Recent content by TheMinister

I really never got to grips with that game, or X2. I just found the tutorials completely unitelligable- it was sort of like... "here's how you fly your ship, now make some burgers" Just plain WTF there. I kinda prefer complex games with simple control systems, like EVE online, or maybe the...

Maths here is somewhat boring- it's just not useful, at the levels this report is talking about. The curriculum spends a long time building core skills, before getting onto applied stuff. I think the maths A level in england is a lot better- it's split into modules, each with a very tight...

As me old dad used to say, you clean up these stains and I'll pay the nuns.... I wonder if we could have it, if we offered to take it off their hands for free.....

The plan to save payload weight with midget astronauts was far from a success....

I'm gonna take a punt on that ship being from star trek voyager (with no research at all). The text in the bottom left is the right sort of font. Any others?

Women seem to have this amazing ability to save themselves from being in the sad club, which let's face it, is what we are.... It is interesting though- does anybody know why there seem to be far fewer women than men in physicsy subjects? It's not just in orbiter- in my year at school, there...

Hehe, makes you wonder whether model rockets could be used as cheap ammo for terrorists etc. I suppose if you put a large amount of black powder in the body, ontop of a basic motor, with the right sequence of fusing you could get one hell of a bang at the end of the flight. Although something...

Am I the only one who has lost all confidence in NASA to do anything helpful? Ever? I'd like to work in the space industry, in fact right now I'm applying to study aerospace engineering at universities here in the UK. But as far as NASA goes, it's a complete non starter for me. I think the...

I think this would be more feasable in terms of funding, PR etc if you could make it an indefinite stay. So with a self-supporting lander on mars, the astronauts could stay for months, years or whatever until someone sent another vehicle for retrieval. Easy. In fact, that was an option for the...

Nice, those tutorials make it look so easy. Do you have to melt the sugar/oxidiser together, or is it ok just to pack it in as mixed fine powder? Also, for any UK based people, where is a good place to get potassium nitrate? No garden centers or chemists in my local area seem to have any...

Anybody have any simple guides etc for how to get building these things? I don't really want to be buying anything other than raw materials, so each bit of the design is my own (so no recommended 'buy this $300 motor'). I was really interested in the sugar motor tutorials that were posted on...

Ooh thats nice. Although doesn't light have problems interacting with things getting towards 10 nanometers?

Aha, we have our first problem. We've got a good method of producing the nanometre tips needed for this microscope, http://sxm4.uni-muenster.de/stm-en/ (click the sidebar link) but one problem- how do we measure how big our tips our once produced? The obvious way would be to use some highly...

So some sort of mass dampening system then? Sounds like a sensible idea, I'll look into it. And its not an electron microscope in the usual sense of the word. Those are generally where a beam of electrons passes through or bounces off a sample, and are ridiculously complex. Here, electrons...

Hi All, Long time no see, but a talk at school today has forced me out of hiding. Nanotech people from Cambridge talking about err nanotech. Fascinating stuff. Then this guy mentions we can build one of these microscopes ourselves. With atomic resolution. Oh yeaaah...