If there’s an enduring image of how large steel structures used to be made, it’s probably the hot riveting process. You’ve probably seen grainy old black-and-white films of a riveting gang — universally men in bib overalls with no more safety equipment than a cigarette, heating rivets to red heat in a forge and tossing […]
Usually, designing a CPU is a lengthy process, especially so if you’re making a new ISA too. This is something that can take months or even years before you first get code to run. But what if it wasn’t? What if one were to try to make a CPU as fast as humanly possible? That’s […]
So far in this series, we’ve talked about man-made byproducts — Fordite, which is built-up layers of cured car enamel, and Trinitite, which was created during the first nuclear bomb test. A lovely fulgurite pendant. Image via Etsy But not all byproducts are man-made, and not all of them are basically untouchable. Some are created […]
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a major functional component of the modern Internet. We rely on it for just about everything! It’s responsible for translating human-friendly domain names into numerical IP addresses that get traffic where it needs to go. At the heart of the system are the top-level domains (TLDs)—these sit atop the whole […]
One of the standard tropes in science fiction is some kind of device that can render someone unconscious — you know, like a phaser set to stun. We can imagine times when being aggressively knocked out would lead to some grave consequences, but — we admit — it is probably better than getting shot. However, […]
Visualization of the Sun-Earth Lagrange points. Orbital mechanics is a fun subject, as it involves a lot of seemingly empty space that’s nevertheless full of very real forces, all of which must be taken into account lest one’s spacecraft ends up performing a sudden lithobraking maneuver into a planet or other significant collection of matter […]
Plastics are unfortunately so cheap useful that they’ve ended up everywhere. They’re filling our landfills, polluting our rivers, and even infiltrating our food chain as microplastics. As much as we think of plastic as recyclable, too, that’s often not the case—while some plastics like PET (polyethylene terephthalate) are easily reused, others just aren’t. Indeed, the […]
For months before liftoff, the popular press had been hyping up the fact that the Polaris Dawn mission would include the first-ever private spacewalk. Not only would this be the first time anyone who wasn’t a professional astronaut would be opening the hatch of their spacecraft and venturing outside, but it would also be the […]
If you are in need of a lesson on just how much things have changed in the last 60 years, an anecdote from my childhood might suffice. My grandfather was a junk man, augmenting the income from his regular job by collecting scrap metal and selling it to metal recyclers. He knew the current scrap […]