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| Lance Murdoch, Unqualified Psychoanalyst | Sep 16, 2011 2:24 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:As I lay in bed this morning trying to get back to sleep, a new vein of humor comics popped into my head. And I want to get them out, but I don't seem to manage to have time to do a Sketchy comic, A* comic, A* sciencey blog thing, AND one of these other comics every day. So the blog, being the weak link there, will be switching gears for a bit as I get these gag comics done. They'll be compiled in my One Off humor comic site, but I'm also going to put them in the A* blog because eh otherwise I won't have much put here! Also, their pseudoscience may provide a nice contrast to A*'s attempts at hard science. AND they'll be giving me additional drawing practice with the Lasso Tool technique I use on A*, which can only be a good thing for this comic.
So anyway, I give you the first in a little series I'm calling The Irresponsible Diagnoses of Lance Murdoch, Unqualified Psychoanalyst:
Yay! Okay but I am going to sneak in some quick science bits today:
- Generally I try to avoid posting about extrasolar planets people are discovering these days, because there are so many of them, and because the conclusions reached about their size and surface conditions and so forth are generally based on very, very scanty data. But anyway, I thought it was interesting that NASA's Kepler mission has just announced the discovery of the first known planet to orbit two stars; apparently a planet orbiting a binary star like this is called a "circumbinary planet"; and this one, although its current official designation is Kepler-16b, appears to have been nicknamed "Tatooine" already, after the planet in the Star Wars movies that had two suns in its sky.
- NASA has just come out with the plans and proposed budget for their new rocket, the one that would be used to go to Mars and so forth. The really boringly named "Space Launch System" (although I guess "SLS" sounds okay) will/would be somewhat larger even than the huge Saturn V rockets used in the Apollo program (the one that sent people to the Moon), and the program to develop and launch this massive liquid hydrogen & liquid oxygen-powered astronaut-launcher would cost about $35 billion. If, that is, Congress approves it, which... Well, I guess we'll see how that goes.
- And that reminded me of this article I noticed back in May (and which has been wasting away at the bottom of my large blog topic backlog all this time :p) about the crew vehicle that would be launched on the SLS, namely the "Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV)" (ew, now that name is just dull no matter how you slice it--unless I suppose you stick "Orion" on the front of it, which people seem to have started doing--it was originally going to be part of the proposed "Orion" spacecraft "in the now-cancelled Constellation program"); it's supposed to be about twice as roomy as the capsules used back in the Apollo program, so it could carry six astronauts, rather than just three. (Although I'd think it might be nice to carry just three astronauts, but give them more breathing space for these much longer proposed space flights.)
- And here's a video showing what might be a "fireball"--that's the official name for a basketball-sized asteroid that smacks into Earth's atmosphere and leaves a blazing trail across the sky as it disintegrates. This one was widely seen in the sky in the American Southwest in the past day or so.
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