It’s amazing we get to watch these on livestreams. SpaceX willing to expose its R&D process and high-risk work to the world in real-time. The world definitely needs more companies taking big risks and pushing forward.

Beautiful and inspiring stuff from SpaceX:

A convincing case for Elon to put his focus all-in on SpaceX, and not 6 other ventures at once.

The resemblance between Martian and Terran topography is amazing. Mars has volcanism, plains, valleys, and hard evidence of water formerly everywhere.

Great shots here with renderings of Martian topography.

🗺 turf-tagger

Bryan put together this neat little utility for merging point data with containing polygon attributes with spatial join queries. It uses Turf.js to do the geoprocess in the browser.

🚀 Mars Curiosity High-Res Panorama

Amazing photography of the Mars surface:

NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured its highest-resolution panorama yet of the Martian surface. Composed of more than 1,000 images taken during the 2019 Thanksgiving holiday and carefully assembled over the ensuing months, the composite contains 1.8 billion pixels of Martian landscape. The rover’s...

🌌 Universe Sandbox

This is a physics simulator that replicates the physics of interstellar objects. You can simulate massive planetary collisions or supernovae in the Earth’s solar system, in case you want to see what would happen.

🧮 The Map of Mathematics

A neat catalog “map” of mathematics, with visualizations of things like prime numbers, symmetry, calculus, and more. Quanta Magazine does fantastic work.

🇯🇵 Why So Many of the World’s Oldest Companies are in Japan

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This is a neat clip from Walt Disney’s Disneyland TV series. Wernher von Braun explains the future technology that’ll take us to the Moon, in 1955, several years before the Mercury program even began.

Bloomberg has been publishing this video series on future technologies called “Giant Leap.” It’s well-done and a nice use of YouTube as a medium.

This one explores a number of new companies doing R&D in microgravity manufacturing — from biological organ “printing” to creation of high-quality fiber optic materials. There are still some challenges ahead to unlock growth of space as a manufacturing environment, but it feels like we’re on the cusp of a new platform for industrial growth in the near future.

🌕 The Atlas of Moons

This is an absolutely phenomenal project showcasing each of the major satellites in the Solar System. The full interactive maps of each one are incredible. It shows how much data we’ve gathered about all of these bodies with imagery on each one and thoroughly mapped with place and feature names.

🏠 Opendoor and Redfin Partner

A cool piece of news here. We bought our house with Redfin and had a great experience with it, after using the website heavily during the house search...

We took the kids over to Kennedy Space Center on Saturday on the way up to Jacksonville. A quick stopover in Titusville Friday night then morning over at the Cape.

I always loved visiting KSC when I was younger. We had the opportunity to go and see multiple launches over the years, including a couple of Space Shuttle launches. Visiting again brought back memories since they’ve got several things there that haven’t changed much over the years. On the way in you get to walk through the Rocket Garden, which...

🌐 Tissot’s Indicatrix

This is a neat interactive tool to visualize distortion due to map projection using Tissot’s indicatrix, a mathematical model for calculating the amount of warp at different points:

Nicolas Auguste Tissot published his classic analysis on the distortion on maps in 1859 and 1881. The basic idea is that the intersection of any two lines on the Earth is represented on the flat map with an intersection at the same or a different angle. He proved that at almost every point on the Earth, there’s a right angle intersection...

🔌 Announcing 1.1.1.1: Privacy-First DNS

This is an old announcement, but new to me. CloudFlare now hosts privacy-centric DNS at 1.1.1.1, available to all:

We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system. They thought it was a laudable goal. We offered Cloudflare’s network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs. And, with that, 1.1.1.1 was born.

🛰 Opportunity is No...