Archive for August, 2009

Who needs Google Earth if you have THIS!?

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

After browsing a website on the supposed early maps of Antartica, I thought the idea of mapping out the world without any of the high-tech equipment we have today to be pretty fascinating. Most of the maps look ridiculous from our point of view now, but I remembered an article in Zeit Magazin from a long time ago which had German politicians draw up maps of their country. The results were pretty funny. Now I tried to do the same, but up the ante a little bit - draw a world map from memory. I have to say, I used to be good in geography in school, but my memory for where countries are located is pretty spotty at best. There are a lot of embarassing blank spots in Africa, South America, Asia but also Eastern Europe. I don’t even know all the countries there. The result is a pretty Euro-centric map, as was to be expected … By the way, why not create a map yourself and post it in the comments section? You can add an extra challenge if you like and try to locate all the capitals. I decided not to do that because I couldn’t remember how to spell Reijkjavic Reykjavík. Now without further ado, behold! I give you the world according to me:

Who needs Google Earth if you have THIS!?

Funding Science

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

Money is always short when it comes to spaceflight. While NASA does have a rather large budget in comparison to ESA for example, very little seems to come out of it if you look at the development time of the new Ares rockets which are supposed to take human beings to the moon again. If you consider that it’s already been done before a couple of decades ago, you’d think it could be repeated in a shorter time frame and with less money now since a lot of the basic research has already been done (of course, a lot of know-how has been lost as well.)

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Face it

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

This is a short film we created last year for our animation class. Enjoy!