Head to Popular Mechanics to see the official timeline of the crash. [Popular Mechanics]

Three percent of all the electronic components in the world become obsolete every month. When you imagine all the shit coming out of China, it's pretty staggering. The problem is actually worse for the military, which spends about $10 billion a year on keeping up obsolete electronics parts. Ironically it's because they've switched to using off-the-shelf consumer electronics for 90 percent of their components—with a much shorter service life, four years at best—rather than "military-spec" gear, which was designed to hang around for a decade or more.

IEEE Spectrum lists a couple of egregious examples: The B-2 Spirit, one of Jesus' favorite planes, started flying in 1989, and by 1996, lots of its electronic components were obsolete. And in the Navy's new sonar system, 70 percent of the parts were obsolete when they started installing it.

Finding the parts isn't just difficult, it's expensive as hell, so the cost of maintaining obsolete but very necessary wares basically keeps you from upgrading. In the NYC subway case, instead of moving to a new, modern computerized system that would probably be cheaper in the long run, the Metropolitan Transit Authority has had to focus its limited budget on maintaining the frail, antediluvian network, trapping New Yorkers into an transit system light years behind, say, Japan's. (There have been stories in the recent past about the subway's upgrades, but they have mainly been superficial.)

Not all of you depend on the subway, or fly B-2 bombers, so here's a closer to home example: Windows vs. OS X. The latter is lighter, faster and springier, because it dumped all of the Classic OS's code. A fresh start, with a transition eased by the Classic emulation scheme. Windows Vista, on the other hand, is burdened by 20 years of legacy code, code that it could be argued is essentially obsolete. So we pay the price with a bloated operating system that struggles under its own massive girth. Dumping all that dead weight for Windows 7 and starting fresh—while painful—would be the best thing Microsoft could do. But it's not that easy, or they'd have done it, obviously. Maybe. You got any better examples of painful obsolescence? [IEEE Spectrum, NYT]

Jesús Díaz: How many pieces do your models use?
Ralph Savelsberg: I don't really keep track of how many parts I use for any particular model. I can really only guess. The smaller ones (the F-15, Su-27 and E-2C) probably use between 1,500 and 2,500 parts each. I wouldn't be able to narrow it down any more precisely without taking them apart and counting. The B-1B is a lot bigger and heavier and probably uses between 6,000 and 10,000 parts.

JD: How's your typical building process?
RS: There are quite a few builders who sit down and start building. I can't quite do things like that, or perhaps it doesn't actually lend itself very well to the subject. I use pictures and plans of the aircraft. 1/72 is a fairly common scale for model aircraft and it's comparatively easy to find proper drawings on that scale. My planes are 1/36 mainly because I can simply scale them up by a factor of two relative to the scale drawings.

JD: So you use drawings first?
RS: I usually make a number of drawings (the old-fashioned way with a pencil and paper) trying to figure out how to represent the aircrafts' general outlines, such as the shape of the wings, for instance, in LEGO parts. There is only a limited range of angles available in LEGO plates, so getting the angle of the leading or trailing edge of the wings right can be tricky. I used a pythagorean triple (3,4,5) to do the tailplane on the B-1B and used a combination of different angle plates to get the wing on the E-2C right. That's the sort of thing I really have to work out on paper.

I sometimes also make drawings of specific parts of a plane, such as the nose on the E-2C or it's radar dish. I find that simply putting parts together doesn't work as well for me as visualising the shape, thinking about how to build it in LEGO and then making a few drawings before I start to build. The Su-27 was almost completely designed on paper. The F-15 was a lot simpler somehow and came together without too much preparation.

[Flickr via Brothers Brick]