Sunday Things - continuing edition
posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday January 20 2013
More things. On Sunday. You get the idea.
Lana Sator, post-Soviet urban explorer - she of rocket factory infiltration fame, somehow her rust-laden blog wasn't in my RSS reader. A situation now rectified! via rjp
Tracking a radiosonde (weather balloon) - listening in on various telemetry systems using hacked USB digital television adapters is definitely a thing. I need to investigate. via
Siding Spring Observatory fires - Australian bushfires come close to burning down a major observatory. (Spoiler: the expensive bits mostly survived. Luckily!) via proogs
Parting Moon Shots from NASA's GRAIL mission - dual-spacecraft gravitometric lunar mission with tiny educational outreach cameras attached, shooting gloriously atmospheric timelapses from orbit, shortly before colliding with the moon itself.
Bonus Calamitous Chemistry corner:
- Things I Won't Work With - you don't need to know anything about chemistry to enjoy the wonderful descriptions... 'In every case, the solution detonated spontaneously on standing. And by "spontaneously”, they mean "while standing undisturbed in the dark", so there’s really just no way to deal with this stuff. It’s probably a good thing they didn’t get crystals, because someone would have tried to isolate the hideous things. The cesium salt actually did give a few crystals, which they managed to pluck from the top of the solution and get X-ray data on. A few hours later the remaining batch suddenly exploded, though, which certainly must have been food for thought.'
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