notes.husk.org

"Director Stanley Kubrick, however, deliberately had all of his spacesuits destroyed, since he was..."

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 19:56:44 +0100

“Director Stanley Kubrick, however, deliberately had all of his spacesuits destroyed, since he was aware of the fate of the spacesuits from Destination Moon and did not want his own creations to resurface in any lesser films.”

- Gary Westfahl as interviewed by Diane Tedeschi in Hollywood’s Spacesuits, in the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Magazine, talking about the iconic suits from 2001. Destination Moon’s suits were reused by several later films. (Thanks to Dan W and Fred Scharmen for the nudges.)

How to build a Lego Monolith

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 03:28:00 +0100

howblank:

The dimensions of every Tycho Magnetic Anomaly discovered are in the precise ratio of 1:4:9, the squares of the first three integers. Lego bricks are not cubes. The standard unit has a ratio of 5:5:6. A scaled down Lego Magnetic Anomaly (LMA) would be 7 1/2 units high but there are no 1/2 height pieces. Flat Lego pieces are 1/3 height. I find coupling 7 standard 1×4 bricks with 2 flat 1×4 pieces to be the most geometrically sound.

This results in an LMA with a ratio of 1:4:9.2, or 5:20:46 in simplest form, which is dimensionally perfect in the Lego realm.

Why not scale it up by a factor of 2, making it 2x8 at the base and 15 bricks high? That’s exactly the 1:4:9 ratio (taking into account the 6/5 height/width ratio). Admittedly you need four times as many pieces, but 2x8s are a standard (if slightly rare) brick, and you can get either two 2x4 or two 1x8 tiles for the top of the monolith.

Oh, the other problem with a larger monolith? It’s a bit out of scale with a minifigure. Ah well.

A recreation of an image from HAL’s displays in 2001, as...

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 04:40:05 +0000

A recreation of an image from HAL’s displays in 2001, as seen on a modelling community’s forums.

Thirty Five Images of Space Helmet Reflections by Eric...

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 18:10:00 +0000

Thirty Five Images of Space Helmet Reflections by Eric Ulrich.

I’ve been able to use Google Images and their nifty “upload an image and we’ll match it” to figure out the source of thirty one of the images. Top to bottom, left to right:

2001, Sbtrkt, Solaris (2002), 2001, Explore the Unknown
The Astronaut Farmer, Radiohead, unknown, Moon, The Right Stuff
Alien, Up In The Air, unknown, Barbarella, Getty Images
Space Cowboys, Anna Fisher, iStockPhoto, u nknown, Moon
2001, Apollo 13, 2001, Hubert Vykukal, 2001
Solaris (2002), Space Odyssey, Space Camp, 2001, Alien
2001, 2001, Cargo, Richard Branson, unknown

If you know the provenance of the final four, please let me know.

How can I do a Pan Am image dump without including an image from...

Sun, 05 Dec 2010 05:46:02 +0000

How can I do a Pan Am image dump without including an image from 2001? Here’s a space flight attendant, but that Flickr account has more screen grabs (including Pan Am ones) in this 2001 set. (via)