tobedetermined!

Space To The Rescue

Posted on Monday, March 3, 2008

• Need a good excuse reason to go to New York? Read this NYT review of the MOMA exhibition 'Design and the Elastic Mind'. Makes me wanna go! More at MOMA (via Google LatLon)
• TED was on. Missed it. Next year. Here are a lot of good videos from it. Lots of buzz about Microsoft's new move vs Google Earth/Sky: World Wide Telescope. The TED video is here. Indepth reviews at OgleEarth and GoogleEarthBlog. Looking forward to a test drive, which will have to wait untill they release it this spring.
• Just learned that Google is running a www.google.com/space subdomain these days with the following overall statement:

  There's nothing we love more than ambitious research with world-changing potential, and space exploration and research have long produced much of the scientific community's most ambitious, even audacious work.
  
  We honor the work that's been done in the past, and want to foster and support that work today and in the future. By supporting space-related research and exploration, we hope to inspire a new generation of innovators to enter the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. We believe that the same imagination and passion that fuels space research and drives those who meet the challenge of space exploration will also help advance research and development in fields closer to our own.

  
  That's certainly a statement I can get my head around, especially coming from an IT/media company ;-)
  Btw, I learned about the subdomain here at Ames where Chris Kemp and Matthew Hancher (NASA's Planetary Content team Project lead) showed us the Google Street View equivalent on the Moon: Apollo panoramas...uhm...lunalocated (?). Quite impressive. Story telling is a big part of the overall picture, as both reviews (above) of the upcoming Google Sky competitor are right in mentioning. The possibility to re-live Apollo adventures in their appropriate context is excellent. Its still a bit text-heavy for now, but I am sure that that's gonna change as the platforms evolve. Btw2, for some reason this most recent release of Google Moon (think it was this post d.d. 13th September 2007 where it was announced) didn't make it up the list for me, which makes me wonder: is it time for a dedicated Google Space Blog?