Linked List: January 2020

The Final Frontier

Michael Chabon, Picard Star Trek series writer, in a New Yorker personal history piece about his father:

The episode rises above the banality of a premise as old as Grendel, and some creature effects that are truly risible—even to a ten-year-old in 1973, the homicidal Horta looked like an ambulatory slice of Stouffer’s French-bread pizza—by making an honest effort to imagine nonorganic life and then, in the characteristic turn that gives the “Star Trek” franchise its enduring beauty and power, by insisting that fear and prejudice were no match for curiosity and an open mind, that where there was consciousness there could be communication, and that even a rock, if sentient, had the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Lego International Space Station

The orbiting laboratory, which for almost 20 years has hosted a continuous human presence in Earth orbit, is being released by LEGO as a toy model. The 864-piece set shrinks the football-field-long space station to the size of desktop display, while still preserving details such as its rotating solar arrays and robotic arm.

Manually Cleaning Boeing 737 Windshield in Flight

The crew went around, climbed to 8500 feet, depressurized the aircraft, opened the cockpit side window and cleaned the windscreen by hand. The same happened on second approach to Dire Dawa. The crew again climbed to 8500 feet, cleaned the windscreen by hand again and diverted to Addis Ababa.

Quindar Tones

The beeps you hear in NASA communications such as Apollo 11.