Links for 09-01-2007
Google telescope project, Hawking heads for orbit, Second Life goes open source, Mormon transhumanists…
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“The Internet search company has struck a partnership with scientists building a huge sky-scanning telescope, with hopes of helping the public access digital footage of asteroids, supernovas and distant galaxies.” Many fingers, many pies.
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“Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking says he wants to undertake a zero-gravity flight aboard an airplane this year as a precursor to a journey into space…” Go for it, Professor.
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“…even as new missions to Mars seek evidence that the planet might once have supported life, we already have data showing that life exists there now–data from experiments done by the Viking Mars landers in the late 1970s.”
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“When CD sales finally tank completely, record labels will be faced with a tough decision: distributing music nearly exclusively through Apple’s iTunes store or rethinking their approach to digital-rights management, or DRM, from the ground up.”
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“…I am proud to announce the availability of the Second Life client source code for you to download, inspect, compile, modify, and use within the guidelines of the GNU GPL version 2.” Listen for the repercussions.
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“Yotel has opened capsule hotels in London’s Gatwick and Heathrow airports; they’re modelled on the famous coffin hotels of Tokyo, but bigger and more luxurious…” Now open cheap ones near Waterloo for out-of-town gig-goers…
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“Compact, computer-controlled, 3-dimensional woodworking machine with an easy-to-use interface. It allows a novice to make a complete project without a shop full of tools.” Desktop 3D printing for less than £1000. Blimey.
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“The silent empire has expanded again. There is so much to celebrate – but why do we see so little celebration?”
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“In a similar way overlooked books tend to be half-seen, somewhat mysterious. Perhaps we view them in one context when they deserve another, wider context.” VanderMeer gets his word on.
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“Astronomers have mapped the cosmic “scaffold” of dark matter upon which stars and galaxies are assembled.” Now that is pretty damn cool.
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“It would really be great if libraries could set themselves up as guardians of an intellectual inheritance, but if no one cares about that inheritance, it’s difficult to see how that helps very much.” Sad but true.
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“Some very cool images and video of a test launch of the private space launch test vehicle named “Goddard” Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has been building have been posted online.”
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“In bringing 2006 to a close, the Cassini Imaging Team is releasing its best maps of Titan and the major icy Saturnian moons, and other eye-catching images collected from our travels around Saturn.” Beautiful, just beautiful.
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“A Welsh steelworker addressed a Christmas card to an old friend by drawing a map showing the approximate location of the town his friend had moved to — and the crafty Royal Mail actually delivered the card in nine days.” Believe it when I see it.
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“The ancient Andean empire built great cities but left no written records – except perhaps in mysterious knotted strings called khipu. Can an anthropologist and some mathematicians crack the code?”
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“Government officials plan to re-examine the case for sending Britons into space, almost 50 years after the UK pulled out of human space flight.” About bl**dy time.
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“ExxonMobil Corp. gave $16 million to 43 ideological groups between 1998 and 2005 in a coordinated effort to mislead the public by discrediting the science behind global warming, the Union of Concerned Scientists asserted Wednesday.” No surprises.
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“We seek the spiritual and physical exaltation of individuals and their anatomies, as well as communities and their environments, according to their wills, desires and laws, to the extent they are not oppressive.” Surely a spoof?
January 9th, 2007 at 5:56 am
I’m sort of excited about the peroxide bug theory about the Mars lander, but I’ve heard a lot of theories about the Viking experiments that conveniently fail to exclude the possibility of Martian life. This one made the media instead of being kicked around after seminars. No way to know without going back and taking a look, I suppose.