Engineer2Entrepreneur

BREITBART.COM - Virgin Spaceport to Be Built in N.M.

Link: BREITBART.COM - Virgin Spaceport to Be Built in N.M..

Virgin Galactic, the British company created by entrepreneur Richard Branson to send tourists into space, and New Mexico announced an agreement Tuesday for the state to build a $225 million spaceport.

The first steps to the stars are fraught with peril and uncertainty but take them we must to stride into the future.

Air Force testing new transparent armor

Link: Air Force testing new transparent armor .

"The substance itself is light years ahead of glass," he said, adding that it�offers "higher performance and lighter weight." Traditional transparent armor is thick layers of bonded glass. The new armor combines the transparent ALONtm piece as a strike plate, a middle section of glass and a polymer backing. Each layer is visibly thinner than the traditional layers. ALONtm is virtually scratch resistant, offers substantial impact resistance, and provides better durability and protection against armor piercing threats, at roughly half the weight and half the thickness of traditional glass transparent armor, said the lieutenant.

Now if Apple would make their iPods out of this stuff no one
would complain about scratches.

The Carnival of Compassion 1:1

Link: MedSim: The Blog.

There is a new Carnival in town.

Play Journal: A network is a network is a...

Link: Play Journal: A network is a network is a....

And here's some fascinating news from the labs, about how networks from four wildly different areas - "the World Wide Web; a network of actors who have been in films together; networks of proteins with links between those that can bind to each other; and networks of other cellular molecules with links between molecules involved in the same biochemical reactions" - exhibit 'self-similarity', meaning that they look roughly the same at any scale (see graphic above). This wasn't expected, precisely because each network comes from such a different locus.

This just doesn't seem all that surprising to me. It is a lot like phi. It's found everywhere, the layout of seed in a sunflower to architecture.

Find the similarities not the differences and great wonders abound all around you.