Scroll up to the Kármán line.
This is a terrific walkthrough from Andy showing how smart fundamentals in your CSS can give you a beautiful readable document without much work.
This video was in my “Watch Later” queue for ages but I finally got ‘round to watching it this weekend. It’s ace! Great content, great narrative, great delivery—would’ve made a good dConstruct talk.
This game is hard:
Sayable Space is a television game for 1 or more people, it consists of saying “Space” out loud at the same time as Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) during the intro to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Or actually that’s just half of the game. The second half is saying “Space”, and the first half is remembering that you are playing this game.
The positively steampunk piece of hardware used for tracking Alexei Leonov’s Apollo-Soyuz mission.
I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.
Maciej lays out the case against a crewed mission to Mars.
Like George Lucas preparing to release another awful prequel, NASA is hoping that cool spaceships and nostalgia will be enough to keep everyone from noticing that their story makes no sense. But you can’t lie your way to Mars, no matter how sincerely you believe in what you’re doing.
And don’t skip the footnotes:
Fourth graders writing to Santa make a stronger case for an X-Box than NASA has been able to put together for a Mars landing.
James describes his process for designing fluid grid layouts, which very much involves working with the grain of the web but against the grain of our design tools:
In 2022 our design tools are still based around fixed-size artboards, while we’re trying to design products which scale gracefully to suit any screen.
