Now With Better Baseball
Rather than talk about the concept of the world and all that blah blah blah… I thought I’d update with some site news! No big concepts today. Some may have noticed that some pages look like exports of...
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Mars Rover Curiosity Launches!
If you've ever seen a launch in Florida, you know how cool this is. The Mars Science Laboratory launched on Friday, and if your weren’t paying attention, you should’ve been. Nicknamed “Curiosity”, the...
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Why Open Source Is Amazing
I don’t talk about the code behind this site very often because, to me, it’s generally less interesting than what it’s used for, namely holding the data for this massive story world. Still, in setting...
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Shuttle Engines, An Entire Field of Science
I was clicking around the NASA website and went into the Space Shuttle section because, honestly, I miss the fucking thing. I mean, we had four, four spaceships capable of going into space and...
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Russia Had A Space Shuttle, Too
Yep. Russia, or I should say the Soviet Union, had a space shuttle program too. Did anyone else know about this? I was reading an article about the secret Air Force space shuttle and it had a paragraph...
View ArticleWhy A Wiki?
Going to do a couple of articles around the technology of this site because, well, I can. And because it might be useful for people looking to set up their own projects. This one is called, “Why a...
View ArticleWhy A WordPress?
In a previous post I discussed why someone might want to use a wiki as a content management tool. In this post, we take a look at a post-based content management system and discuss its positives and...
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How Soon Private Spaceflight?
I was reading Reason today and they posted an article from their print issue about the first private spaceport in America. It was kind of exciting to read about and I feel stupid I hadn’t known...
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Phobos-Grunt Burnt Up, Russia Must Hate Mars
The image posted to the right is an infographic I found a while back detailing all the missions to Mars and their varying degrees of success. I feel like it’s appropriate to post it again given how...
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Building A Mars Outpost
One day, hopefully sooner than later, humans are going to try to put someone on Mars. We have the technology to put stuff there, (see Rovers, Mars), and we’re practically pros at orbiting shit around...
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The Future of the Spacesuit
Here’s something that doesn’t get as much discussion as it probably should. With almost everyone agreed that Mars is the next stop for human exploration, what will the space suit of the future look...
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Now With Facebook Comments
In an effort to reduce the difficulty of interacting with the Unified Republic of Stars, Facebook comments have replaced the standard blog commenting system. Now, with the login almost everyone has,...
View ArticleWarp Drives Apparently Have Downsides
File this one under “bummer” and “well, it sounded like a nice idea.” (Don’t think about this while watching Star Trek. Don’t think about this while watching Star Trek…) According to Universe Today, it...
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Cutting Edge Space Propulsion
My buddy Mark, he who wrote the insightful article on Tardigrades, forwarded me this article about VASMIR propulsion and I thought it was worth taking a look at here despite being published almost...
View ArticleQuantum Communications Inch Closer
A few years back, I went to one of the New York Science Fair talks where a physicist described quantum entanglement and how changes to one particle appeared to be reflected by the other,...
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Lunar Satellite Pinpoints Apollo 17 Photo Sites
File this one under, “neat.” The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been used to help pinpoint the exact sites visited by the Apollo 17 mission team in 1972. Why is this important? Glad you asked....
View ArticleTotally Predictable
In a move that was one hundred percent predictable since the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or “drones” became available to domestic police forces what was once only available to the military or...
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A Lunar Supercomputer?
Sorry for not blogging. Again. Projects and clients for my software consultancy have been crazy. But, I am pleased to announce the release of my first iOS app, Punk or Metal?!. Please be sure to check...
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New Dynamic Timeline
The new Unified Republic of Stars timeline. Today, I’m pleased to announce that we have a new timeline available on the Unified Republic of Stars. For those of you who remember, the old list-based...
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How The Timeline Was Integrated
So… yesterday, I posted the news item about launching the new timeline feature on the Unified Republic of Stars. Today, I wanted to discuss a little bit about how I did it, since extending MediaWiki in...
View ArticleCuriosity Memory Issue, Possibly Caused By Cosmic Rays
I saw this over the weekend on Space.com: The computer problem is related to a glitch in flash memory on the A-side computer caused by corrupted memory files, Cook said. Scientists are still looking...
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NASA’s Proposed Z-2 Spacesuit
Tragically, I only just found out about this through Wired today but it’s still pretty interesting. Apparently, NASA has been redesigning the spacesuit, looking at making one that will function on...
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Alien Communication & More On The Fermi Paradox
I don’t know… maybe it’s because I’m a sci-fi nerd but the more I read about Enrico Fermi’s supposed “paradox” the more I want to call bullshit on it. When discussing the possibility of advanced...
View ArticleSome Rare Good News From the Supreme Court
We finally got some good news from the US Supreme Court today. Considering that the Court has more or less routinely punched enough exceptions into the 4th Amendment to almost make it feel like a...
View ArticleWelcome to the New Site Design
In case you haven’t noticed, we have a new site design to go along with our new podcast. It’s not a radical departure from what there was before, in fact, if you’re looking at it on a desktop browser,...
View ArticleSupplemental – Cheap Energy
Our first supplemental episode. Energy! Taking a break from the reading of A Short History of the Unified Republic of Stars to discuss something that hasn’t been covered much but is key to...
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Behind the Podcast Scenes
So… as I’m sure anyone reading this now knows, I’ve started the Unified Republic of Stars Podcast. Yeah, with a capital “P” because it’s that formal. And, you know what? It’s more awesome than even I...
View ArticleLaw Enforcement Decry Mobile Encryption, Imply Only Perverts Would Want It
In case you missed it, the government is pissing itself over Apple and Google’s announcement that they’re enabling encryption on their devices by default. I’m not going to go into the ins-and-outs of...
View ArticleSupplemental – Communications
The first of two asides to supplement this week’s material. With this supplemental, we discuss how you might go about communicating not just next door but to the next town over and, even, to different...
View ArticleSupplemental – Ship Terms & Navigation In Space
Welcome to part two of this week’s two asides. Unlike the last one that dealt with a topic that was directly related to the last episode, talking about how the former colonies would have communicated...
View ArticleAdding New Story Ideas To the Generator
In this week’s podcast, I mentioned ways in which people could submit new ideas to the Story Generator. Actually setting it up is a bit technical and complex but I’d love to add listener ideas to the...
View ArticlePeople Will Die For Space Tourism… And That’s Okay
I wanted to write about this last week (the week before?) when it originally happened because, between the Antares rocked explosion and the Virgin Galactic debacle, it was a rough week for private...
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My New Obsession: Kerbal Space Program
So here’s how obsessed I am about the game. The gallery below? I just spent thirty minutes selecting the right images, uploading them, adding descriptions, thinking of titles, and then altering the way...
View Article2.7 – Economics & Transportation
This week, we discuss the various methods of transportation around the Colonial Star Cluster. How would you get around? Well… this is a sci-fi world so you’d probably take an interstellar vessel...
View Article2.9 – Computing & Media
Welcome back to the Unified Republic of Stars! This week, we discuss computing and media in the Colonial Star Cluster, what it is how it got there, and what the intersection between the two were....
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Review: Hands On With the 9.7″ iPad Pro
This turned out to be the first of at least a three part series, the second of which you can see here and the third of which you can see here. Because I’m significantly more mobile than I used to be...
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A Follow Up To My iPad Review
This turned out to be the second of at least a three part series, the first of which you can see here and the third of which you can see here. Now that I’ve had things installed for a little longer and...
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iPad Pro: Almost Two Years Later
This is the third in a series on the experience of owning an iPad (Baby) Pro as someone who never even had a tablet before. You can see my initial thoughts and my one month followup thoughts by...
View ArticleWiki Back Up & Running
The Unified Republic of Stars website has been, unfortunately, kind of abandoned for a little while. Part of it is time, part of it stems from life issues, and part of it comes from, honestly, a lack...
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