Model Airplanes

The latest addition to the Museum of Flight’s airplane collection, a Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornet jet, landed in Seattle today with the aid of a three-story-high crane.

The No. 2 jet, which is on permanent loan from the National Naval Air Museum in Pensacola, Fla., didn’t make the trip the way it did last year, by air. Instead, it was driven to Jet City on the back of a flatbed truck, over the course of six days.

The truck driver, Buddy Chapman of Blossom, Texas, said the sight caused a traffic jam wherever he stopped.

“You’d stop in the littlest town in Wyoming, and you wouldn’t be there but five minutes and you’d have 30 people around it,” he told GeekWire.

While aviation buffs and their kids watched, the truck pulled into a museum parking lot behind the Charles Simonyi Space Gallery, accompanied by a police escort. Sections of the detached wings were offloaded using a forklift, and then the giant crane pulled in to lift the jet off the back of a truck and set it back down.

Doug King, the museum’s president and CEO, noted that the newly acquired Hornet has been flying for 30 years, including patrols over Iraq for Operation Desert Storm in 1990 and over Somalia for Operation Restore

Article source: http://www.geekwire.com/2016/photos-blue-angels-jet-seattle-museum-flight/

Look, the internet is so many things, everywhere and nowhere, necessary but often completely obscure to us. Talking or thinking about it is, like a sign-on screen, practically an invitation to get lost. The so-called “network of networks” now represents digital culture, new media, new war, the global commons, a digital Times Square, the world’s economic engine, increasingly, everything. It is also arguably a kind of work of art—is it the greatest masterpiece of human civilization? It’s what William Gibson imagined it would be, after wandering around Vancouver, listening to his new Walkman for the first time: “A consensual hallucination,” he wrote in Neuromancer about cyberspace,

experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation…A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…

The metaphors for the internet that I think of first—a series of tubes, a cloud—aren’t even mentioned in Lo and Behold, Reveries Of A Connected World, Werner Herzog’s new ten-part, two hour documentary about cyberspace. That word isn’t mentioned in the movie either—in a way it sounds as ridiculous as tubes or clouds or superhighways, and doesn’t get us closer to really confronting what it is—but the tension these words suggest, between the gutter and the stars, the profane and the sacred, the sublime and the absurd, the virtual and the real, has long been a part

Article source: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/herzog-lo-and-behold-internet-dreams

MARION — Seeing an airplane crash as a 3-year-old was the catalyst that set Marion’s David Wendell on a lifelong course of documenting aviation and aerospace history. Now, Wendell shares his hobby with the world through an online aerospace and aviation museum.

Wendell, 48, has spent the last 25 years and thousands of dollars securing model airplanes and space shuttles, traveling across the country to get the models autographed by the pilots who flew them.

Wendell’s online museum, which went live in July, can be found at wendellairandspacemuseum.org. It features 365 autographed model airplanes and space shuttles, signed aviation and aerospace posters, paintings and various aviation and aerospace facts.

As a child, Wendell said he would ask his parents to take him to The Eastern Iowa Airport in Cedar Rapids. And that airport is where Wendell said he saw the crash of one of the Blue Angel planes, part of the Navy’s aerobatics demonstration team that travels around the U.S.

It remains one of his first memories.

“The No. 4 Blue Angel came in for a landing, never put down its landing gear and sent up a huge plume of fire behind him,” Wendell said. “Finally the pilot ejected and landed safely under his parachute. We always wondered what it was that caused that incident.”

After the crash, Wendell became fascinated with aviation.

He and

Article source: http://www.thegazette.com/subject/life/people-places/marion-historian-takes-aviation-history-online-20160822

The final design of the Tesla Model 3 is “pencil down” for over a month now and we all want to know what is different from the prototypes unveiled earlier this year. CEO Elon Musk mentioned some refining of the exterior design and a lot of reservation holders are anxious to know what is the “fix” for the trunk opening.

But what I’m personally most excited about is the interior. Tesla carefully made sure that any promotional picture or third-party photoshoot would not feature the interior of the prototypes, presumably because it will be nothing like the production version.

While everyone is focused on the horizontal center touchscreen and speculating about a potential heads-up display, which I admit is likely, I am most interested in the steering wheel.

The one on the prototype was unfinished-looking and Musk confirmed that it’s not “the real steering system“. He referred to it as a “system” and not a “wheel” on a few occasions, which is very interesting.

First off, there will be manual controls in the Model 3 even if it features an advanced or fully autonomous driving system. The “steering system” might not be a traditional “steering wheel”, but there’s just no way Tesla believes it can legally ship a product next year without it featuring actual manual controls.

Now what will this non-traditional steering wheel of the Model 3 look like?

Musk didn’t say what it will look like, but he did say what it will feel like:

Article source: https://electrek.co/2016/08/22/tesla-model-3-spaceship-like-steering-wheel/

Article source: http://links.org.au/degrowth-green-capitalism-ecosocialism-richard-smith

Amazon’s iron grip on the ebook reader market is not going to loosen anytime soon. Products such as the Kindle Oasis ensure that the company caters to the premium niche, while the Kindle Paperwhite serves most other customers just fine. Even then, few people can justify spending above Rs. 10,000 on an ebook reader. If you are one of them, you’re probably looking at the Amazon Kindle.

The base model in Amazon’s ebook reader lineup is priced at Rs. 5,999, which is bound to appeal to many more people. To lower the price, there have to be some compromises. Has Amazon cut one corner too many or has it managed to strike a perfect balance between price and quality? We used the Amazon Kindle for a couple of weeks to find out.

The Amazon Kindle is about the same size as the Paperwhite. It’s no match for the light and small Oasis, but it doesn’t cost Rs. 24,000 either so we will happily live with its size and weight. The new Amazon Kindle is thinner and lighter than its predecessor, so that is a big plus.

The moment you hold it, you will notice one of the compromises. The body is plasticky and lacks a premium feel. The bigger problem is that the Kindle’s back is

Article source: http://gadgets.ndtv.com/tablets/reviews/amazon-kindle-8th-generation-review-874333