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| No Escape | Apr 30, 2011 3:53 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Turns out that today's (Friday's) launch of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer--an instrument that will be placed on the International Space Station to look for crazy stuff like antihelium and theoretical neutralinos in cosmic rays--(I blathered about this earlier in the week) has been delayed; according to the AP article, the launch was called off due to a few technical issues in its launch vehicle, the Space Shuttle Endeavour: "one of the two prime heaters for a fuel line feeding one of Endeavour's three auxiliary power units failed" and "another heater was acting up." Monday will be the earliest date on which they could try again, but it may take longer than that to get things squared away. It's to be Endeavour's last flight anyway as the Space Shuttle program winds down; Endeavour, first flown in 1992, was the shuttle that replaced Challenger, which broke up during launch in 1986, resulting in the death of all seven crew members.
The Wikipedia article on the Challenger Disaster is a morbidly fascinating read. The launch--scrubbed multiple times already due to bad weather and minor mechanical problems--took place on an unusually cold January 28th: overnight lows of "18 °F (−8 °C)" meant that launch temperatures would almost certainly be below the "redline" 40 °F (4 °C) temperatures established for the Shuttle's solid rocket boosters ("SRBs"). Check out how much ice had accumulated beneath the launch pad:
image by NASA (source)
Furthermore, they knew that they did *not* have data on how well the rubber "O-rings" sealing three of the joints holding the six sections of each SRB together would function in temperatures below 53 °F (12 °C); the O-rings were designated as "Criticality 1" components, meaning that their failure would result in the loss of the vehicle and death of the crew, yet they could not be assured of them functioning properly in the frigid conditions at the launch pad--this was all known going into launch.
The stresses of Shuttle launches routinely deformed the SRBs, pulling them apart at the joints, with hot gasses ("above 5,000 °F (2,760 °C)") seeping through; however, the O-rings would slip out of their grooves and seal the gap. They hadn't actually been designed to do that, but they did, so the specs were modified to account for it and consider it normal behavior.
All well and good in normal balmy Florida temperatures, then, but on the Challenger during the January 28th launch, the slipping and sealing action is thought to have been slowed by the cold hardening the rubber of the O-rings. Before they could seal the hot gasses in at one of the joints on the right SRB, they'd been vaporized.
That in itself might not have been enough to doom the mission, as aluminum oxides from the burned solid propellant actually gathered in the gap at the damaged joint of the right SRB and sealed it. Launch appeared to be continuing normally.
But 37 seconds into launch, the Shuttle was hit by 27 seconds of the strongest wind shear events ever recorded in the Shuttle program's history; they shattered the oxide seal, allowing the gasses to flow freely. By the time the Shuttle was clear of the turbulence, the leak was a jet of flame shooting out of the side of the booster. That lateral jet forced the SRB to start to pull away from the rest of the vehicle, and within ten seconds, this unexpected force, throwing other considerable forces of the launch out of balance, was enough to have torn the craft apart.
It did not actually explode: the large plumes of vapor seen in the breakup were the oxygen and cryogenic hydrogen fuel spilling out of the disintegrating external fuel tank. In fact, the crew compartment pulled free of the rest of the vehicle in one solid chunk, arcing a further five kilometers up through the sky on a ballistic trajectory; it did not begin to fall back to Earth until 25 seconds after the vehicle had broken up.
The compartment was intact, but it isn't known if the crew survived that rise, and then the plunge toward the ocean, or for how long; the last message caught by the voice recorder was pilot Michael J. Smith's "Uh oh" a half-second after the SRB first wrenched to the side under the force of the escaping & burning gas jet. When analyzing the wreckage of the cabin, it was found that some electrical control system switches on one of Smith's control panels had been thrown, possibly indicating he had--futilely--tried to restore power to the detached cabin. Furthermore, three of the four Personal Egress Air Packs--emergency oxygen systems capable of supplying six minutes of breathable air--on the flight deck had been activated, indicating that at least two of the crew members, other than the pilot, had been alive to activate them after the cabin broke off from the rest of the vehicle. But they were only meant to provide air in case of something like noxious gasses in the cabin, and so were unpressurized; if the cabin had lost pressure, which seems likely, then they would have been useless. In any case, there was certainly nothing the crew could have done to save themselves, and the cabin smashed into the ocean at "207 mph (333 km/h)," with a force of "well over 200 g," far beyond what the crew compartment, let alone the crew, could survive.
It's rather shocking to think about--and this isn't even in retrospect, since these ships are still being flown!--but the Shuttles have no ejection system. All previous manned U.S. space vehicles had ejection systems--none of which were ever used--but while multiple ejection systems had been discussed--and at one point even installed--for the Space Shuttles, in the end, they were all rejected as impractical, of limited utility, or too costly. Although I suppose there would have been little chance of an escape system working in the Challenger disaster, when the cabin was tumbling at who-knows-what angle, it's still disheartening to know that there is simply no escape option during a launch procedure.
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Guh still disheartened now that I've written all that. But anyway I hope you'll find the depiction of space in today's A* page to be a bit better, or at least an interesting attempt. I think it's getting somewhere, although I broke some of my own rules on this one, such as using a bit of Gaussian Blur. :P Other than that, the background was pretty much all done with Gimp's airbrush tool at various settings. Oh, except for the larger nearer stars, which are little radial Photoshop gradients.
More storyboards and rejected storyboards for later in this episode! It's a mad, mad tea party you know:
^ For future reference, that one's in the episode 13 gallery, newly available from the "episodes" top menu item.
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Also, as usual I've neglected all week long to invite you to take a look at the latest page of my weekend fairy tale comic, "The Princess and the Giant," which you will find clickably linked from this inviting teaser banner thingy:
And there'll be an even newer page of it going up on Sunday.
Have a nice weekend!
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| Them Ruskies are up to something again | Apr 28, 2011 11:41 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:You didn't think mem training was all fun and games, did you? :P
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A*'s Facebook page is apparently popular enough now (maybe it had been for a while; I just found out about this trick :P) to have a nice short address. So instead of the boring old
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Supermassive-Black-Hole-A/155265446287
which doesn't exactly flow trippingly into the URL field, you can now get there with just
http://facebook.com/smbhax
How's that for progress!
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Somewhat ironically considering we're also at the 50th anniversary of the flight of Yuri Gagarin, whose death--along with a good friend of his 14 months earlier--may have been due to Soviet technical negligence and possibly sinister political maneuvering, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, in the Ukraine earlier this week for the observation of the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, took the opportunity to call for nations to work on rules for safer nuclear energy.
The article has a couple interesting factoids concerning the disaster:
"The Chernobyl explosion released about 400 times more radiation than the U.S. atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima. The U.N.'s World Health Organization said at a conference in Kiev last week that among the 600,000 people most heavily exposed to the radiation, 4,000 more cancer deaths than average are expected to be eventually found."
It also notes that the Ukraine is still $300 million short of the funds needed to erect a better containment structure over Chernobyl's ruined #4 reactor--it's planned to be the world's largest mobile structure, since it will be rolled into place over the existing concrete "sarcophagus".
Sad that the world's leading nations still haven't pitched in enough to make that happen. Speaking of sad notes left over from the Chernobyl disaster, here's another:
"Russia, Ukraine and Belarus have cut the benefits packages for sickened cleanup workers in recent years and the memorial events were overshadowed by their complaints for more aid. Prime Minister Mykola Azarov vowed Tuesday that benefits to Chernobyl victims would continue to be paid."
Makes me wonder if at some point in the far-flung future the nuclear industry--assuming its still going--might be costing more than its making, due to maintenance on accident containment sites that have to be funded and maintained for a long period of time, or even more or less into perpetuity, like Chernobyl. But then again, nuclear reactors have better safety systems these days, and even something like the recent Fukushima accident is expected to be cleaned up in a matter of decades, maybe. (That Wikipedia article I just linked also has an interesting comparison with the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, where it was 11 years before the partially melted reactor core was opened, and several more years for cleanup to be completed.)
Then again again, even non-accidental nuclear industry work generates waste that has to be buried in perpetuity, which also costs a bit. Oh well maybe eventually it'll just be cheaper to launch it into the Sun--problem solved!
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Oh! I also had more storyboards from later in this episode to leak out, seeing as how I doodled 'em last night:
What's this? Our hard-as-nails galactic bounty hunter sipping tea in *my* hard sci-fi webcomic??? Hm well maybe she's practicing for the royal wedding. :PP
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| Of Komarov and Gagarin | Apr 27, 2011 10:58 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:A new book out this month, Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin, purports to reveal much that has been previously unpublished concerning the life of the first man in space. Judging from the user reviews there on Amazon, the authors do not buy into the conspiracy theories about his death in a Soviet test flight at age 34; they do, however, do some investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of his good friend and fellow cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, only 14 months earlier.
This NPR article has details of the Komarov account, along with a grisly photo of his charred remains, and what is supposed to be a recording of some of his last moments, screaming in rage and cursing the engineers (as some translators render the difficult recording) while plunging to his death in the fatally malfunctioning Soyuz 1.
Gagarin had been assigned as the backup pilot for the mission, and, according to the account, had enumerated 203 flaws in the spacecraft prior to launch; he sent a memo about it up the chain by way of a friend of his in the KGB, but that friend--and every other lesser official who saw the memo, supposedly--was demoted, and some of them were sent to Siberia; Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev insisted on the mission going ahead, as he was determined to score a coup in the space race by having the pilot of the Soyuz 1 rendezvous and exchange places with the crew of a second Soyuz module.
The Soviets could not make a space mission succeed by willpower alone, however, and engineering problems quickly became apparent, beginning with the solar panels of Komarov's craft failing to open once he reached orbit; this prevented some navigation and maneuvering systems from functioning correctly, and the craft could not orient on the Sun. The second Soyuz module, which could have repaired the solar panels on the first, was never launched--either due to a thunderstorm at the launch site, or because the first had so many problems, depending on which Wikipedia article you read. After five unsuccessful hours of trying to orient the Soyuz 1 with the main maneuvering rockets, Komarov tried the secondary system, and it failed. After two days in space, on his 19th orbit, he managed to put the craft into atmospheric re-entry with a manual retro-fire, but then the final failure occurred: the module's parachutes failed to deploy correctly, and on April 24, 1967, the Soyuz 1 plunged to Earth, killing Komarov. His was the first in-flight death in a human space program; the three astronauts of the Apollo 1 mission had perished in a cabin test on the ground two months previously.
The book alleges that Komarov had known the mission would likely be fatal, but had gone ahead with it because he felt that if he protested or begged off, his friend Gagarin would have been made to go--and die--in his place.
Grim stuff. To illustrate that death in the space race was not unexpected in those days, that NPR article also shows a speech that the Nixon administration had prepared in case Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin had not returned alive from the Moon.
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| Use PSN? Your personal data has been stolen. | Apr 27, 2011 1:46 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:If you use Sony's "PlayStation Network" ("PSN") online service, say to download or play online games on the PS3, you've probably noticed that the service has been down for a week or so now. All they had said about it really was they'd had to shut it down due to an "external incursion" or something, aka a hack attempt. Well, today they updated their blog with the low-down: hackers got in and stole your personal information. Specifically:
"...an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, out of an abundance of caution we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may have been obtained."
If you have a PSN account, you should definitely go read the whole blog entry so you know what's up, and if you've used a password similar to your PSN one for other stuff online, you should seriously consider changing it wherever you may have used it. As for me, this'll be the second time I've had to get a new credit card due to online identity theft. ;P
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| Argonne and other impractically awesome stuff | Apr 26, 2011 3:18 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Hello! Darn these Mondays and all. :P
Changing the topic to another day, then, over the weekend I added an update to my long-lost series of odd little visual font poem things, "word." So yes it is a little poem, but I did manage to work "Doppler shift" into it, which I was reasonably happy with, as I'm sure you can imagine. Man! So anyway if you want to see what that noise is all about, you can get right to it by clicking on this grayish banner thingy:
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Here's something that's pretty neat, though! Just today, an article came out saying that scientists using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) particle accelerator (in terms of collision energy, it's second only to the fancy new Large Hadron Collider at CERN that's been stealing all the press the past few years) at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island
image by US Government (source)
(the RHIC is below that circular track at the top there) reported spotting the heaviest antimatter atom yet seen: antihelium-4--or the nucleus of it, anyway: that's two antiprotons and two antineutrons hanging out together.
Antihelium has been seen since back in the '70's with antihelium-3 (that would be two antiprotons and one antineutron, I guess), but this was a first for the heavier -4. The article quotes a scientist as saying that this will probably be the heaviest type of antimatter spotted for a while, since the next heavier one, antilithium (-6, maybe?), is expected to be generated two million times less frequently than antihelium (and out of a billion particle collisions, generating a half-trillion charged particles, only 18 of those were antihelium-4--so getting enough antilithium to detect with certainty would take a heck of a lot more work).
One interesting thing about the RHIC is that in terms of heavy particles, it mostly collides copper and gold nuclei--antihelium was detected in gold collisions--whereas as far as I've read, the LHC works primarily with lead. Gold! Gold is way cooler than lead; the RHIC is blinged out. Here are some more pictures of it stolen from Wikipedia! The collider's Central Magnet, nine meters tall and 500 tons, with the beam pipe running through it:
image by US Department of Energy (source)
and a display showing the paths of subatomic particles resulting from some of the first gold ion collisions run at the RHIC, as detected by their "STAR" detector ("STAR" is short for "Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC"; it and PHENIX, seen in the other photo, are the only two detectors still active there, from the original four (RHIC came online in 2000))
image by Brookhaven National Laboratory (source)
which they call a "3-D camera," in that its gas-filled, electrically and magnetically charged time projection chamber (man, that's a keen name) can calculate the position and energy of the scattering subatomic collision debris in three dimensions over time, thanks to combining a wire chamber (particles shooting through the gas in the chamber leave a trail of ionized particles, which, hitting a nearby wire, create an electric current proportional to the energy of the original particle, and the track of these currents across successive wires shows the particle's path) with a proportional counter (this gathers the ions and electrons created along the path of the charged particle into anode and cathode receptors, compares their proportions, and from that can deduce the number and energy of the original particle), plus a simple detector some distance away along the collision track to help calculate the speed of the particles. Whew!
(That "wire chamber" Wikipedia page has a funny story about Georges Charpak, who came up with the idea of combining the wire chamber with a proportional counter in 1968 (and got the Nobel Prize in Physics for it in 1992). You need really big magnets--like the 500-ton PHENIX Central Magnet--to pull in the charged particles from the collisions--checking their movement curves as they go through the magnetic field helps measure their charge. The story goes that Charpak, engaged for months in stringing together the thousands of tiny wires needed for constructing such a wire chamber, had unwittingly been sitting in an iron chair, and one day, he moved it too close to the detector's magnet, and BANG! the chair got sucked into the detection chamber, tearing out all the wires in the process. Oof!
They probably don't have a whole lot of iron chairs at the RHIC. >_>
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Hm! In looking up the sources of that STAR tracking image above, I found out that it is the result of work by the Argonne National Laboratory, who talk about how they're able to generate such results relatively quickly (in a day or so?) now by using Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service to put up to something like 300 computers to work on the data at a time.
And I feel silly for not knowing this, since I got an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago (well okay, it was an art degree, but hey :P), but the U of C manages Argonne--and has since it started in 1946, when the nuclear experiments that had started at the U of C's campus--run by Enrico Fermi, and constituting a crucial part of the Manhattan Project--were deemed too dangerous for city life, and moved to a rural area outside Chicago. And I guess I probably drove--was driven, rather--pretty near by it on one occasion, since it appears to be pretty much right down the country road from Fermilab. Neat. Here's one of the cool things they used to show off at Argonne: the Cockroft-Walton preaccelerator component of the Zero Gradient Synchrotron (man that's another cool name), a proton accelerator that came online in '63, and at which the neutrino was first observed, in 1970:
image by US Government (source)
Also, here is the STAR detector's home page, and the scientific paper on the antihelium-4 detection. (Fun antiparticle name found in the paper: antihypertriton (discovered at the RHIC last year). :o) There's a nice illustration of the STAR detection chamber in there, and if you skim through it you can see why it's so tricky to find things in this particle work: since you can't really see anything, these being smaller than the wavelength of light or something, you can only *infer* the (usually extremely brief) existence of these particles by measurements of their mass, energy, velocity, charge, and so forth--or even just measurements of those things from the particles resulting from their radioactive decay. And I thought this description of how the constituents of the atom come together to produce the nucleus was interesting: "The quantum wave functions of the constituent nucleons, if close enough in momentum and coordinate space, will overlap to produce the nucleus." Simple! :) :o
Oh! And the concluding section of the paper reminded me of something that was also in the conclusion of the first article I linked, which is that the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer launches in four days (April 29th, on the second-to-last Space Shuttle flight); mounted on the International Space Station, it will analyze incoming cosmic rays, and one thing it will be looking for is incoming antihelium nuclei, which in theory would come from antimatter galaxies, if such things exist; where all the antimatter in the Big Bang went--in theory, things were nearly equal matter and antimatter there for a bit just after the Bang, and scientists haven't settled on why we seem to be left with pretty much all matter rather than antimatter around these days--is one of the big mysteries of modern cosmology, so a detection of antihelium from space--presumably from antimatter galaxies or something neat--could be a big step in solving that issue; and actually being able to *find* an antimatter galaxy for study would be huge.
Incidentally, it's CERN who run the AMS projects, and their web sites always have that distinctive "this is real science" HTML 1.0 look about them. :D There is though the rather fancy, YouTube-heavy AMS site for the public, as well as CERN's antimatter site; and as you can read there, the first, Space Shuttle-based AMS experiment in 1998 (it was Discovery, and the last Shuttle mission to the Mir station) operated for 10 days and picked up no antimatter nuclei whatsoever (out of the 3 million nuclei that it collected). So this second AMS (as you can also see from that page, it was originally supposed to go up in 2004--they haven't updated that page, even to correct the fo/of typo in the title :P) will be collecting something like a thousand times more nuclei, or something (the quote is "AMS-01 established an upper limit of 10^−6 for the antihelium/helium flux ratio in the universe. AMS-02 will reach a sensitivity of 10^−9," whatever that means), and if it still doesn't find a drop of antimatter after three years of collecting, it appears that at least some scientists will be reasonably convinced that there are no antimatter galaxies hiding out there ("sufficient to reach the edge of the expanding Universe and resolve the issue definitively," says Wikipedia).
The AMS is also going to be looking for other theoretical particles: neutralinos, supposed to make up "Dark Matter," and strangelets, predicted collections of up, down, and strange quarks--another supposed possibility for Dark Matter; although supposedly if a strangelet hit regular matter, it would convert it to strange matter, so the Earth would be a "hot lump" of strange matter already from strangelets produced by the RHIC, which...well that hasn't happened. So needless to say--and of course without having any hope of understanding the math behind it all--I'm about as skeptical of strangelets as I am of Dark Matter, which is very. I am *slightly* less skeptical of antimatter galaxies, but not much. :P
On a much more practical level, the AMS will also conduct extensive surveys of cosmic radiation, which would be very useful to know about for, say, a manned trip to Mars. Okay that still isn't very practical in getting by every day terms for most of us, but hey.
Man, this article really got away from me. :P
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| Oh, everyone knows all about that | Apr 23, 2011 1:38 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:"Science" news first! I noticed in this LiveScience article that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN on the French/Swiss border has finally outstripped Fermilab (in Illinois, outside Chicago--I was in a car that sort of drove past it once, back in college :o) as the place where the most *intense* particle beams (beams having the most particles) have been smashed together, although it had already beaten Fermilab in terms of the highest *energy* collisions last year.
But it didn't stop there! Now apparently certain channels (certainly the popular science press :p) are "abuzz" with a rumor that the oft-predicted and never seen "Higgs boson"--which is supposed to explain gravity and thus make all of particle physics' knottiest theories work out oh-so-nicely--had been seen! Or its decay, anyway. But it sounds like the rumors are quickly being discounted, so...just another day in science, I guess.
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You know them, you love them! Yes, it's more storyboards
Actually those are both attempts for the same panel, and I think I'm getting worse and worse at these because I count successive attempts at doodling a panel's layout by letters of the alphabet, ie the first is well nothing, the second is "b," the third is "c," etc, and this one went clear up to "g." :P These were like d and e, I dunno. I sort of liked the first one but in the end she looked too much like a soggy elf, and A* is just not that kind of comic.
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Speaking of which, this is where I remind you that a new page of my Sunday fairy tale comic, "The Princess and the Giant," came out last weekend, and a new one will go up this Sunday! Golly! Here's a graphical link to the latest page, but it isn't actually a preview of that page, 'cause that page didn't have a suitable drawing of the Princess on it. :P So I've just pulled this banner out of the ol' archives--clicking will still take you to the page that went up this past Sunday, though:
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| To storyboard or not to storyboard | Apr 21, 2011 10:37 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Well, this is the nutty kind of layout that occurs when I decide the storyboard I had for the page was far too hum-drum, and just ditched it and tried to come up with something on the fly. In this case, I think it worked out much better than I deserved; and this is the kind of thing that makes me think that maybe I shouldn't take the time to storyboard everything out--like, I probably would never have even thought of this layout (for better or worse...) in a storyboard doodle. Then again, there are certainly pages or sequences of pages where I know I would've gotten myself into trouble if I hadn't worked them out as storyboards first. Hrm.
I at least had a fairly productive storyboarding day yesterday; I have 80 of the little boogers done now--only 85 to go! ;| But part of why they're taking so long is that I've had some really *un*productive days on them over the past couple weeks, so hopefully this is where I start turning that around.
So I'll drop some recent 'boards on you, and run off and work on some more (and I just noticed in putting these together that I somehow deleted one last night (#65--maybe in the frenzy of like seven different attempts on 66 :p, so I guess I gotta go redo that one too, grr!).
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| A bit of money for shuttles | Apr 20, 2011 8:01 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Here's the storyboard for today's page; I think I had some fun with this doodle at the time:
And in a way I think sometimes I've gotten too conservative with my final page art, wanting it to look reasonably professional and all, whereas not so long ago I would have let it go a little more toward the wild side. Hm hm hm.
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My brother pointed out this article in the local paper saying that NASA just awarded $270 million in contracts to four companies for shuttle programs: Boeing got the most, at $92.3 million, then $80 million went to SpaceX, $75 million to Sierra Nevada Corp, and $22 million to Blue Origin. Those aren't really huge figures, when you consider for instance that Boeing made a profit of over $3 billion last year, and NASA had an annual budget of $17.6 billion a few years ago, but eh well the whole point of farming shuttle programs out to commercial ventures is to get it done cheaply, so I guess we'll see what they can do.
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| Is it nap time yet? | Apr 20, 2011 12:22 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Over the weekend I drew a portrait for another webcomic that they'd asked me very nicely to do some months ago and I'd been putting off. They seem okay with the result so hopefully it will get posted soon and I can link you to it. It was interesting to do because their comic is based on a real person, so I had to draw like specific facial features and stuff instead of just making them up, which is what I usually do.
Speaking of that, though, in continuing to draw the storyboards for this episode—which continue to go slowly, ugh...I guess 'cause this episode has a heck of a lot of new sets and people and character interactions to figure out, I dunno—after the first doodle or so of a certain character, I started to notice I was sort of basing them on a vague childhood memory of an old cartoon character, possibly because they were easy to doodle, or maybe it's some Freudian thing, who knows. Anyway for instance see if you can pick them out in this storyboard I drew yesterday, which is actually a layout I've rejected, so it's kind of a spare:
I mean you know it's pretty scribbly, so it could be eh anyone
[Update 3/22/16: My old image host lost this image, I'm not sure what it was now : o]
Anyway, I'm sure they'll look somewhat different in the final art. >_>
And I think maybe I've got something for couches, because we've got one here in Selenis' moon base, suddenly, and I've been drawing them here and there recently in my other daily comic, Sketchy. Which is interesting because I don't have a couch and couldn't fit one in my tiny apartment even if I wanted one. There's also been a lot of snoozing in that comic of late, and I guess there's often sleeping here in A* in a way, since people tend to go into a deep sleep while traveling between star systems (notice how Selenis' hair was a bit longer at the start of this episode?).
So, hm. I think it means...that I need to finish these darn storyboards. :P
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| Make it pretty | Apr 18, 2011 8:16 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Since Mother's been so talkative recently and getting "her" subtitles close to the "smbhax.com" imprint in the lower right of the comics, I've dimmed that URL down a little bit so it'll clash less. Massive change!
Thanks to Drivel_Dave of the This Is Drivel blog for adding A* to his "Your Drivel" link list. Yay! Look ma, I'm officially drivel! :D This is pretty rad.
Over the weekend I added the ability to embed Vimeo videos on the A* forums (with the new "vimeo" tag, as described here), pretty much because I wanted to show you this beautiful movie showing night-time footage of the galactic core (with A* in the middle, naturally) as seen from the surface of Earth, if you can get the right latitude and atmospheric conditions:
watch on vimeo.com
Wow! What this really tells me is that I gotta get better at drawing them space backgrounds, because if the core looks that amazing from here, it should look way more amazing even when you're, like, right up in it, which is where A* the comic is supposed to be. I've got a long way to go, but the video's pretty darn inspiring.
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| Einstein and Shiny Space Balls | Apr 16, 2011 1:14 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:My Sunday fairy tale comic "The Princess and the Giant" will update this Sunday, and if you haven't been keeping up with it, here's a preview of what you missed last weekend (and it's clickable and stuff to go right there)
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According to this AP news article, this past Monday was "the 50th anniversary of the first human spaceflight by Yuri Gagarin." The article has some interesting quotes from people involved with the old Russian space program, saying for instance that they weren't certain of humans could survive being in space, psychologically, and that the risk assessment for the mission's success was only 50%! It also mentions the controversy surrounding Gagarin's death in a test flight in 1968--rumors persist that it was arranged by the KGB "for his alleged opposition to the Communist regime."
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This Space.com article talks about supermassive black holes, as well as black holes in general, saying that a formula has been developed that can calculate when a black hole will reach "Kerr spacetime," which is supposedly a state where time is no longer passing. Sounds kind of interesting. The scientific paper this came from might be this one, of which I can understand very little. :P
And there isn't much on "Kerr spacetime" on Wikipedia, but there is an article on the "Kerr metric," which is sort of like the better-known Schwarzchild metric, used to calculate the event horizon of a black hole (the distance from the singularity inside of which light cannot escape), but it has to do with the ellipsoidal "ergosphere" around a *rotating* black hole, outside the event horizon, inside of which particles are forced to rotate due to the rotating black hole's warping of spacetime in rotational frame dragging, aka the Lense–Thirring effect.
Sounds fun, huh? Turns out there was already an experiment done to verify that this effect, predicted by General Relativity, actually exists: NASA and Stanford University's Gravity Probe B went into a polar Earth orbit in 2004, and spent 16 months measuring the effect of the Earth's gravity on four precisely engineered gyroscopes mounted on the probe--at the time they were made, the ping-pong-sized fuzed quartz gyroscopes on GP-B were the most perfect spheres ever made by humans! They were coated with a thin layer of the superconducting metal niobium, and suspended in magnetic fields; the spin induced on them by the Earth's gravity could be read by monitoring the magnetic field of their niobium coating. Neat-o. Here's one without the coating, refracting a photo of Einstein (oh those jokers at NASA!):
image by NASA (source)
This NASA graphic in a BBC article (can I steal that, since NASA made it? hm not sure :P) illustrates what was expected would happen: the gravitational effect of the Earth's spin would gradually cause the gyroscopes to rotate away from their starting alignment.
A camera on the Delta II rocket that took the probe into orbit got a photo of it up there:
image by NASA (source)
The findings apparently confirmed the geodetic effect--that is, an alteration of the orientation of an orbiting body around a mass, due to the mass' gravitational effect on spacetime--to an accuracy of better than 0.5%, meaning the data from the experiment was only 0.5% off of what general relativity predicted would happen. Another triumph for experimental space science and general relativity!
However, the frame-dragging effect--due to the rotation of the gravitating mass, not just its non-rotating gravitational (geodetic) effect--is "170 times smaller" than the geodetic effect, so it's much harder to measure, and the results at that level of accuracy were muddied by a non-uniformity of the niobium coating on the gyroscopes, which gave them an "electrostatic axis," causing them to rotate just ever so slightly, "of a magnitude similar to the expected frame dragging effect." So they had to figure out just what effect that had on the results, and calculate it out before they could see what effect frame-dragging might have had.
This page on Stanford's site shows the measured rotation of the gyros as nifty gif animations, and later, over here, in November 2009 (convenient since their final funding, secured Saudi Arabia's science and technology complex after NASA's funding ran out in 2008, was due to run out in December 2009) they announced that they'd confirmed the existence of the frame-dragging effect predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity, within 14% accuracy of the predicted values. (Wikipedia editors, maybe you should update your article! :D)
So...maybe good! Frame-dragging experiments have also been run by the Mars Global Surveyor, and even before that, by the LAGEOS ("Laser Geodynamics Satellites"), two Earth-orbiting probes launched in 1976 and 1992 "to provide an orbiting laser ranging benchmark for geodynamical studies of the Earth," both of which are still in service! The LAGEOS look really neat:
image by NASA (source)
And the reason why they're still in service--and for practical purposes may still be for another 8.4 million years, at which point they'll have drifted back down into the atmosphere--is because they don't have any electronics or mechanisms in them at all: they're just 411 kg, 60 cm, aluminum-covered brass spheres. Because they're so simple, and their mass-to-area ratio is so high (they're dense!), their orbit is very predictable, and they're "the most precise position references available." You fire a laser beam up to them, measure the time it takes to reflect back, and that tells you your exact position to a very high degree of accuracy; from that, you can model the movement of the Earth's crust, and so forth.
But anyway the frame-dragging results of both the MGS and LAGEOS experiments are apparently highly contested. Due to the irregularity in the niobium coating of the gyros, GP-B's results may be somewhat contested as well (?), so I suppose we're still waiting for a really really good experimental confirmation of frame-dragging.
(Boy I really only meant to link that Space.com article--darn Internet makin' me look stuff up! :P)
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| A* going soft? No! Noooo! Well... | Apr 14, 2011 11:11 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Ook, I hope this one looks okay, 'cause it was one'a those that seems like it should be simple, then fights me all the way. Gar! Now you are published, drawing, so there! =P
Here are some storyboards I did yesterday that came out with considerably less trouble:
Yep, this episode's gonna be a real emotional rollercoaster (no, really).
Speaking of which, I added a couple more of what I think were my more successful drawings from the end of episode 12 (still got a couple more) to my deviantART, and as has been my habit of late there, in their description fields I ramble on a bit about details behind the drawing, or the character or location depicted, or whatever. For instance, in this one I reveal all about the origin of Kol Andiran's name! Woooo. And what's this suggestion that there may be...romance? In *my* hard sci-fi webcomic?? Well, you'll just have to go read the rest of the description yourself. :P
Okay now I gotta go wring out another little batch of storyboards. These are going so...slowly...ugh. =P
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| Hey look some halfway-decent storyboards | Apr 13, 2011 8:37 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Oh man I just know I'm gonna regret making that space station so visually complicated. :P
On the other end of the visual complication spectrum, here are some storyboards I drew yesterday, for pages later in this episode:
Some new places and people, yep!
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| Firefoxed! | Apr 12, 2011 10:09 PM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Hey two pages! Now I gotta get some storyboards done, finally.
I was excited a little while back about the new Firefox 4, being all fast and stuff, and I still like it and it's my main browser, and/but in using it, I noticed a few things it does differently than Firefox 3 that slightly inconvenienced my online lifestyle! OMG rage! :D
The first one actually forced me to learn how to do something for the site the right way, namely managing server HTTP cache control correctly; I had a popular hack in there instead, which worked find in FF3, but I found that 4 wasn't always delivering the most up-to-date version of the front page after I posted a comic or news article. So I had to learn how to do that the technically right way.
The second thing is that now when you go to upload a file--like I upload the A* comics not only to this site, but also to mirrors on DrunkDuck, Smack Jeeves, and ComicFury--the browser stores the last directory you uploaded from to that site and starts you there, which would be great, except that I upload from two separate directories each day, since I also upload my daily Sketchy comic to those sites as well.
Waaah! Well probably nothing will happen and I'll just have to suck it up and live with it, but I did at least enter "Questions" about those two things in Mozilla's uh support database thingy, here and here, and I guess in theory maybe if enough people have the same problem, they'll take it under consideration or something, I dunno. In any case I at least got them documented all official-like. :P
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| Stars and lots of helium | Apr 11, 2011 10:52 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Well I think I'm going to go ahead and draw a second page tonight instead of working on storyboards for further ahead in the episode, because it's Monday and I've been to the dentist and pages are less brain-killing than storyboards. But I'm not going to put it up whenever I finish it this evening, because I kind of like the look of page 4 here, and anyway we haven't had a nice smiling picture of Selenis in a while. :P But that should mean two new pages tomorrow, so yay.
Here's a video I forgot to drop on you on Friday! It is the best video I have seen of Moby in a space suit.
video on Youtube
(on YouTube)
It also actually refers to some very fundamental astrophysics science, since all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are thought to have formed, by and large, in the nuclear furnaces of stars. So good work there, Moby! And here's a fun helium factoid I just noticed: according to Wikipedia, the superconducting magnets that guide supercharged particles around the Large Hadron Collider (the big particle accelerator at CERN on the border of France and Switzerland; a hadron is a particle made of quarks, of which there are two flavors: baryons, made of three quarks, and including things like protons and neutrons, and things with funnier names like "charmed double bottom Omega" (oh dear), and mesons, composed of a quark and antiquark, and having names like Pion, Kaon, and "strange D meson") are cooled to 1.9 Kelvin (that's −271.25 °C) by 96 metric tons of liquid helium, making CERN the largest cryogenic facility in the world at that low temperature. That's a lot of squeaky voices if it boils!
And actually, that liquid helium coolant made the news in 2008, shortly after the LHC came online to much fanfare, because a malfunction in some of the huge magnets that guide the particles around the collider track led to a rupture that spilled six tons of it into the tunnel around the accelerator. (The big problem though was that the magnets were damaged and took a while to fix.)
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| Oh my stars | Apr 09, 2011 4:35 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I've been doing this comic for what...two years now, in one form or another (it started off as an animated thingy, you know), and you'd think I'd have settled on a way of drawing SPACE, but no. I threatened with the last page that I was going to try a more traditional painted approach for stars and gasses next time, sort of forgetting that next time was the very next page! So after trying three other approaches first (the second one being a lasso + Noise filter one for which I even posted a quick test example on the forum; but I ran into difficulty when trying to push it to high contrast and detail, and then when I was at wit's end and just googled "photoshop starry sky" or something to see how *other* people do it, I found that, like, everyone uses the Noise filter for stars--so obviously I couldn't settle for that ;P), I finally settled for a somewhat paint-like method on the space background for this page (in GIMP, airbrush with some funky settings for the stars, and Ink Tool with various opacities for the dark clouds blocking them).
I think it worked...okay? I mean, I need some practice with it, but it at least seems to offer the flexibility, speed, and detail I want. So I think I'll probably have at least a few more cracks with it, although I think there's only hm one more space shot in the near-ish future--but there will be more further on down the road of this long episode.
Oh yeah, I also promised to present my most presentable storyboard for this episode so far--which isn't far at all. Haveta do better on those next week. Anyway here's the one, a layout for what will probably be page... Wait no that one's way too scribbley. Huh! Well, okay, so I don't have a presentable one yet. Dang. Hm. What to give you... Oh well here's today's Sketchy comic, which I draw more or less the same way as the storyboards (GIMP's Ink Tool):
The biggest difference with this new Intuos4 tablet over my old Intuos3 tablet, as far as drawing A* goes, is that the drawing surface has some bite to it--versus the slick surface of the Intuos3 and the ancient Calcomp Drawingslate I had before that--so it takes a bit more effort to move the stylus across the page, but the up side is that it's easier to stop and change drawing direction; so it sort of favors a more detailed, intricate drawing approach, which is somewhat in contrast to the spazzy, wrist-flicking, sliding-over-the-surface style I'd gradually developed for drawing on the computer. It's taking a bit of getting used to, and I kind of miss the effortless glide of the smooth old drawing surfaces, but it *does* help with detail work, and if you look over the past two and a half pages (not counting the title page for this episode, but counting the shading of the last page of the previous episode), I think you'll probably be able to spot a slight difference in that respect.
Gar, up too late again. :P See you next week!
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| Episode 13 launches despite the odds | Apr 08, 2011 3:29 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* pages:Phew! I think I'm sort of getting closer to what I want space in this part of the galactic core to look like, but, hm... As I was making the stars and nebulae in the background, I was thinking "man, next time I should just paint this part" because...that was a heck of a lot of layers, and I'm still not quite sure how I feel about the hard look of it back there. So maybe I'll try painting the next spacey background in GIMP or something, just to see how that goes.
It's late and I continued to be plagued by various technical problems today--some new ones, even!--so I'll just run through those and some self-serving links quickly before calling it a night, dear reader:
- A big "gosh, thanks!" to the guys at Mannie Marine for adding an A* link banner to their site, which hosts their neato black and white animated webcomic set in a grim, militarized future. Also, the banner needed to be at a size I didn't have one for yet--150x30--so I made one at that size:
which you can always find along with a lot of larger ones on the icons and banners page, which is always linked off of the big list of links on this site's about page.
- Speaking of the about page, I updated the A* development list at the bottom with notes on stuff I started doing in the last episode--12--like gray for the primary skin tone (instead of white), and semi-transparent skin highlights. Oh and notes about when I started using the Intuos4 tablet, which was basically halfway through the last page of episode 12, when I broke my Intuos3. :P
- Speaking of the Intuos4, although I said yesterday that I got it to be cooperative with the lit button labels showing in wireless mode, it decided to stop doing that today, at least on a regular basis, and even sort of to go into a pretty crippled mode when switching to wireless where it loses all its tablet settings and behaves like a very sluggish, generic mouse. Hrrrhh. Uninstalling and reinstalling my Bluetooth and Wacom drivers didn't have any effect. I can get it to make a good connection--but still not with lit buttons--by redoing the connection manually. It would be *nice* if it did it right automatically, but currently it's deciding not to. Not sure what else I can try for that, and Wacom has pretty much zero Intuos4 Wireless troubleshooting documentation on their site--two articles as far as my search found: one about a wireless version of their old Graphire tablet, and one actually for the Intuos4, basically saying yeah if it doesn't work go check with Apple or Microsoft--but I'm pretty sure this clumsy auto-handshake I'm having a problem with is run by the Wacom tablet drivers, so, blug.
- Technical issue with the post office! Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate! I'm pretty sure that's carved in stone over like the capital post office, right? >_> Come on, guys! =P
- On the plus side, the rest of my computer virus scanning procedure came up clean, so yay, cured! :D
- On the briefly incredibly depressing although it shouldn't really have been side, while juggling my tablet and keyboard during testing the wireless pairing by using the programmed function buttons I've got for it to work with Pandora, the Pandora station I've been carefully training since like mid-January suddenly...disappeared. Like I'd deleted it, but with a single stray keypress or something--not going through the menu and "are you sure you want to delete" dialogue in their stand-alone desktop player. It was gone! Checked the web player too at pandora.com, but it wasn't showing there, either. Noooo! I'd have to listen to at least the first parts of all the 500+ songs I've weeded out over the past months, re-tag the (what's 65*5? that many) I'd said I liked...
But then for some reason I thought maybe I'd see if I could at least find its old info page, and that might help me re-create it if Pandora tech support couldn't magically restore it. I thought I'd posted its name as a link to its info page at some point -- Trippity Hoppity -- either here or on Facebook or something, so I googled for it, but Google just came up with the direct info page link in the top results. So that was handy! And I clicked through and it was all there, along with a "Listen" button, so I clicked that, and...it was back! And it showed up in their desktop player too, and played as if it had been there all along. So... I don't know what happened. :P Fixed with Google magic, maybe! :o
(What's funny too is that when I use pandora's own station search, it comes up with three other "Trippity Hoppity" stations, none of them mine. I guess I'm so unoriginal it doesn't even want to know about me. ;_; Also I have no idea why on the station info page it says it was created in 2009--more like beginning of this year!)
- While waiting for the new tablet to arrive I was catching up on various non-drawing things, like posting some of the more successful pages from episode 12 on my deviantART, along with sort of way too much information about what went into them, what I thought about it, etc. I still have some to go from episode 12, and who knows when I'll get myself some spare time to do that, but hey you know what would really encourage me to do that? If you headed over there and Followed my dA page (you need a free and easily-signed-up-for dA account to do that), because when people do that it makes me inexplicably happy--like, way more than it should. :D Anyway, if you can't get enough of my babbling about how conflicted I am about my latest drawings, that's a pretty good place to get extra helpings of that bitter medicine! (I'm pretty good at talking this thing up, aren't I?)
- Speaking of non-drawing things, thanks to the relative mess that has been my working life this week, I made no further headway on the 165 thumbnails I'll need for this episode; I have ten that I managed to squeak out yesterday...and none of those are particularly presentable...eh, maybe one is. But I don't think it's "let's stay up at the top of the front page of the site in the top news article all weekend long"-presentable, sooo maybe I'll just put that off 'til Monday.
- See you then!
- Oh wait, also since this weekend I *have* a working tablet, I'll have a new page of my Sunday comic, The Princess and the Giant, done up for you on that day this weekend, unless some *other* technical issue comes along and-- Well, I'm not even going to think about it. Positive thinking! Comics! Yar!
- Geez, apparently I'm so ready for this week to be done that I optimistically converted this Thursday update into a Friday update in my head. Garrrrrr! So no I *will* have another A* update for Friday, and another A* page, and maybe I'll get some kind of leaked storyboard scribble to head up the news for the weekend after all. And I should probably go get some sleep now.
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| Technical issues are the best issues | Apr 06, 2011 6:54 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:That's the end of episode 12; 13 starts tomorrow, with me drawing 13's storyboards in the background.
One thing that kept me occupied in setting up this new Intuos4 drawing tablet yesterday was trying to get it working in Gimp, which I use to draw my other daily comic, Sketchy, and which I'll be using to draw the storyboards for episode 13. I found that the tablet moved the mouse pointer around just fine in Gimp, but it wasn't getting any pressure sensitivity. I'd had this problem when I first started using Gimp, under my previous tablet, an Intuos3, but I couldn't remember quite how I'd fixed it.
So, this time I'm writing it down. ;) Turns out that Gimp gets confused if there are multiple tablets registered with the system, and that will be the case if you switch from one tablet to another, even if the original one is no longer plugged in. So the solution was to remove all my Wacom tablet settings using the little "Wacom Tablet Preference File Utility" that is quietly installed along with their driver; I had to redo my configuration settings after that, but at least it got the pressure sensitivity working in Gimp.
I spent this morning and early afternoon battling another technical issue, which I mentioned briefly yesterday: a virus. Or specifically, a rootkit. I was getting a slow but steady series of advertising pop-up tabs in my browser, and when I tried poking around further, I found other troublesome problems, such as being unable to browse to the Windows Update website, and seeing a mystery svchost.exe process suddenly downloading a large amount of data in the background while the system was idle. My normal array of antivirus and antimalware utilities (Avira, CCleaner, Anti-Malware, and HijackThis) found nothing aside from a few suspicious scraps of minor things in a surprising variety of temporary internet file folders in Documents and Settings; I eliminated those, the scans were coming back clean, but the pop-up tabs continued, and sporadic system slowness--our downright unresponsiveness when trying to run certain programs--continued.
Looking up various suspicious traces on my system eventually took me by The MajorGeeks Malware Removal Guide, a frequently updated, extensive step-by-step process for removing most known malware from Windows systems using freely available utilities. I ran a couple more scans as it directed, overnight, with nothing coming up, but then this morning I noticed I'd skipped a Google Redirection/Hijacking subsection at the beginning, which sounded promising, since by then I'd realized some of the ad pop-up tabs had come from redirected Google search links. So I restarted the process and went through that checklist, and the last step, running a very quick and compact utility from Kaspersky called "TDSSKiller," found and eliminated a rootkit that had been hiding out in my system. Phew.
Haven't had any of the problems recur since then, but just to be on the safe side I'm going to finish running through the rest of the full checklist as soon as I get some free time to start running those long full file scans again--probably before bed tonight, I guess. Anyway, the people who keep that checklist up to date certainly seem to know what they're about, so thank you very much, MajorGeeks! Also, if you're in the hunt for Windows optimization or system cleanup utilities, check out that one they call on several times in the checklist, named "ATF Cleaner": a very simple, fast utility that cleared out over 2 gigabytes of junk files--stuff CCleaner for some reason wasn't catching: old temp files and the like, mostly from Documents and Settings, I think--the first time I ran it.
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And to cap it off (hopefully...), my internet has been running at a crawl for the past few hours now. Should be a good excuse to stop wasting time on the internet and finally get into the episode 13 storyboards, I suppose. What with all the technical issues I've been having since Friday, I guess I haven't really had a chance to do my usual "man this next episode is going to be awesome" pimping of it this time around, but really I do think it's going to be a lot of fun, and we'll be seeing some new sides of Selenis, and of this human society living at the galactic core. I should get a chance to talk it up a bit more tomorrow, and hopefully leak a few of the least spoilery, least scribbly storyboards to you, too.
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| Bluetooth gets Snaggletoothed | Apr 05, 2011 9:26 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:My new tablet came! Yay! So I can finish the last page of episode 12 for tomorrow (I started it last week but put it off because I wanted to start on the script for episode 13), and start on the 165 or so storyboards I'll need for the next episode. There's no way I'll get close to having them done by the time I have to start drawing episode 13 pages for you on Thursday, though, so for the next I don't know maybe four or so days there I'll have to be spending half the day drawing just one new episode 13 page to give you, then churning through as many storyboards as I can.
I should have started on them earlier today (the tablet arrived at about noon; I'd been up since 7:20 AM refreshing their tracking page, which had just shown "out for delivery" since 4:17 AM :P), but I got caught up in trying to configure the new tablet. It's an Intuos4 Wireless, which sounded neat since it was the dumb USB data/power cord that I'd busted on my Intuos3 last week, but it doesn't look like I'll be using the wireless mode for drawing. Here's why:
and by "best possible connection" I mean that when I drew them, I was sitting with the tablet just a few feet away from the IOGEAR GBU421 Bluetooth 2.1 USB Micro Adapter so that the connection strength looked like this in WinXP's readout:
and that didn't actually seem to matter a whole lot, anyway; you get pretty much the same results with everything below that until you're down to like just a few pixels of signal, at which point the lines get really polygonal and there's noticeable lag on the pointer--but it's kind of hard to get reception that bad without being twenty feet or more from the adapter.
Anyhoo, since I like my lasso'd drawings as smooth as possible, I'll have to stick to keeping the tablet plugged in while drawing comics. It's a little remarkable that I didn't see this loss of smoothness or update rate or whatever it is when going from USB to wireless reported by any of the user reviews I read on Amazon (I did see one or two complaining about laggy response, but that can only mean they either had really bad adapters or just weren't getting good reception on them), but I suppose if you're using a drawing tool that supports smoothing--which pretty much all of them do in modern drawing programs--and maybe not drawing very fast, you wouldn't notice the loss of input detail much, if at all. But my crotchety ol' unsmoothed Photoshop 4 lasso is sensitive enough to pick it up, consarn it! (I don't know what that means.)
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After drawing the circles above, I thought well maybe the regular Windows XP SP2 Bluetooth "stack" would be better with the jaggies than the one that comes with the driver from IOGEAR's site (this did of course sound unlikely, but IOGEAR's flimsy documentation even sort of confusedly directed XP SP2 users to stick with the ("much more limited" or something) Windows stack rather than bothering with the driver they provided on mini-CD in the adapter's packaging), so I tried switching back to the Windows Bluetooth driver. This turned out to be a huge mistake: two blue screens, innumerable Windows-didn't-manage-to-shut-down-or-boot-up-right fun times, fairly hopeless searches finding hopeless internet postings with vaguely similar problems (which didn't land me much aside from a fairly mild Firefox browser virus ;p), and the Windows driver not seeming to be capable of detecting the darn tablet at all, I finally got back to what seems to be the best I can manage reinstall of the IOGEAR driver, although there are still worrying traces of the Windows stuff lingering around somehow, and the tablet seems less inclined than it was before to complete a handshake via the IOGEAR driver's System Tray icon (but it'll do it just fine by way of the Mouse control panel--huhhhh)...but anyway it works again, and is back to drawing slightly flattish circles just like it did before, so I guess it's all right. (I should probably mention that IOGEAR doesn't actually make their own driver, they just give you the one from the manufacturer of the actual chip inside the adapter, which is Broadcom or something like that.)
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You know, Wacom didn't bother to mention that the fancy illuminated names of the customizable buttons on the Intuos4 Wireless don't illuminate if you have the tablet in wireless mode, which seems downright un-neighborly.
Anyway non-Wacom-specific Bluetooth headaches aside, it's a pretty nice tablet; it can't really be worth anywhere near what Wacom charges for it (I think it cost more than my friggin' computer; it certainly costs more than my previous tablets, whereas technology across the rest of the computer industry usually gets *less* expensive with time, rather than more), but that's what they get for having come out with a monopoly of the market, I suppose. Anyway, since the USB cable on this Wireless version is completely detachable, if I do manage to screw it up somehow like I did with the Intuos3, at least I'll be able to replace just the generic cable, rather than having to get a whole new tablet.
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So I don't like the loss of detail the wireless brings for drawing, but I have found one really handy use for the tablet in wireless mode: as an oversized remote control for Pandora; you can bind Pandora's keyboard shortcuts to the Intuos4's numerous customizable buttons, and then you no longer need endure the pain of Pandora deciding to experiment by feeding you a bunch of tracks totally unlike the ones you've told it you like, just as soon as you've settled yourself down at something in the next room. Hah! I have you now, Pandora. (Seriously though, being able to give a thumbs-down to crappy songs from the next room feels so, so good.)
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UPDATE: Ah, setting the Bluetooth adapter back to "discoverable" seems to let the tablet connect by itself so I don't have to do it manually, and also solved the "no fancy illuminated names in wireless mode" problem I'd given myself. This is good.
Despite full virus scans with multiple programs, cleaning out everything I could think of, uninstalling Java, etc, after hours of seemingly being "clean," I just got another seemingly randomly-timed pop-up tab in Firefox 4. This is bad. ;P
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| Star stuff in our neighborhood | Apr 04, 2011 9:47 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Looks like my new drawing tablet won't get here until tomorrow :|, so although I finished the script for episode 13, I can't start in on the storyboards yet. According to the script it's going to be a pretty long episode--165 pages or so--so I'd probably need at least three full days to draw that many storyboards, but since I'll now only have two at best before I run out of episode 12 pages (and I still need to finish up the last one, actually :P), this means that I'll probably still have to be drawing storyboards while also starting in on actual episode 13 pages on Thursday, which means (this is the only part that really matters for you the reader) that I probably won't get up to my usual two-pages-per-day speed until some time the following week. Botheration!
So not having a way to draw today, I'm just puttering around doing any non-drawing thing I can think of, like shipping off an art print, proof-reading the script like four more times, uh and I'll probably go dink around with my ads or something later. But I also came up with a pretty fat blog entry topic over the weekend, and so I might as well burn through that today while I can't draw. Here goes then!
Wikipedia's list of nearest stars is pretty neat, and reading through its entries really starts to give an idea of the immense variety of stuff there is out in space, even just around our own quiet little star system! For instance, you may have heard lots of times that the nearest star to us (at just over four light years--could have sworn the figure I was given as a kid was more like 3 ly, but eh I have a bad memory so who knows) is Alpha Centauri--except that Alpha Centauri isn't a star, it's two--and actually maybe even three, since it turns out there's a red dwarf star, Proxima Centauri, that may be gravitationally attached to the two other stars--which are much closer together--making it a triple star system, or "trinary." Just think, the closest star to us, actually a triple! Or at least a double. Makes our single star seem a bit boring by comparison, perhaps.
Of course, we have planets, and they...may not. There's been a lot of controversy of people claiming to have spotted evidence for planets in Alpha Centauri, but for the most part they seem to have been rebuffed for the time being.
But there's more stuff that makes Alpha Centauri pretty interesting. The small Proxima Centauri, just a bit over a tenth of the Sun's mass and diameter, and too faint to be seen with the naked eye, even as close as it is (it's about a tenth of a light year closer than its two larger siblings), sometimes increases in magnitude by up to 8%: it's a very active "flare star," and the flaring activity is thought to be the work of a powerful magnetic field.
Alpha Centauri is headed in our direction, too! Proxima, for instance, is moving toward us at about 21.7 km/s (compare with the Voyager spacecraft's 17 km/s); 26,700 years from now, it is expected to reach its nearest distance to us, 3.11 light years. Alpha Centauri as a whole is projected to vanish from naked-eye view about 100,000 years from now as it moves past us in its orbit around the galaxy.
Here it is--Alpha Centauri A and B, anyway--above the rim of Saturn, as seen by the Cassini spacecraft in 2008:
image by NASA (source)
The second closest star system to Earth, at just under six light years away, is Barnard's Star, another red dwarf, just slightly bigger than the teeny Proxima Centauri. Barnard's is the fastest star moving across our night sky
image by Steve Quirk (source)
and it is moving toward us at about 140 km/s--it will reach its closest point of 3.8 light years in the year 11700, but still won't be visible without a telescope. As with Alpha Centauri, lots of people claimed to have discovered evidence of planets around Barnard's Star, and there was even a starship project intended to go there--Project Daedalus in the '70's--with the hope of reaching it and its supposed planets within 50 years, if the ship could hit a theoretical speed of 12% the speed of light through fusion pulse propulsion utilizing intertial confinement fusion of 50,000 tons of deuterium/helium-3 pellets to propel the 4,000 ton craft on a one-way trip; it wouldn't be able to decelerate and stop at Barnard's Star (you'd need ten times the fuel for that, or something, I think... Well I can't remember, maybe I'm just making that up :P), so 18 sub-probes would have launched between 1.8 and 7.2 years before reaching the star, spreading out with nuclear ion drives to observe the star they'd be speeding by. Oh, and getting enough helium-3 to get there would require 20 years of mining the atmosphere of Jupiter via balloon-supported robotic factories, supposedly.
Fun! Not easy to catch a star, much less a fast one, I suppose. Fast as it is relative to us, Barnard's Star is an ancient one; the furthest estimates (the smallest being more like 7) of a 12 billion year age would make it one of the oldest stars in the galaxy! For a star, being old means, among other things, rotating slower: it takes Barnard's Star 130 days to rotate around its axis, vs just 25 for the young punk Sun. Being that old, it also isn't supposed to have much of a magnetic field anymore, but it threw scientists for a loop in 1998, when it suddenly flared to twice its normal temperature. So finding out how that happened would be one big aim of any exploration of it.
Skipping down the list past a couple more red dwarfs, Wolf 359 and Lalande 21185 (although this nice photo of Wolf 359 gives an idea of what a nearby red dwarf might look like through a telescope)
image by Klaus Hohmann (source)
(Wolf 359 is the red dot in the upper middle of the picture) brings us to another binary: Sirius. I've written about it before on the A* forum, so I'll just quote myself here:
There's a white dwarf pretty much right next to us, just 8.6 light years away: Sirius B, and it in fact is one of those dwarfs that's about the mass of the Sun (0.98 solar masses is close!) and the size of the Earth. It's in a binary with Sirius A, which is about two solar masses, and the brightest star in our sky--after the Sun. Here you can see little B and big A; the B dwarf is the little white dot to the lower left of the big A glare:
image from NASA (source)
White dwarfs and their "degenerate matter" are pretty awesome, but I'll limit myself to just dropping those links on you for now. :)
Skipping down the list again past four more red dwarf flare stars (the binary Luyten 726-8, then Ross 154 and Ross 248 (Voyager 2 will come within 1.76 light years of Ross 248 in 40,176 years!)), I'll just dwell last on Epsilon Eridani (which will come within a light year of Luyten 726-8 around AD 33500, possibly knocking some comets off or something!), ninth in the distance list at ten and a half light years from Earth.
Epsilon Eridani has extensive disks of debris around it, and has the firmest candidates for an extrasolar planet or two close to Earth, although they're still debated and theoretical, respectively. Epsilon Eridani is all the more exciting to those who like to try to discover planets because it's a "sunlike" star, which is to say that it's not radically different than the Sun in terms of mass, size, and brightness: 82%, 74%, and 34%, respectively. But its magnetic field is stronger than the Sun's, and that's one indicator that has scientists thinking its a relatively young star: maybe between 0.5 and 1 billion years old, for instance (the Sun is about 4.5 billion years old).
While the presence of planets around Epsilon Eridani is hotly debated, the presence of an outer dust disk around it can be pretty firmly proven based on strong infrared readings from the system, and what we can project from that is pretty interesting in its own right. The dust disk seems to have about one-sixth of the mass of the Moon in it, and maybe 5 to 9 Earth masses worth of comets; it is also thought that it would have taken collisions between about eleven Earth masses-worth of "parent bodies" to generate all that stuff. Furthermore, a 2008 study of data from the Spitzer Space Telescope (which sees in the infrared) determined that there are two asteroid belts inside the cometary disk, and that two-belts-plus-disk structure suggests the presence of "more than two planets" to be herding that material into its current configuration.
All that within just ten and a half light years from Earth! (And this isn't counting any Earth or smaller planets that might be there since we can't really spot those with current technology.) And the galaxy is 10,000 times wider than that! And there are maybe more than 170 billion galaxies within just the part of the universe we can see!
... That's gonna be a lot of blog entries. :o
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| Art, Tears, and Blood (do not try at home) | Apr 02, 2011 2:05 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Okay I have firmer details about where and when some of my framed and signed art prints--works from A*, and my other comics--are on display here in Seattle, since we hauled them over there today and talked to the owner: they will be up at the Rosebud Restaurant & Bar on Seattle's Capitol Hill from tomorrow (that is, Saturday) through the end of June (three months!). They have nineteen framed pieces from me, including a few that we couldn't fit in the show I had in Ballard in November/December (the wall there wasn't nearly as big as the one they have in Rosebud :o). They were playing background music of which I approve at the Rosebud when I was there today--youngish Sinatra and the like--and they have a bit of class with old movie star posters in their main dining room; also, numerous sleds.
There was some suggestion of some possible sort of function there on the neighborhood's Art Walk day, which is the second Thursday of the month--that would be the 14th of April--but it was a little vague so I will have to get back to you on that. But my stuff should be there starting tomorrow, so if for some reason you want to go hang out with your friends and enjoy some nice food, drinks, pleasant early vocal jazz, and my art, all in one place, you can now do that. Crazy!
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Disaster! Well not really. But I managed to break my beloved Wacom Intuos3 drawing tablet this afternoon by...setting it on the floor; next I tried using it, it kept deactivating and reactivating depending on how I wiggled the USB/power cord where it goes into the tablet, so the wires must've pulled loose or got pinched there or something. Which is a shame because the rest of the tablet is built like a tank. A heavy plastic tank, anyway. Dang.
Exciting! I am getting a fancy new wireless tablet! So I had to go look for a replacement tablet and found that Wacom is now making their fancy-schmancy Intuos4 (that's one whole Intuos more than mine had!) in a wireless version. They are kind of stupid expensive, but it could mean I would never have this cord problem again, so that would make it a little more worth it! And it would be a lot handier to use on my lap, which is what I do with it. Anyway I need something with which to draw comics so I ordered one, and this cute little USB "micro" adapter to go with it.
The soonest Amazon could get them to me is Monday, though, so whereas usually in this end of the week A* news update I would be reminding you that you'll be able to check out a new page of my weekly fairy tale comic, The Princess and the Giant, on Sunday, this time I...won't have one, 'cause I won't have anything to draw with until Monday. Dang.
On the other hand that leaves me more time to finish up the A* episode 13 script for this weekend, since with all this art and breaking stuff, I haven't got it finished yet. The part I've got has been pretty fun, though; Selenis will be in an entirely new environment--socially, anyway--than we've seen her in before, and she'll need to call on different sets of skills to navigate its DEADLY HAZARDS. Okay well actually she's the deadliest part of it, so...it may not end well. For someone. But maybe it will! I haven't written that part just yet. =P
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Ooh, almost forgot that I dissected my dead old Intuos3 tablet and took gory pictures of its remains. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME! Not only did I sort of accidentally rip the foil circuit connecting the circuit board to some kind of vital conducting plate the second time I pried it open, thus definitely killing it off, whereas prior to that it still sort of worked if I held the cord *just so* and didn't breathe, but the third and final time I pried it open, I cut my finger a little on one of the sharp interior edges. ;_;
I bleed for you, Internet! But I got some crummy cell phone photos of the tablet's insides.
Here it is in layers (from right to left): the outer top part you draw on, the main circuit board just below that that does magic stuff, a lovely foam pad, some kind of brushed metal plate, and the plastic bottom
But where do the elves live?
Here is me failing to get a close-up of the back side of the front panel's buttons
There don't seem to be any circuits at all going into the drawing surface itself, so I guess it's really just there to support the weight of the stylus, and to feel good in contact with the stylus. The magic must happen below, maybe in this not-very-good photo of the main circuit board
(but a lovely one of my ancient and irreplaceable brown shag carpet!) You can't really tell from that photo, but those horizontal lines across the middle are all little circuits, just running back and forth behind the part on which you wave the stylus around. And here's a horrible close-up of the rear metal plate; that bronzy foil on the left is the torn ribbon circuit that had connected the metal plate to the circuit board
I guess it must create some kind of electrical field that the stylus can perturb, and those perturbations are read by the rows of circuits. Or something completely different. Yes I know nothing whatsoever about electronics! Just hope my new one that I will never ever break shows up just when I'm bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to greet the delivery person on Monday so I can start cranking out episode 13 storyboards. =o
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