"Bear in Space has an unusual premise for a children's book. It is the fictional story of a bear who shares film of his vacation to the Moon with his animal friends, but that is not the unusual part." Bear faked his trip; his photographs are clearly manipulated. The child should pick up on that, but will Bear's friends? A Russian tale of space travel from 1970.

It's basically a satellite that's an external Android peripheral, and they're chucking it into space with a phone attached. Impressive.

"This December, in a surprisingly simple yet ridiculously amazing installation for the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, artist Yayoi Kusama constructed a large domestic environment, painting every wall, chair, table, piano, and household decoration a brilliant white, effectively serving as a giant white canvas. Over the course of two weeks, the museum’s smallest visitors were given thousands upon thousands of colored dot stickers and were invited to collaborate in the transformation of the space, turning the house into a vibrantly mottled explosion of color." Lovely. I really like Kusama.

Lovely little round-up of games about architecture and the urban environment from Kars.

Gosh, what a lot of topics: fashion, fabrics, architecture, space, cybernetics, cities, all spinning out of the development of the spacesuit. Cracking interview, impossible to pick a quotation from.

"So there's a cosmonaut up in space, circling the globe, convinced he will never make it back to Earth; he's on the phone with Alexei Kosygin — then a high official of the Soviet Union — who is crying because he, too, thinks the cosmonaut will die.

The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.""

The terrible, sad cost of the space race. Warning: contains a graphic image of human remains in an open casket. Also: is, in many ways, very upsetting. But this is history, and it must be documented.

"To train the astronauts, he set up a makeshift facility seven miles away from Lusaka, where the trainees, dressed in drab overalls with British army helmets, would then take turns to climb into a 44 gallon oil drum which would be rolled down a hill bouncing over rough ground; this, according to Nkoloso, would train the men in the feeling of weightlessness in both space travel and re-entry." Wow.

Brilliant.

"I started with Valentina Tereshkova in January 2009 thinking if I drew one every week I'd finish the series around the end of the year. See how well that worked out." I like Phil Bond's art already, but this set of portraits of female astronauts is just lovely.

"Maybe if I do a good enough job, they'll let me come home." Jesus, this is not far from making me tear up. I really need to do something about my sympathy-for-small-robots thing.

Gorgeous retro-styled, genuinely-3D space combat strategy game for PC and (hurrah!) Xbox 360 Indie Games. Love the jaunty, Jetsons-y typefaces, the gentle piano music as combat plays out, the turn structure, and the hints at what's to come in the preview video. (Although: why anyone would make ships with weak bottoms (as opposed to bottoms & tops) in a genuinely 3D game seems strange. Gravity Bone was delightful, so this could be great; will buy it as soon as it's out.

Fascinating: GPS satellites are both high enough, and travelling fast enough, that you need to correct for relativistic effects in order for them to be effective.

"In the desert 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles is a suburb abandoned in advance of itself—the unfinished extension of a place called California City. Visible from above now are a series of badly paved streets carved into the dust and gravel, like some peculiarly American response to the Nazca Lines (or even the labyrinth at Chartres cathedral). The uninhabited street plan has become an abstract geoglyph—unintentional land art visible from airplanes—not a thriving community at all."

"The physical act of moving around a window into the greater world makes your spatial relationship to the globe profoundly more tangible. The experience of being oriented to a larger context creates an unforgettable sense of wonder."

"this is good level design." A lovely dissection of a couple of screens from Super Mario Land; detailed, spot-on, carefuly analysis from Anna Anthropy. Amazing what you can do with four types of block.

"At 14, Caroline Moore became the youngest person ever to discover a supernova. But months later, we're still figuring out how her find, dubbed SN 2008HA, can actually exist, since it defies everything we thought we knew." Awesome.

Haynes Manual for the Apollo 1 LM and CSM. Awesome.

On Shadow of the Colossus: "When the game is up, the player-character suffers a terrible price for destroying these strange, animate monuments. It is one of the few videogames in which the protagonist dies – horribly and permanently – when the game is over. It is a game where destroying the evil lair might well have been the wrong thing to do. And yet it is _all_ you can do. Such is the inexorable, linear fate of the videogame avatar." Rossignol hits up BLDGBLOG, and (as if you couldn't have guessed), it's good.

This is epic and brilliant and has so many jumping-off points I need to read it again, and again, and again.

I've linked to a single photo, because it makes me think: what it must be, to be taking photographs for Science, millions of miles away via radiowaves, and to have them not only be useful, but to turn out as beautiful as this one. How wonderful to know that the universe is as beautiful as the world, and that even in the name of research, we can take such beautiful pictures.

"Miegakure is a platform game where you explore the fourth dimension to solve puzzles. There is no trick; the game is entirely designed and programmed in 4D. Because humans can only see and move along three spatial dimensions, pressing a button allows to "swap" one regular dimension with the fourth, invisible dimension. Armed with this, the protagonist can see inside closed objects, walk through walls, move objects from one dimension to another, hide under 3D shadows of 4D objects, and more. " You read right. Four spatial dimensions. Now: how can I play it?

"For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind." Bill Safire's speech for Richard Nixon, on the event Armstrong and Aldrin were marooned. A glimpse of alternate history.

"A decade or two ago I spent some days in a “study” in an old Oxford college: bed, desk, lamp, and a window with a view of the quadrangle; nothing else. It made an impression that hasn’t faded. Among other things, I made insane, immense progress on a difficult piece of writing at the front of my to-do list. Here’s a prediction: Geek fashion in particular and intellectual fashion in general will swing hard over: from cluttered to ascetic, from high to low entropy, from library to monastery." A few thoughts from Tim Bray - not all of which I agree with - on the changing geek aesthetic.

Gorgeous, inspiring, and makes me wonder if it's all an ARG or not. I want to cut it to the music from the Pi trailer.

"Warning - this is a collection of half-formed thoughts, perhaps even more than usual." They seem pretty well-formed to me, even if the blogpost is a dense infoburst. Lots of solid gold in here, worth reading twice, slowly, and thinking on. And then working out what the conclusions are.

"You’ll win the game if you’re the only one playing the game at the moment in the world. The game checks over the internet if there are other people playing it at the moment and it’ll kill the game if someone else is playing it. You have to play the game for 4 minutes and 33 seconds." High concept, I'll give it that.

Pup ponders the heat-death of the universe. Beautiful, and a lovely use of space, too.

In its entirety, on Google Video.

"Yesterday was the inaugural papercamp in London, alongside its big sister bookcamp. I presented a half bookish half paperish presentation about travel guides. What I forgot to mention or make explicit: how there are totally different stages and needs for guide books – especially pre-booking, pre-travel, during travel, during holiday. So here is, from memory, what I talked about, with a few additions:" This was jolly good, an a neat branching point between the Paper and the Books.

A nice post to end the year from Kars - it feels like a top-trump of so many things that have risen to the surface in my head in 2008.

Video from the side of a solidrocket booster from a shuttle launch - through launch, into the atmosphere, separation, and back down to splashdown. Incredible; hypnotic; magical to think that we made that.

"That's how I got here. How long will it be before someone builds a raft and sets sail in space? Bill Gates has over fifty billion dollars. What if Richard Garriott had fifty billion dollars? If he wanted to, would that be enough money to build a rocket to get him into space, and a self-sustaining environment in which he could live? Would he want to sail away and never come back? ... No matter what happened in our future, [whoever built that raft] would forever be the first. A thousand years from now, people would remember his name." Bill Harris is awesome.

"Turf Bombing is a location-based turf battle game which rewards and encourages traveling and learning about different neighborhoods." Location-based game that forces you to travel out of your normal areas, and potentially explore transport networks. Also: not designed around specific devices, just laptop+wifi.

"I mapped the strength of the wi-fi signal across levels 1 and 2 of the Library, the primary areas that the Library’s wi-fi is used. By taking readings across the floor of both levels, using standard wi-fi-enabled consumer equipment in order to mimic the conditions for the average user [...], I was able to construct a snapshot of the wi-fi signal strength across the Library." Some lovely work by Dan Hill.

I don't normally link to XKCD, simply because it would become repetitive... but "Height" is really lovely.

"When NASA's last scheduled Space Shuttle mission lands in June of 2010, the United States will not have the capability to get astronauts into space again until the scheduled launch of the new Orion spacecraft in 2015. Over those five years, the U.S. manned space program will be relying heavily on Russia and its Baikonur Cosmodrome facility in Kazakhstan." Wonderful pictures of spaceflight, Russian-style.

A detailed look at various techniques for greebling Lego models.

Nice looking site for perhaps the more grown-up gamer looking to connect and share with others; the focus on sharing the spaces you play in is a really interesting touch. Can't wait to try this.

"The most perfectly round objects ever made by humanity, flying through the void on one of the purest scientific quests ever." Wow.