Space Exploration Technologies Corporation - Press:
"This marks the first time a commercial company has successfully recovered a spacecraft reentering from low-Earth orbit. It is a feat performed by only six nations or government agencies: the United States, Russia, China, Japan, India, and the European Space Agency."
Just Warm Enough - Science News:
"a massive fungal bloom swept the Earth about the time of the dinosaur extinction."
"...fungi plague plants, insects and other cold-blooded creatures far more often than they do mammals or birds. Putting two and two together, [Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City ] formulated a theory that the warm body temperatures of mammals and birds might have protected them from fungal pathogens, while diseases caused by fungi might have been a factor keeping the reptiles from rising again."
"A fungus called Geomyces destructans infects bats while they are hibernating — a time when body temperatures drop from 40˚ C to about 7˚. “They’re not warm-blooded when they get infected,” Blehert says."
Danish astronomer's remains exhumed in Prague - Yahoo! News:
"On Monday, an international team of scientists opened [Tyge Brahe's] tomb in the Church of Our Lady Before Tyn near Prague's Old Town Square..."The book got poor reviews, but the whodunnit isn't done yet.
The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother - thestar.com:
"That's the process %u2014 six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes."
"If you want to make really sharp stone spearheads, do like Stone Age cave dwellers did and cook them first."
"'The gold-bearing earth which is hardest they first burn with a hot fire, and when they have crumbled it...they continue the working of it by hand..."
"By Livy's account the crossing was accomplished in the face of huge difficulties.[24] These Hannibal surmounted with ingenuity, such as when he used vinegar and fire to break through a rockfall."
The line between book and Internet will disappear - O'Reilly Radar:
"But everything exists within the EPUB spec already to make the next obvious -- but frightening -- step: let books live properly within the Internet, along with websites, databases, blogs, Twitter, map systems, and applications.
"There is little talk of this anywhere in the publishing industry that I know of, but the foundation is there for the move -- as it should be. And if you are looking at publishing with any kind of long-term business horizon, this is where you should be looking[...]
"I don't know what smart things people will start to do when books are truly of the Internet.
"But I do know that it will happen, and the 'Future of Publishing' has something to do with this. The current world of ebooks is just a transition to a digitally connected book publishing ecosystem that won't look anything like the book world we live in now."
Can Nuclear Waste Spark an Energy Solution?:
"The idea is to reprocess that spent fuel to generate more power. Proponents say the know-how is available now to address the nuclear proliferation concerns that have bedeviled previous recycling plans. And they say the advanced reactors that would run on that recycled fuel would mark a new level of progress on safety."
'“It’s very clear when you get into details that [nuclear] is the best energy system, bar none,” said Tom Blees, president of the Science Council for Global Initiatives, a nonprofit focused on resources and climate, and author of Prescription for the Planet, a 2008 book advocating the technology. “We have to make a choice—provide abundant energy for the planet or be content with these resource wars we have all the time.”'
"The International Panel on Fissile Materials, a group of arms control and nonproliferation experts from 17 countries[...] noted that sodium leaks have sparked major fires in a similarly designed prototype reactor in Japan, as well as in several operating reactors in France. One of them, the Superphénix commercial-sized plutonium fueled reactor, was shut down in 1998 for political and technical reasons after experiencing high operating costs."
Cory Doctorow, via Boing Boing:
" Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Kobo were all happy to carry my books without DRM, and on terms that gave you the same rights you got when buying paper editions. Sony and Apple refused to carry my books without DRM -- even though my publisher and I both asked them to."
Via Doc Searls:
U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don't Even Know It: Laurence Kotlikoff - Bloomberg:
"This is what happens when you run a massive Ponzi scheme for six decades straight, taking ever larger resources from the young and giving them to the old while promising the young their eventual turn at passing the generational buck."
iHelp for Autism - - News - San Francisco - SF Weekly:
"After he began spending 30 minutes at a time on apps designed to teach spelling, counting, drawing, making puzzles, remembering pictures, and more, she sat down at her own computer."
Russia confirms shiny new cosmodrome - The Register:
"Putin stressed the non-military nature of the project, and indicated that Russia is keen to cut its reliance on Kazakhstan's Baikonur spaceport."
Life isn't so much a fabric as it is a fascinating, intricate tangle of seemingly unrelated things.
I've long been a fan of Richard Feynman's stories. In 1992 I read about his last adventure, a quest to visit Tannu Tuva: "Tuva or Bust." A central element of the story is Tuvan throat singing.
My grandfather had had a distinctive singing gimmick, one which had helped him establish his character of "Frog Millhouse" in old western movies. As I read the description of throat singing in "Tuva or Bust", I began to wonder whether Grandpa had in fact been a country and western throat singer.
Fast forward to 2005. I was living in Santa Fe, not far from the site of one of Dr. Feynman's early adventures. My friend Bobi, who had once worked at Los Alamos, was getting ready to adopt a baby from Kazakhstan. As we prepared for her trip we came across the story of Paul Pena, a blind R&B musician who among other things had written the Steve Miller Band hit, "Jet Airliner." Listening to a San Francisco radio station, Mr. Pena had heard some intriguing vocal music which turned out to be Tuvan throat singing. The music was being aired because a group of Tuvans was visiting the United States, in a cultural exchange visit which was a posthumous result of Dr. Feynman's efforts to visit Tuva.
Paul Pena taught himself to sing in the rumbling style of kargyraa, somehow became connected with the author of "Tuva or Bust", Ralph Leighton, and ended up traveling to central Asia, where he won a prize in a throat-singing competition.
Mr. Pena's adventure, and some of his life's trials, were captured in the bittersweet movie "Genghis Blues."
Almost a year after Mr. Pena died, Bobi departed to Kazakhstan. I went along, and we came together with one of the most wonderful people I've ever known. She's now Bobi's daughter, and my god-daughter.
We made a video of the trip. The obvious choice of background music for the air travel segments was Mr. Pena's "Jet Airliner."
With all of this as background, today I came across an NPR interview with Billy West, who provides much of the voice of Futurama:
On Popeye
I loved Jack Mercer, and I got him. I understood him. And what helped me understand that Popeye voice — it's a high voice and a low voice at the same time — cause when I was a kid, we all used to try to do that and we all stunk. It didn't sound right. So one day, I see this film — it was an independent film called Genghis Blues. And it was about [Paul Pena] ... And he was listening to a world-band radio one night, and he heard this strange noise. And it was a program about Tuvan singers. And Tuvans had a way of singing where they could do one and two voices. And I realized, 'Oh man, that's how this guy did it. Jack Mercer.' [He imitates both voices.] There'd be two voices, an octave apart. And he'd put them together."
Virtual power plants fill supply gaps in heat wave | Green Tech - CNET News:
"...automated efficiency technology, particularly dialing back electricity usage during peak times, is becoming one of the most effective smart-grid tools for maintaining the balance between electricity supply and demand."
"To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app's behavior."
Sharp-eyed robins can see magnetic fields:
"a new study shows that [birds'] internal compass also depends on the birds having clear vision in their right eyes.
Cryptochrome also affects the light sensitivity of retinal cells, which suggests it may also affect sensitivity to magnetic fields. In effect, the magnetic fields create light or dark shadings over what the bird usually sees, and the shadings change as the bird turns its head, giving it a visual compass from the patterns of shading."
BusinessWeek posted this on 1 July:
Andy Grove: How America Can Create Jobs:
"A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer. The U.S. lost its lead in batteries 30 years ago when it stopped making consumer electronics devices... U.S. companies did not participate in the first phase and consequently were not in the running for all that followed. I doubt they will ever catch up...
These [Asian] countries seem to understand that job creation must be the No. 1 objective of state economic policy. The government plays a strategic role in setting the priorities and arraying the forces and organization necessary to achieve this goal..."
"Nearly $2bn... in loan guarantees will be given to two companies to kick-start the US solar energy industry, President Barack Obama has announced...
Abound Solar Manufacturing, will manufacture state-of-the-art thin film solar panels...
Plants will be built in Colorado and Indiana, creating 2,000 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs, the Associated Press reports...
'We're going to to keep competing aggressively to make sure the jobs and industries of the future are taking root right here in America,' he said on Saturday."
"Over the past decade, Lee has worked with other researchers to develop a geographic information system, or GIS, model to identify glaciers and ice fields in Alaska and elsewhere that are likely to hold artifacts. They pulled together biological and physical data to find ice fields that may have been used by prehistoric hunters to kill animals seeking refuge from heat and insect swarms in the summer months."
"Ninety-five percent of the archaeological record that we usually base our interpretations on is comprised of chip stone artifacts, ground stone artifacts, maybe old hearths, which is a fire pit, or rock rings that would have been used to stabilize a house," Lee said. "So we really have to base our understanding about ancient times on these inorganic materials. But ice patches are giving us this window into organic technology that we just don't get in other environments."
"Then the Dropbox public API showed up. That changed everything again. I've never wanted to write and maintain my own simpletext.ws sync service, but there was no other choice. Now I can outsource all that work to Dropbox. But to do this I still need to rewrite my model layer to support Dropbox sync."
Here's a nice, concise snippet to demonstrate CSS3 3D transformations, from Superted's Toy Story iAd Navigation post:
items[i].style.webkitTransform = matrix.rotate(newAngle, 0, 0).translate(0, 0, 380);
Technical Note TN2262: Preparing Your Web Content for iPad:
"For example, a mouse pointer can hover over a webpage element and trigger an event; a finger on a Multi-Touch screen cannot."
"Still, what new frontiers are out there for interacting with computing devices? Michael Okuda believes that removing the touch requirement will bring new advances in gesture-based control. "Once you don't have to physically touch the screen," he told Ars, "I think yet another window is going to open up.""
Here's a part of the "suicide" story with which I was not familiar.
Wolfram|Alpha Blog : Happy Birthday, Alan Turing:
"When one first hears that Alan Turing died by eating an apple impregnated with cyanide one assumes it must have been intentional suicide. But when one later discovers that he was quite a tinkerer, had recently made cyanide for the purpose of electroplating spoons, kept chemicals alongside his food, and was rather a messy individual, the picture becomes a lot less clear."
This made me chuckle.
The iPad and immersive computing - O'Reilly Radar:
"I love how focused I am using an iPad, versus working on a laptop. New mail isn't constantly arriving; tweets aren't Growling into view; I don't even have an RSS reader installed."
NEX-3 and NEX-5 coming in July, and an interchangeable lens camcorder in the fall (Sneak Peek: New Sony Camcorder in Development).
I'm not sure what the camcorder will offer over and above the NEX cameras, but to a person living in the bright environs of northern New Mexico that optional optical viewfinder on the digicams is really appealing. SDHC/SDXC memory card support and automatic HDR look nice, too.
Recently, when opening new Terminal sessions in Mac OS X, I've started seeing a familiar old message before the first shell prompt.
Last login: Wed Apr 28 06:27:11 on ttys006
You have mail.
mymac:~ my_username$
mail: /var/mail/my_username: Is a directory
Via Tim O'Reilly, a tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Eric Margolis:
"Gorbachev did not plan to destroy the Soviet Union but to reform and revitalize it. But by refusing to hold it together by force, he brought about its doom.
Gorbachev did the world a huge favor."
Chrome brings Flash Player into the fold, trains it to kill iPads? -- Engadget
As of about a year ago I thought Google didn't really care for Flash. It had accessibility problems and was opaque to search engines.
Apparently Adobe have addressed these issues.
I recently upgraded my iMac. Migration Assistant moved all of my files to the new machine without issue -- or so it seemed.
I had created Mercurial repositories in a couple of virtualenv environments, to track changes locally.[1] I didn't notice that Mercurial had put each virtual environment's .Python file under revision control.
Shortly after completing the migration I made changes in one of these virtual environments. A quick 'hg status' before committing, and...
$ hg status
abort: data/.Python.i@13b27e856c38: no match found!
EOF - The Google Exposure | Linux Journal:
" The 2008 study found half of all clicks come from lower-income young adults."
U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google - CNN.com:
"In the aftermath of Google's announcement, some members of Congress are reviving a bill banning U.S. tech companies from working with governments that digitally spy on their citizens. Presumably, those legislators don't understand that their own government is on the list."
