WPenner's Blog

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space. — Douglas Adams

Because space, as Douglas Adams so cleverly put it, is enormous, propulsion is crucial. T...

Having a shuttle service between the moon and earth would be incredibly useful and this little article proposes using demonstrated technology to create one.¹ The problem is getting out of earth's gravity-well, which takes a rocket's complete energy. Once in orbit, more energy is required to accele...

Today two Canadian startup rocket companies are racing to define the next generation of Canadian space. Both are getting their feet wet serving the satellite launch market. This is important because after decades of earth observations (EO) by satellites, this market is shucking its national and defe...

Space has long been the domain of two groups: boffins and bureaucrats. The first is really smart people, the people that can calculate complex formulas in their heads while the rest of us struggle with knowing if we got the right amount of change at the store. These people become scientist and engin...

If you’ve been following my Twitter account you’ve noticed a strong pivot towards space in the last few weeks. I’ll write about what I’ve discovered in the next while, but today, I take a detour into civil organization.

I have recently pondered a strange idea: the largest Canadian cities should...

I have been trying to wrap my head around the Canadian space program for the last couple of days. I knew it exists, but compared to my knowledge of the American or European programs, I knew nothing at all beyond the CanadArm (more about that later).

What whet my appetite was this chart from [Space...

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is the idea that a systematic approach to storing and retrieving for personal use is helpful. Different systems like Building a Second Brain or Linking Your Thinking attempt to leverage software to enhance the brain's natural linking abilities. In a world awas...

There are lots of different ways of categorizing shoppers and after many years of designing websites, the acronym BRAG encapsulates one of my favourites. According to Frank Wazeter, writing for Entrepreneur, most customers are:

• Bargainers Bargainers always want a deal. That does not equate to...

Today's post is unusual.
It developed out of several recent conversations about centralization and misuses of power.
Following the Feynman technique, this aims to be simple enough for a child to understand without talking down.

It starts, as many glorious adventures, with a family on safari.

T...

Stagetimer¹ is a bootstrap product from Lukas (@_lhermann) and Liz Hermann (@lizmhermann). The product is a terrific showcase for the distributed ubiquity of web and using a light protocol to solve problems.

The value proposition is simple, there are a lot of times and places where someone i...