Science
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A jovian black eye
When I read that an impact had been spotted on Jupiter, I figured it was somewhere other than the equator, which would be a bulls-eye. Even Shoemaker-Levy, a huge comet broken into a string of pieces, slammed like a series of machine gun bullets into Jupiter near its south pole. But this one was bigger.… Continue reading
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Weather and Air France 447
Check out two very provocative Baltimore Weather Examiner pieces by Tony Pann: Air France 447 electrical problems and the South Atlantic Anomaly and Air France 447 mystery, LOST, and The Bermuda Triangle. The latter is not as goofy as its headline suggests. Tony is a degreed meteorologist and his unpacking of weather arcana, especially in… Continue reading
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Pano Rama Mania
We are severely into Pano. It’s an amazing free (woops, $2.99) app for the iPhone that lets you take panoramic shots — first by helping you line up one shot after another, and second by stitching them together remarkably well. The above is the first of two shot at Harvard’s Old Yard. I made small… Continue reading
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Beyond ownership
Tristan Louis asks, Is ownershp passe? Or, from his first paragraph, “…our ownership society seems to be started a slide towards a new mode of being: a rental society.” He uses the examples of Netflix, Apple, Kindle and build vs. buy vs. rent choices at the enterprise level, and suggests, “The change in our relationship… Continue reading
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East Coasters, look up
Glaring Rocket Launch Could Surprise East Coast Residents Tuesday Evening reads the headline of a post by Joe Rao at Space.com. In it he points to a video I taped in 2005 with my kid of a similar launch on the west coast. You can watch it here. The launch will take place on Wallops… Continue reading
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Getting real about fixing health care
I’m listening right now to On Point*, where the topic is Pushing E-Health Records. The only case against electronic health records (EHR, aka electronic medical recordsk, or EMR) is risk of compromised privacy. Exposure goes up. The friction involved in grabbing electronic medical records is lower than that involved in grabbing paper ones, especially with… Continue reading
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Origins
Good of Vanity Fair to interview some of the Net’s and the Web’s fathers and sons (alas, no mothers or daughters), in a piece titled How the Web was Won. On vision: Leonard Kleinrock: Licklider was a strong, driving visionary, and he set the stage. He foresaw two aspects of what we now have. His… Continue reading
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There is no try, cont’d
Props to Joe Andrieu for pointing out the Cult of Done, for which I am constitutionally disqualified, but wish I were not. Why? Because I: 1) Bite off more than I can eschew, 2) Keep more balls on the floor than anybody I know, and 3) Plan for my epitaph to read “He was almost… Continue reading
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Sums of differences
Here at SXSW there are two conferences happening on the same floors: Interactive and Film. Interactive is mostly computing geeks. Film is mostly film geeks. The main visual difference: tatoos and laptops. In the film crowd there is a high tatoo/laptop ratio. In the interactive crowd, there is a high laptop/tatoo ratio — lthough many… Continue reading
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Top of the fool chain
If you want to keep something in orbit around the Earth, you need it to be flying parallel to the surface at speeds exceeding those of bullets. Get high enough above atmospheric drag, and stuff will continue to orbit as long as the moon does. The moon has been around for 4,530,000,000,000 years, give or… Continue reading
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Lesson du jour
Love this line, from Dave: I have no idea how these guys got the idea that they could save the news industry by becoming the tech industry. Dave’s the only guy I know who reliably schools both the journalism and the tech industries, often at the same time. Well done. Continue reading
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Wanted: à la carte HDTV
So our Verizon FiOS home bill has been about $160/month. We were looking to chop that down a bit when I called Verizon this morning. To put it as simply as possible, it’s complicated. What I care about most is keeping the 20/20Mbps down/up Internet service. That’s $69.99/mo. What I don’t care about is POTS,… Continue reading
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And porn soon followed
Says here that sex came along at least 365 billion million years ago. Continue reading
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Magma roots
The problem with “grass roots” as a metaphor is that it reduces its contributors to the miniscopic. Not microscopic, because then you couldn’t see them without a microscope. But miniscopic, meaning they’re small. You have to get down on all fours to eyeball them and say hi. So I’ve been thinking about alternative meaphors where… Continue reading
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Window blobs
Form the inside of a de-iced plane, it looks like they poured clear syrup all over it. Or so I was reminded when waiting to take off from O’Hare on Saturday night after a snowstorm. What I found, when I tried to shoot pictures through this rippled ooze, was some fun photographic effects. The shot… Continue reading
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Q & Hey
What’s the tweeting protocol? An inquiry at Linux Journal. Lots of good and helpful responses. And thumbs up to Dave’s Where is Twitter’s WordPress? Continue reading
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As does the flat Earth
Great mind-opening post by David Reed: …the policy issue is that such systems for multiplexing such EM fields don’t fit the “law of the land” regarding sharing the medium. So, like UWB and spread spectrum underlay, and white spaces, all that capacity will evaporate in attempting to fit the technology into the procrustean bed… Continue reading