I’m Reading…Wonderful news today coming out of NASA today:
NASA took the first concrete step toward returning human beings to the moon Thursday, successfully launching the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter on a mission to find the best place to build Earth’s first off-world colony.
The 19-story-high, two-stage rocket and spacecraft launched at 2:32 p.m. PDT. As the huge [...]
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Defense Secretary Robert Gates has recommended ending the the long-standing drama surrounding the F-22 (nee, the F-22A) supersonic fighter, capping the program with a purchase of four more planes in 2009, bringing the total number to 183.
A pair of F-22 Raptors during an Air Force training flight.
(Thomas Meneguin — U.s. Air Force Via Associated [...]
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I’m a big fan of distributed systems – complex networks of an extremely large number of independent entities governed by simple and transparent rules. Not surprising, really, that I work professionally on next-generation products and services based on the Internet, one of the most successful man-made distributed systems in existence.
As a result, it’s not surprising [...]
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Very, very strange to see breaking news come through Twitter.
But the Mars Phoenix mission actually has its own twitter feed:
MarsPhoenix
And as the LAist reported just a few hours ago, there was an exciting tweet just 3 hours ago:
Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! [...]
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Looking at my first blog posts has a certain charm to it. One of the first posts on this blog that ever drove a significant amount of traffic was a post about the decision to demote Pluto as a planet at the IAU conference in 2006.
Pluto is a Planet
Scientific American has a nice article out [...]
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You be the judge. Many thanks to Boing Boing and Haha.nu for this one.
Here’s a snippet:
Statement by a round-earther physicist: When you watch a ship sailing towards the shore, all you see at first is the mast. Then you see the bow, and eventually the entire ship.
Fadhel Al-Said: When you [...]
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I was feeling really bad on Tuesday.
A gorgeous lunar eclipse took place that was visible from most of Asia-Pacific, and even stretched to full visibility over California. But with peak viewing at just past 3:30am, I just couldn’t make it. One of the liabilities of having two kids under 3 and a full-time gig at [...]
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One of my first posts on this blog was about Pluto, namely the incredibly stupid move to re-classify it as a dwarf planet. For the first month of my blog, that post generated a surprisingly large amount of traffic.
Since then, I’ve posted about the New Horizons spacecraft, and the current mission to send a [...]
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This week’s Science Times in the Tuesday, Feb 27, 2007 edition of the New York Times was just phenomenal. So many things worth writing about!
I’m just going to write one tonight, but I had to give a shout out to their cover story, and one of the coolest technologies I had the chance to [...]
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I am a huge supporter of space exploration, and a big fan of the recent boom of entrepreneurial activity around space. For example, I’m the type of person that gets excited when I see that the Blue Origin spacecraft managed a very successful test recently of their new launch vehicle. (Blue Origin is Jeff [...]
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How is it possible that I didn’t know that Don Norman wrote a post entitled:
In Defense of PowerPoint
He wrote the post over two years ago. However, I remember the storm over this like it was yesterday. It all started with a New York Times article in 2003 called “PowerPoint Makes You Dumb“. [...]
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I love the Leonid Meteor shower.
Every year, at this time, if you are willing to stay up late and drive to an area that is relatively dark, you are rewarded with a great show. It’s always exciting to see a shooting star – it’s even better to see dozens of them in one [...]
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On Friday, NASA announced the selection of Lockheed Martin as the major contractor to build the space vehicle to replace the aging Space Shuttle fleet.
The vehicle is called the Orion Crew Vehicle, and Lockheed Martin will be building eight of the reusable launch vehicles, with an initial launch target of 2014. For those [...]
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I love the controversy over this Pluto decision. I think the NASA lead for the New Horizons project basically sums up my arguments in this article which is surprisingly well written on BBC News.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Pluto vote hijacked in revolt
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Of course, like everyone, I caught the headline this morning:
Astronomers say Pluto is not a planet – Yahoo! News
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it’s nice to see people who probably cannot even name all nine planets interested in a story about cosmology and the way we define our neighborhood [...]
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Adam Nash Sunnyvale, CA |
