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Tuesday, February 04, 2003 |
 Space Shuttle Columbia, April 14, 1981. Yup, I'm pretty sure that this is a photo of Shuttle Mission STS-1: I was one of many eager press photogs standing about a mile from runway 23 at Edwards Air Force Base, near Rosamond, California, for the first-ever Shuttle landing. This was my big snap for the day. The shuttle landed at 10:20 AM: here's the whole mission profile. I would have developed the film on the spot, likely in a black cloth bag in the trunk of my Toyota - the Herald Examiner, where I was working at the time, was an afternoon, newstand-sale-newspaper. It was a 90-minute drive from Rosamond to downtown L.A. I would have tried to get the picture into the earliest PM edition I could (hence developing on site). The artifacts you see in the picture - the graininess and the uneven tones in the sky (under the nose) were caused by developing film in the desert - temperatures at Edwards AFB, situated in the Mojave Desert, get into the 90s, even in April, even mid-morning (temperatures overnight were a very different story). The developing time of Kodak D-76, my developer of preference in those days, was too short (about 1 minute at 90+ degrees vs. a normal 7-9 minutes at room temperature) to guarantee even development. It shows up most in evenly-toned areas, like sky. The 'hot' development means there's little detail in the shadow - black - areas: that's where the tiles, now suspect in Columbia's breakup Saturday, are situated. Lens I used was almost certainly a Nikkor 600mm with a 1.4x extender. Note the motion in the picture (see the hi res version): this was the first time I tried to track something moving around 200 MPH with a very long lens on a tripod (a Bogen - I still have it). I remember distinctly the two sonic booms: one from the nose, one from the elevator. Truth be known, I have been a total Shuttle freak: I begged my assignment editor to put me on every Shuttle landing (and they all landed at Edwards AFB in the early 80s), which he agreed to, mainly because I would willingly sleep overnight in the desert, and attend the interminable NASA briefings, just to be there. I didn't think it appropriate to publish this photo until today: I have been a very distant member of the NASA family, but a devoted one, nevertheless. I was last at KSC in April, thanks to colleague Dr. Kathy Clark, formerly NASA chief scientist, and classmate, astronaut, Lee Morin. This has been hard for everbody: but, like everyone who has been close to NASA, I feel great respect for the families of all who flew and worked on STS-107: the people close to the central mission of NASA, and on whom great grief and guilt will have fallen, for all their efforts. So here's my small tribute: a photo that cost me a night sleeping on the ground at Edwards. NASA people: all regards in this hard time, all respect for your efforts, all hope for solace, closure, and may Grace dictate when it's best that we all move on... [www.gulker.com - words and pictures from Silicon Valley]
7:46:53 PM 
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A Nation of Voyeurs
"Dazzlingly fast, vast, and precise, Google has made our lives appreciably easier. The first tool truly to make sense of the white noise that is the Internet, Google has become essential research for everyone from sales people calling on new accounts to single people taking another spin with blind-date roulette. It's reconnected long-lost biological brothers and battalion buddies. And who dials 411 anymore, when it's cheaper and faster on Google, and you don't have to explain to some headset-wearer in Terre Haute how to spell Worcester?...
'It's the collapse of inconvenience,' says Siva Vaidhyanathan, assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University. 'It turns out inconvenience was a really important part of our lives, and we didn't realize it.'
Google has quietly but unmistakably changed our expectations about what we can know about one another. But this search engine that fields 150 million queries a day is of no use in helping us determine how much information we deserve to know about one another, or how we should proceed once we know it. Should we confront friends, dates, or co-workers with the damning details we unearthed while cyber-snooping? Or should we say nothing?" [The Boston Globe Magazine]
Phil Wainewright also has an interesting Google story that shows just how far the search engine has encroached into our everyday thinking. [The Shifted Librarian]
7:44:42 PM
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pr0nt1n65: hyper-pixelated porn images --> art. Snipped from Mt. Molelog:
 pr0nt1n65: Very low-res oil paintings that, from a distance, appear to be pornographic. Up close, they're just squares of color, though. So where's the smut -- on the canvas, or in our heads? If the answer is the latter, then where's the smut on a computer or TV screen, which is just the same thing, but with better resolution? There are now prints available (hallelujah!). Mind you, these are "giclee prints", which seems to be art-world speak for "ink-jet printout" -- so, these are high-resolution automated digitally pixellated versions of low-resolution manually analog pixellated versions of porn scenes.
"When I was 8 or 9 years old, I acquired a split beaver magazine. You can imagine my disappointment when, upon examination of the photos with a microscope, I found that all I could see was dots."
Link to images (they're explicit, but work-safe 'cause they're all chunky-pixelated!) Discuss (Via Reverse Cowgirl's Blog) [Boing Boing Blog]
This just strikes me as a cool idea. I wonder what other type of pixelated images will be next. Maybe a Mosaic picture made up of a bunch of these types of pictures.
7:42:58 PM
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TI Boosts Wireless Chipset Portfolio. Texas Instruments has unveiled a handful of new wireless chipsets, promising improved performance among its industry-leading power plants for mobile phones, PDAs and other devices running on advanced wireless networks. [osOpinion]
7:33:21 PM
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Fatal Overdose Caught on Webcam and IRC. Helen Kennedy recently reported in the New York Daily News about the January 12th death of a man in front of a webcam while chatting on the #shroomery IRC channel. As Brandon Vedas mixed pills, alcohol and pot, some egged him on while others tried to get him to stop. From the article: Vedas died online as a crowd of virtual onlookers egged him to "eat more!" A chilling record of the Jan. 12 chat reads like an Internet version of the notorious 1964 Kew Gardens, Queens, stabbing of Kitty Genovese as her neighbors watched from their windows. On January 21, the users of MeFi discussed this online. The next day, they were asked to take the thread down. This sparked another thread on whether or not to delete the posts. A link to the IRC logs and Brandon's obituary is also available. [kuro5hin.org]
What the fuck has society become?
7:33:01 PM
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Lord Chesterfield. "Never seem more learned than the people you are with. Wear your learning like a pocket watch and keep it hidden. Do not pull it out to count the hours, but give the time when you are asked." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]
7:31:26 PM
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Tiny Whiskers Make Huge Memory Storage.
When we hear about ever-increasing disk storage capacity, we usually read about new engraving technologies. Not here. Charles Choi has the story.
New, tiny magnetic sensors could help break a technical barrier to ushering in the next generation of computer disk storage capacity, researchers reported Friday.
The sensors, filaments of nickel thinner than a wavelength of visible light, are capable of detecting extremely weak magnetic fields.
Although it is already possible to increase hard drive storage capacity many times, the process has lagged because technology has not existed to read the data signals, researcher Harsh Chopra, a materials scientist at the State University of New York in Buffalo, told United Press International.
Here comes the fascinating part of the article.
In findings to be published in next July's issue of the journal Physical Review B, Chopra and physicist Susan Hua described sensors they have developed that are both small and sensitive to improve the density of hard drives.
The sensors are actually microscopic whiskers of nickel only a few atoms wide. Each of the filaments can read infinitesimal magnetic fields and at room temperature can detect a 100,000 percent change in voltage.
For comparison, he explained, imagine normal magnetic sensors can read a signal that begins with a strength of 1 and swings between an "off" reading at 0.8 and "on" at 1.2. The new sensors can read a range that swings between minus 1000 and plus 1000. That degree of sensitivity means terabits of data -- or trillions of bits -- could be crammed into a square inch of disk space.
Don't expect to see these devices anytime soon: "The normal cycle for [such technologies] from discovery to implementation is about six to eight years," Chopra said.
Source: Charles Choi, United Press International, February 3, 2003 [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]
7:29:36 PM
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Transparent clothes. Tokyo researchers have developed "transparent" clothing which crudely paints the clothing on one side of you with the scenery on the other side of you.
The team has said that the system is still less than perfect. Unless an observer is looking in roughly the same direction as the video camera, the clothes will not be a perfect match with the background.
The claimed uses are for things like surgery, allowing a surgeon to effectively see through their hands. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
7:24:55 PM
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BuddySpace.
Geo-contextual interface - on a smaller scale.
BuddySpace.  Now that the notion of presence is beginning to infuse our electronic communication, an inevitable next question is: presence where? Marc Eisenstadt, chief scientist at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University in the UK, wrote to show me a Jabber-based system called BuddySpace that locates presence indicators on maps. In the map shown here, Marc (top row, third photo from right) is present in the office, but idle. Martin Dzbor (bottom row, far right), KMI's "chief presence architect," is present and active. And that little dot on the US map, in New England, is me, present and active. ... [Jon's Radio]
The first time I heard of those 'radio' badges that broadcast where you are - was in the context of Xerox PARC. Apparently behavior patterns changes - when people know that others know where they are. There was only one 'safe spot' that the badges didn't work from - the toilet. 
Then I heard that - when you visit Bill Gates' mansion - they hand you a badge - that not only keeps track of where you are, but also enables the 'dynamic' paintings to change to suit your preferences and tastes. Kewl!
Now we have 'enhanced presence management' from these Brits! Totally Kewl! It's built with Jabber and cleanly integrates into the existing IM world.
This is clearly a major piece of the 'digital lfiestyle'. Of course - the only trick is to us this sort of technology for GOOD rather than some Big Brother nightmare.
There are so many great applications for this - from managing and running a meatspace event - where it's imperative that you keep track of where everyone is - and making sure they're doing their job or tasks.
Or for kids - at school. We'd be able to let them run around more freely if we could just track their movements.
But one things for sure - it would sure fit into the concept of multimedia conversations!
Here's some of what Marc [Eisenstadt] says about BuddySpace:
The nice thing with BuddySpace is the 'feelgood' factor: like returning to the office late at night and seeing a few key lights on, knowing that certain people are in... more compelling with an office layout rather than a list...even better is your perceptual ability to spot the ABSENCE (or 'busy state', etc) of someone at a glance on a map you know, rather than having to scan a list...even a well-organised hierarchy is hard to scan rapidly.
[back to Jon Udell]
Cool! It's going to get even more interesting when location becomes dynamic. We had that for a while, with phones, when caller ID meant not only "who" but also "where." Then, with cellphones, the "where" went away. We'll get that information back soon, and when we project it onto maps, collaboration in virtual teams will seem a little less abstract. [Marc's Voice] I can't even react to this. Hurts my head. [The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty]
7:22:40 PM
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More digits: 802.16a approved: The 802.16 working group at the IEEE deals with wireless metropolitan area networks (WMANs) which are typically used for back haul, or aggregating many customer premises connections into a stream sent back to a high-speed backbone. The 802.16 group has focused on licensed applications, although its work is now broadly applicable to the 5 GHz band. Note at the end of the article Alvarion is moving its proprietary 5 GHz gear into compliance with 802.16 for better industry-wide adoption. [80211b News]
7:18:29 PM
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© Copyright 2003 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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