adamweiss.net/blog

Last night, a private launch vehicle from SpaceX Corporation made it most of the way to orbit. According to their website:

Falcon flew far beyond the “edge” of space, typically thought of as around 60 miles. Our altitude was approximately 200 miles, which is just 50 miles below the International Space Station. The second stage didn’t achieve full orbital velocity, due to a roll excitation late in the burn[.]

That means they had a failure late in the flight that made the spacecraft fall back to Earth. Not a complete failure, but seeing as the goal was to get something up into space and have it stay there, this certainly wasn’t a success.

Why then do we have Space.com (first below) and New Scientist Magazine (second) reporting the exact same story in opposite ways?

Everyone knows about the Boston Duck Tours, but there’s a new outfit in set to start tours from Charlestown soon: Super Duck Tours. I saw this one this morning at the intersection of Causeway and North Washington Streets, headed over the Charlestown Bridge.

According to an article about the amphibious tours in Maine, these Ducks are custom made for tourism (the Boston Duck Tours boats are old WWII military vehicles). A piece at CharlestownBridge.com says that they will leave from the Navy Yard and tour a route different from the Duck Boats:

The vehicles will load at Terry Ring Way in the Navy Yard, follow the truck route down Chelsea Street to the seaport and enter the water at the Little Mystic Channel. The Autoport on Terminal Street will serve as the maintenance and storage site for the vehicles. The tours begin daily at 9 a.m. and will take between one hour and one-quarter and one hour and one-half. Up to five tours could run each day, and the season could typically run from April through the end of November, depending on demand.

Now I know that Boston Duck Tours currently has a monopoly on the city’s amphibious tourism industry, but do we really need choice in our Ducks?

I usually read my news online (Reuters and AP wire stories via Yahoo! News), where it seems that speed is valued above quality. Stories are truncated, the same facts are given at both the beginning and the end of articles, and the pictures rarely relate well to the text. I’ve gotten used to these thrown-together stories that don’t completely make sense, but today I found what is probably the worst one I’ve ever seen.

This Associate Press story on the first transatlantic flight of the AirBus A380 is horrible. You can read it if you’d like but I’ll excerpt some of the “best” parts here (emphasis mine):

The four-engine Airbus A380 touched down at Kennedy International Airport at about 12:10 p.m., to the cheers of onlookers gathered to watch the arrival. As the plane taxied, a pilot waved an American flag. A separate A380 was flying to Los Angeles time but devoid of any passengers.

The air show began early Monday at Frankfurt International Airport when the took off as Lufthansa Flight 8940 for the eight-hour flight to Kennedy, scheduled to land at 12:30 p.m. EDT.

That one does double duty as a non sequitur (this is the only time in the article that an air show is mentioned) that also has words missing.

Using the performance results from this circuit — flying the plane as it would be done so if it were in service — Lufthansa’s goal is to match the A380’s turnaround time from landing to takeoff with that of much smaller long-haul jets already in operation.

The company revised its plan to allow for arrival at both locations. Los Angeles sped up construction of a $9 million gate for the giant gate to accommodate the plane.

In addition to these blatant errors, the wording of the whole article is off, and it is quite obvious that parts of it were pasted in from other places.

I wish someone would read the news before it was released to the public.

I was at the Stata Center at MIT this weekend, and everything inside seems to have someone’s name on it. These three examples are all from the main hallway:

On the Ho Chi Minh entry, of all places:

1. ^ Adam Weiss. Boston Behind the Scenes http://www.bostonbehindthescenes.com/. 12 March. Podcast accessed on 2007-14 March.

The Internet is a truly strange place.

Last night, my Boston Behind the Scenes podcast reached its 10,000th download. It’s come a long way!

I like snow, but I know many people are unhappy that everything is white on March 16.
Here’s the Science Park T station right now.