Week #179 shares its name with a large main belt asteroid called 179 Klytaemnestra. At 75km in size, it isn’t a small asteroid. It is an S-class asteroid, which means it is made mostly of stone and is the second most common type of asteroid. 179 is also a prime number. Week #180 shares its name with an extreme sports move where the athlete spins 180 degrees while in the air and lands. It is also the maximum score achievable in a game of darts on a single turn. Within our solar system, 180 Garumna is another large main belt asteroid of the S-class.
These last two weeks have been very busy. We are getting back into our Analog.is project to finalize all our kickstarter promises and a bit more! The envelops are all setup, labelled and ready to go. All that is left if that printing and stuffing. 5 of the 7 designs have been sent off to the printers with two remaining. St. Helena Island is proving tricker than we expected and then the final Mars notebook. Mars is a different color and a very different file format than we’re used too. Normally, we use the Geo TIFF and extract topographic lines from a 2D black and white image. NASA, on the other hand, has provided some 3D format for Martian data. So we are using that in hopes of making the best possible notebook covers.
The dashboard recommendation project is also due next week, so we’ve wrapped-up our first draft of that document and will send it off early week #181 for review. Even after you’ve done this several times, you never know what the customer’s first reaction will be, so we do our best to always leave some time budgeted for additional work and changes.
In week #179 we were interviews by the BBC for a piece about Ethics and the Internet of Things. They are putting together a collection of smart folks all discussing issues of privacy, personal information and how that affects our lives in a fully connected world. It will be shown at the V&A in London and then in parts for MozFest. When we know more about the dates, we’ll post that along with the video when it is available online.
We have also has some visitors from out of town, all the way from Australia. We’ve work with them on several other projects and while they were nearby, they decided to stop by and visit. We’ve been brainstorming some new ideas and will be working on a few prototypes in week #181.
We also got a quote and gave the go for some of our laser-cut prototypes for our new project. Hopefully next week we’ll have a bit more to show for the effort in terms of pieces of plastic, wood and metal.
Bric-à-brac
Since it is the 45h anniversary of the moon launch and landing there have been plenty of moon related stories these last two weeks. Here are a few of the more interesting things we’ve found.
Commentary about the launch of the Apollo 11 rocket. It is 8 minutes long, shot with a high speed camera. In real-time it is only a few seconds.
This is a beautiful map of all the lunar landing sites. It really shows you both how many more times we’ve been there than you think, but at the same time how few times we’ve been there at all.
Second Moon app
The artist Katie Paterson created the second moon project for the British Science Festival. It is a small box containing moon fragments traveling anti-clockwise around Earth twice as fast as our current moon. It is a second moon orbiting us via airfreight courier. There is an app to locate yourself, the 1st moon and the new 2nd moon as it makes its journey 26 times around the Earth this year.