Stilgherrian » nasa

Links for 16 November 2008

del.icio.us — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 23:51:06 +0000

Here are the web links I’ve found for 16 November 2008, posted automatically and not.

Filtering Pilot and ACMA Blacklist - Not just “illegal” material | Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA): EFA’s analysis of the Australian goverment&’s policy makes it clear that it’s not just illegal material being targetted for Internet “filtering”.
From cutlass to AK-47 | BBC News: A brief history of piracy through to the present day — the real kind of piracy, not “copyright infringement”.
From Pickin’ Cotton to Pickin’ Presidents | Strange Maps: There’s been plenty of discussion about how race (i.e. the fact that Barack Obama isn’t white) affected the US election. Here’s a comparison of the map of cotton production from 1860 compared with voting patterns earlier this month. The resemblance is both uncanny and scary.
This Isn’t England | Noisy Decent Graphics: Pax Britannia! London-based graphic designer Ben Terrett notices that the UK isn’t always drawn as it should be on maps. All maps, by definition, present a distorted view of the world. But how distorted?
How This Bear Market Compares | NYTimes.com: Once more the New York Times wins with its superb infographics. Want to compare the current stock market crash with previous ones? This interactive graphic allows you to do just that, clearly and simply.
Introducing Recession: Simple Advice for Designers | Noisy Decent Graphics: While the blog is aimed at designers overall, this post is about the current world economic recession and includes links to some good infographics to help understand it, as well a rather nice FAIL photo.
Digital Surveillance Event Recorder | Jaycar Electronics: There’s just got to be some cool uses for a gadget that comes with two infra-red video cameras and records a 10-second burst of low-res video every time something moves. And it costs less that AUD$300.
Resampled Space | BLDGBLOG: Amazing but probably impossible buildings, assembled thanks to some nifty photo editing.
Anything Looks Cooler with a NASA Logo | Flickr: Yes, even mundane things.
Ethics & Principles of Permaculture browse | Permaculture Business Guild: Bill Mollison published these principles in 1980 in Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual (Tagari Publications), but the “Principles for Functional Design” apply everywhere, I think.
Internet filtering and censorship forum UNSW 27 November 2008 | Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre: A free forum in Sydney later this month discusses Australia’s proposals for Internet filtering / censorship. I;ll be there.
Economics of Spam | Link: The paper “Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion”, details how researchers hacked into a spam network to measure its effectiveness. This post asks whether the technique of hacking into a spam botnet was ethical.
japanese bert | Flickr: There’s an uncanny resemblance between this chap and Australian television presenter Bert Newton.

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Space: we’ve still such a long way to go

Stilgherrian — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 01:59:02 +0000

This morning I watched the Space Shuttle Endeavor [sic] rocket into orbit on NASA TV. Exciting. But now I see this new photograph (above) of a planet found orbiting Fomalhaut, and realise we’re still only taking the tiniest of baby-steps into the universe.

I’m a child of the Space Age. When I was born, no-one had been outside the earth’s atmosphere. I was too young to be aware of the flights of Yuri Gararin or Alan Shepherd. But when Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong walked upon the Moon we got the day off school to watch the grainy video imagery — our rural school didn’t have enough TVs for everyone to see.

Today I watched quietly as Endeavor became a tiny blue dot in the empty black sky — oh so quickly! And yet… And yet in the full-sized Hubble Space Telescope imagery the newly-photographed planet Fomalhaut b is also just a faint dot.

25 light-years away.

Endeavour would take more than 900,000 years to get there at its low Earth orbit speed of 8 kilometres a second.

Tiny. Baby. Steps.

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Links for 02 July 2008

del.icio.us — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:13:18 +0000

Stilgherrian’s web links I’ve found for 02 July 2008, created automatically from internets.

China As An Island | Strange Maps: China has land borders with 14 other countries. And yet you should not think of China as particularly well-integrated with its neighbours. In fact, as shown in this dramatic map, you should rather consider China to be an island.
NASA's Moon Truck Goes for a Test Drive | Telstar Logistics: A prototype of a NASA lunar rover undergoing testing at the Moses Lake Sand Dunes in eastern Washington state.
Hyperpolitics (American Style) | viddler.com: The video of Mark Pesce's presentation at the Personal Democracy Forum 2008.
Asthma Weed | Sydney Weeds Committees: This is the nasty weed which keeps emerging in our garden and resists all efforts at eradication. Chemical warfare appears to be the only resort.

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Links for 26 May 2008 through 01 June 2008

del.icio.us — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 22:01:28 +0000

Stilgherrian’s links for 26 May 2008 through 01 June 2008, gathered semi-automatically and covering a disturbing range of topics:

NSLU2-Linux: Technical information for hacking the Linksys NSLU2 NAS device, along with the Synology DS101, the Iomega NAS100d, the D-Link DSMG600 and other ixp4xx-based devices with large attached storage.
Hacking WD MyBook World Ed: Western Digital's My Book World Edition network storage device is actually a little Linux RAID server. This Wiki has technical information on how to hack them.
Sarah Jessica Parker Looks Like A Horse: Well, she does. And here's the website. Proof that people have too much time on their hands.
A twittering experiment | eicolab: An interesting use Twitter, with a comment added by yours truly.
Friends, Enemies and My Army | Viddler.com: Another recent presentation by Mark Pesce, this one at the 2008 Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, on 25 May 2008. A nice trip through the power of Twitter, the "nuclear option", and the surprising influence of Josh Marshall's army.
Phoenix Lander “Talks” to Twitterers | NYTimes.com: Includes an interview with the NASA employee who's been playing the part of the Mars Phoenix spacecraft on Twitter (@MarsPhoenix).
Australian Strategic Policy Institute: "One for the feed reader", I've been told. I haven't explored this site yet.
A discussion paper on the singular use of “they”: This link looks like it solves this question forever. If only people read it…
Twitter Co-Opted by Users as Better SMS, Social Media Platform | URBEINGRECORDED: Yet another superb essay on the impact of Twitter.
The Gruen Transfer | ABC TV: A new TV series looking at the art and science of persuasion as used by the advertising industry. Much good stuff here.
Ern Malley | Wikipedia: Not exactly a new story, but I was recently reminded of this wonderful literary hoax from the 1940s.
Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part I | Hueniverse: A comprehensive but fairly technical explanation of the problems Twitter faces.
The Digital Media Revolution | YouTube: Mark Pesce, Technology Futurist speaks about the Digital Media Revolution at the SAGEM conference, April 2008, in Adelaide. Will the government heed his advice? In 5 parts, this links to part 1.
Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address | YouTube: An inspirational 15 mins about the importance of following your dream, even if the end result isn't clear. "You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking back."

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Enceladus from Cassini

Stilgherrian — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 06:33:00 +0000

Have I been too harsh on NASA? Last week the Cassini spacecraft zoomed past Saturn’s moon Enceladus and took these magnificent pictures. Hat-tip to the Bad Astronomy Blog.

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Remembering the Space Age: Arthur C Clarke dead at 90

Stilgherrian — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 02:40:48 +0000

Bugger. The Space Age ended today. Sir Arthur C Clarke, the grand master of science fiction, is dead at age 90. According to the BBC he died in Sri Lanka, his adopted home since 1956, from a cardio-respiratory attack.

Clarke is best-known, of course, for his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on the ~~1966~~ 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even today it’s visually stunning, a grand expression of 1960s technological confidence. Even today, the ending still makes no sense whatsoever, with or without LSD.

Everyone remembers that the computer HAL 9000 went mad and killed the crew. The real lesson is that HAL went mad because his masters had told him to lie, to cover up the mission’s true purpose. This Cold War-era fable about how paranoia corrupts the mind remains completely relevant in this age of The Continual War on Terror.

What Clarke should really be remembered for, however — and what could have made him a multi-billionaire — is suggesting the use of geostationary satellites for international telecommunications.

Clarke’s 1945 paper “Extra-Terrestrial Relays — Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?” sketched out the idea so thoroughly that it counts as “prior art” and no-one’s been able to gain patents ever since.

Apart from 33 novels, 13 short-story collections, TV programs and countless non-fiction works, Clarke was a regular letter-writer to New Scientist magazine. Sometimes he wrote about the ethics and politics of science and technology, but more often than not it was to point out that some newly-patented idea had already been described in one of his novels decades before. Not to boast, just to chuckle.

Sir Arthur is dead. The Space Age is dead.

At least the First Space Age is dead. The 1960s imperative “to boldly go” as imagined by visionaries like Clarke has congealed into a bloated, bureaucratic NASA which has, in the US at least, drained all the excitement from spaceflight.

Long live Space Age 2.0, funded not by governments asserting their fitness to rule the world, but by entrepreneurs like Sir Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic. Space will never be the same.

[A slightly different version of this story was published in Crikey today.]

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NASA prepares for new fake Moon landing

Stilgherrian — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:44:59 +0000

NASA preps robots for future fake moon landings, reports The Register. Thanks to BAB for the pointer.

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Shuttle a pile of crap

Stilgherrian — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 22:18:27 +0000

The Space Shuttle really is a pile of crap, isn’t it. A book I had back in the 1970s enthused that there’d be a flight every week. The Shuttle would be regular trucking service to orbit. Reality: The first Shuttle flight for 2007 was only the other day, and I hardly need to mention the disasters. Still, offer me a ticket and I’ll fly tomorrow. Though part of me suspects the sturdy Soyuz would be safer.

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Why the US space program is shite

Stilgherrian — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 12:33:36 +0000

Thanks for joining us. In the centre of the screen, wearing the white spacesuit — sorry, white Extra-Vehicular Mobility Unit — is Heidi Piper. This is her first Extra-Vehicular Activity in her brand new Extra-Vehicular Mobility Unit. Heidi’s current task is “remove aft solar array blanket box restraints”.

Judging by the loud clanging noises, followed by something falling off, Heidi’s task involves bashing something until it falls off.

No-one else seems bothered. I assume it’s OK to bash your space station until bits fall off.

You can’t quite see him, but up on the left is Joe Tanner. This is his sixth Extra-Vehicular Activity — oh, “spacewalk”, dammit! — so he gets to “mate the T5 to the J5″ on the P4 truss segment.

That’s is, Joe plugs in a data cable.

Joe plugs in several data cables, actually, along with six power cables. They’re all part of connecting the poetically-named “upper utility tray”. And each time it goes a little like this.

Joe: I am about to mate the T5 to the J5.

NASA Voice 1: Roger that, the T5 to the J5.

[Time passes.]

Joe: OK, I am mating the T5 to the J5.

NASA Voice 1: Copy that.

[Time passes.]

Joe: OK, I have mated the T5 to the J5.

NASA Voice 1: Roger, T5 to J5.

Joe: T5 to J5, copy that. T5 to J5.

NASA Voice 2: We copy that, Atlantis. T5 to J5.

Jewish Grandmother: Copy that, T5 to J5.

Choir and Archangels: Copy that, T5 to J5.

And then, in the background, you can just hear a faint sound. Thirty identical NASA-issue ball-point pens initial thirty identical NASA-issue checklists headed “International Space Station P4 Truss Assembly Upper Utility Tray, Part 16B: T5 to J5 Mating Procedure”. A slight grunt, and everybody turns the page.

Joe Tanner, as I say, plugs in several data cables on this EVA, along with six power cables. It’s pretty rivetting stuff.

Meanwhile, Heidi has moved on. Having deftly completed “remove aft solar array blanket box restraints”, she’s faced with her equally daunting second task: “remove forward solar array blanket box restraints”. The announcer reassures us that this is an identical procedure to her first task. And he’s right! More loud banging!

Joe moves on to the next cable, and that’s Part A done. Next, Part B. Yes, more cables to be plugged in.

Is this really what happened to “Space: The Final Frontier”? Some kind of auditor-led DIY Ikea On Mogadon?

Back in the days of Apollo 11, we all got a day off school to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon (Luna). “One small step for mumble mumble,” he said — accounts differ as to the exact wording. And then a silvery blur moved down towards the right-hand side of the screen. We took this to indicate that a man called Armstrong had walked upon the Moon.

Hell, we didn’t care about the poor quality! It’d been in the papers all week. We’d followed every moment in breathless anticipation. It’s the goddam Moon, for Christ’s sake! The Moon! We come in peace for all mankind!

But here in 2006, Heidi and Joe are an hour and a half ahead of schedule.

Huh? Ahead of schedule? You mean you’d planned for this to be slower? I should have been thrilled at Heidi “repositioning her portable foot restraint so that she has good access to her next task”, because this is the breathtaking pace of space exploration?

Screw this, I’m going to watch The Bill.

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Shuttle Atlantis live on NASA TV

Stilgherrian — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 22:52:45 +0000

You can watch the hot space action from STS-115 at www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/. Of course as I write this the astronauts are asleep for the next five hours, but they do have a camera pointing at the Earth, which is worth a look. And the commentator is doing such a sterling job she’d be at home on ABC Radio during a rained-out cricket match.