The Million Dollar Space Pen

In the 1960’s NASA needed a writ­ing instru­ment that could be used in the vacume of space. In order to com­bat this prob­lem, they spent over a mil­lion dol­lars on R&D in devel­op­ing the Astro­naut Pen. When faced with the same prob­lem, the Rus­sians used a pen­cil.

Or so the leg­end goes. Actu­ally the truth is a bit dif­fer­ent. In the begin­ning of the space race, both NASA and the Soviet Union used pen­cils. But pen­cils break, and they are also inflam­mable. In space, both of these things are very bad... Read More

On Pulling a Godwin

Godwin’s Law:

As an online dis­cus­sion grows longer, the prob­a­bil­ity of a com­par­i­son involv­ing Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

In 1990, Mike Godwin made the above obser­va­tion. To date, it has held up, as peo­ple today seem to like com­par­isons to Hitler just as much as they did in 1990. In addi­tion, there’s a corol­lary to God­win’s law which states that if you are the one to make that com­par­ison, or to pull a God­win, then you are the one who is wrong... Read More

Why can't we do pipes smarter?

Some­times I think that Unix is pretty awe­some. You can strip it down to noth­ing but a ker­nel and a shell and maybe a few driver­s/­mod­ules and end up with a per­fectly use­ful, if min­i­mal, sys­tem. At the same time you can build Unix out into any­thing from a desk­top sys­tem to a high traf­ficked web­server to even a phone OS depend­ing on your def­i­n­i­tion of Unix. Unix is pretty flex­i­ble is what I’m say­ing.

A lot has been writ­ten about the flexibility and power of Unix. Suf­fice to say, Unix’s power is due in a large way to its mod­u­lar­ity and the com­pos­abil­ity of its com­po­nent pro­grams. One key ingre­di­ent of this com­pos­abil­ity is the ven­er­a­ble pipeline idiom, Unix’s abil­ity to feed the out­put stream of one pro­gram to the input stream of anoth­er. Pipes actu­ally are quite amaz­ing, at the shell, they turn a set of small util­i­ties into a com­plete sys­tem admin­is­tra­tion toolk­it... Read More