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S3 Outage Effects
Posted on Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Interesting. S3 goes out, and suddenly all over the web you'll see images disappearing, avatars evaporating and webshops go down.
Btw,for those who have the time to follow twitter feeds, and/or(?) are interested how we are gonna re-vamp NASA Ames' presence on the web (starting with the Ames page in the nasa.gov portal) we just added a new fly on the wall.
Twittering from LSI conference
Posted on Monday, July 21, 2008
Just got into the LSI Moon conference here at Ames. Follow my twitter on it here. Alternatively you can see what Keith Cowing is up to here. Or check out the program here. More as it comes in...
The Stone Age Didn't End Because of a Shortage of Stones
Posted on Sunday, July 20, 2008
Bruce Sterling comments inline on this passionate call by Al Gore for the US to become carbon fuel independent in 10 years.
Time to put some solar panels on my roof here in Palo Alto. Or wait, wasn't I first gonna spend 2 weeks flying around Europe for my holiday, buy the iPhone and upgrade my car (from what I hear SUV's come cheap these days).
Could this be the "Moonrace" of the 21st century?
We need you. And we need you now. We're committed to changing not just light bulbs, but laws. And laws will only change with leadership. On July 16, 1969, the United States of America was finally ready to meet President Kennedy's challenge of landing Americans on the moon. I will never forget standing beside my father a few miles from the launch site, waiting for the giant Saturn 5 rocket to lift Apollo 11 into the sky. I was a young man, 21 years old, who had graduated from college a month before and was enlisting in the United States Army three weeks later.I will never forget the inspiration of those minutes. The power and the vibration of the giant rocket's engines shook my entire body. As I watched the rocket rise, slowly at first and then with great speed, the sound was deafening. We craned our necks to follow its path until we were looking straight up into the air. And then four days later, I watched along with hundreds of millions of others around the world as Neil Armstrong took one small step to the surface of the moon and changed the history of the human race.
We must now lift our nation to reach another goal that will change history. Our entire civilization depends upon us now embarking on a new journey of exploration and discovery. Our success depends on our willingness as a people to undertake this journey and to complete it within 10 years. Once again, we have an opportunity to take a giant leap for humankind.
Too Funny
Posted on Friday, July 18, 2008
God, did I miss Jon Stewart when he was on holiday. Watch this from the beginning and be ready for an apotheosis starting 07:20 (btw, I believe Hulu is only available for American viewers).
Edge 250
Posted on Thursday, July 17, 2008
Alan Turing's suggestion, to build a disorganized machine with the curiosity of a child, made more sense. Eventually, "interference would no longer be necessary, and the machine would have ‘grown up’." This was Google's approach. Harvest all the data in the world, rendering all available answers accessible to all possible questions, and then reinforce the meaningful associations while letting the meaningless ones die out. Since, by diagonal argument in the scale of possible infinities, there will always be more questions than answers, it is better to start by collecting the answers, and then find the questions, rather than the other way around.And why trace the connections in the brain of one individual when you can trace the connections in the mind of the entire species at once? Are we searching Google, or is Google searching us?
More at 'Engineer's Dreams' by George Dyson (Edge 250)
Yup
Posted on Thursday, July 17, 2008
Wading through +2k unread posts in my list of RSS feeds (Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond).
Edward Tufte on iPhone
Posted on Monday, July 14, 2008
From the NYT:
“The content is the interface, the information is the interface, not the computer administration debris,” he said in a video critique of the iPhone.Now that's a statement that resonates, considering the amount of (useless) interface on this page.
Its You They're After
Posted on Saturday, July 12, 2008
The best analysis on Google's Lively I've read sofar comes from RealityPrime: Its not so much about giving people a nice virtual world to play with, its providing a new interface to harvest new and previously untapped user behaviour. Which reminds me of an excellent article I was send the other day on the near future of advertising, a must-read.
Yes, But Is It Art?
Posted on Saturday, July 12, 2008
Or Space Aaaarrrrttt, as a Dutch Space Agency collegue would call it back in the days... (personally I wouldn't directly associate this with art, but that's another story. Its an excellent video though!)
Super Sprayer - video powered by Metacafe
Its iPhone Time in Palo Alto
Posted on Friday, July 11, 2008
Just around the corner from where I live there is the Apple store on University Avenue. Not too big a crowd, mostly Stanford students playing guitar hero while the press anxiously awaits whats to come. I decided to opt for a roundtrip to Amsterdam instead, an alternative which also doesn't come cheap these days. But first its Mechanicrawl this saturday up in the City.
Robots Get Better Every Day
Posted on Wednesday, July 9, 2008
A couple of quotes from an article in the Washington Post entitled 'U.S. Finds It's Getting Crowded Out There' (via):
The cost of manned space exploration, which requires expensive measures to sustain and protect astronauts in the cold emptiness of space, is a particular target."The manned space program served a purpose during the Apollo times, but it just doesn't anymore," says Robert Parks, a University of Maryland physics professor who writes about NASA and space. The reason: "Human beings haven't changed much in 160,000 years," he said, "but robots get better by the day."
Another one:
In its assessment, Futron listed the most significant U.S. space weakness as "limited public interest in space activity."
Hmm, it looks like us humans are a real show stopper when it comes to pushing the borders of reality further into outer space. Perhaps we should consider targeting robots instead of humans with the US civil space PR machine. Once they are on equal par with us, they'll probably be much more enthused and equipped to go into outer space. And after all, our race already had its 15 minutes of fame wouldn't u say? An add campaign targeted at robots...hmm...: "Space, The Final Webservice"
NASA Celebrates 50 Years of Exploration This Year
Posted on Monday, July 7, 2008
Get started with above video of highlights (btw, where is my embedabble NASA videoplayer?). The official celebration happens around October if I am not mistaken, but according to Wikipedia NASA was established Jul 29th 1958 so we're getting close. Much more on the upcoming celebrations at this NASA 50th Anniversary website.
Sarkozy's Whirlwind Extends Into Outer Space
Posted on Tuesday, July 1, 2008
The future is process, not a destination
Bruce Sterling
Everything is ultimately becoming information technology
Ray Kurzweil
Data is the Intel inside
Tim O'Reilly
There is only one machine and the web is its OS
Kevin Kelly
The medium is the message
Marshall McLuhan