Amazing Space Probes, Why Newspapers are Called Rags and Sorting Information
I'm Trying to get back into some sort of regularity with this kind of post! Please do let me know if you enjoy them to give me some motivation to continue.
The Voyager Missions
I only discovered recently, to my shame, how incredible these machines are. Voyager 1 and 2 were launched in August and September 1977 with the initial expectation that they would operate for five years, visiting Jupiter and Saturn... forty six years later they are both still going. Having visited, between them, all four of the gas giants. Space X can bite me.
The header photo to this article was taken by the mission on valentine's day, 1990 from a distance of "just" 4bn miles.
These probes are now four times further from the sun than Pluto. They are controlled by the oldest continuously operating computers mankind has ever built and they are still sending back data that is enhancing our understanding of the universe we live in. Add to this the usual cliched facts about how it's been done with less computing power than a modern matchstick or whatever, and this is an off the charts engineering achievement.Good luck Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. You make me proud to be human.
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Why Are Newspapers Referred to as Rags?
Because they used to be made from recycled rags. Simple. Pleasing. Facts.
Card Sorting
This is a new one on me. We recently redesigned our internal Wiki and wanted to carry out some research from our team into how they think the information should be organised. This is always a struggle, because the way that I think information should be laid out and where I see links between subjects will not be the same for everyone.
We made use of a great tool maze.co that allows you to run UX experiments. We started by listing all our terminal information nodes (a fancy way of saying "Wiki pages" and we then allowed our team to create and fill various buckets into which they then sorted the pages.
Maze then does some fancy stuff in the background and comes out with recommendations as to how we should reorganise everything. A quick jiggle around on Notion and voila... a much more streamlined and sensible layout for all our internal documentation. It made my business operations heart sing!