It didn’t look good before, but now it seems the Hubble’s days are really numbered. NASA, who otherwise comes out ok under the new Bush budget, nevertheless cancelled plans to service the telescope by robot (strangely enough, before the engineers in charge could even present their work.) I have a bad feeling about this.
Category: Science
The Hubble Hamstrung.
By way of Blivet and 20-20 Hindsight, the Bush administration announces plans to decommission the Hubble Space Telescope, possibly as an opening salvo in a game of Budgetary Chicken. Grrr…if I give my life-changing $300 tax rebate back, can we keep the Hubble?
A Day to Forget.
Be careful out there, y’all: A British psychologist has run the numbers and deemed that today, Jan. 24, is the most depressing day of the year. Hmmm. It’s early yet, but I can think of worse. Perhaps someone should acquaint the good professor with last November’s election, or, for that matter, Valentine’s Day.
Can you hear me now?
Just skip over this entry if you don’t feel like reading a long-winded customer complaint. Still here? Ok, Verizon Wireless is seriously annoying me. I don’t use my phone for very much — I’m not a chatter by any means, and my telephone conversation skills are legendarily lousy (Ask any of my exes.) Nevertheless, I’ve been using a Palm-Phone hybrid for many years now, and have thus forever lost the ability to memorize nine-digit numbers. So, given that my well-worn Kyocera QCP6035 is on its very last legs these days — I drop calls constantly and my friends and family often sound like they’re underwater — all I want to do is replace it with a spiffy new Treo 650, available on Sprint since November. But Verizon will have nothing doing. They keep trying to ply me with a Treo 600 — the outdated model with cruddy resolution and low battery life — which Verizon obtained a good year after its competitors.
Really, y’all, why wouldn’t you rush to offer your customers the newest phones and assorted gadgets available? (Verizon says its due to their rigorous testing procedures, but most people seem to think it’s because they want to disable the Treo’s Bluetooth functionality, so as to hawk further their lame Get it Now service.) Hmmm…what to do? I’m thinking of switching providers, but Verizon (nee Bell Atlantic/NYNEX) kinda owns this town. Or I might try out this widely-circulated 650 hack, if I thought my soldering skills were up to snuff. We’ll see…I can probably put up with another month or so of terrible phone reception, but after that I’m resorting to drastic measures. Verizon really needs to get on the ball with the new technology. (I’m not the only ticked one, as evidenced by this petition.)
Babylon by Bus (and Chopper).
“Not only is what the American forces are doing damaging the archaeology of Iraq, it’s actually damaging the cultural heritage of the whole world.” Archaeologists of the British museum fault US forces for damaging what’s left of ancient Babylon, currently a base for US and coalition marines. While our troops did originally work to prevent the looting of artifacts, later attempts to construct parking lots and a helipad at the site apparently caused all kinds of needless wear and tear.
Titan A.E.
Score one for the ESA: The Huygens probe successfully lands on Titan and broadcasts images from the surface for five hours (a.k.a. much longer than expected.) (See, NASA? It’s much easier to pull these types of missions off when you don’t have to convert from standard to metric and back.) And now, for Europa… Update: 2020 Hindsight has done an exemplary job today of covering the details and implications of the landing.
War without Mercy.
As reported by The Digital Bits, the upcoming hi-def format war began in earnest at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas: As the HD-DVD camp announced a slew of titles for 4Q 2005, Blu-Ray signed on more powerful allies, including EA and Vivendi Universal. It’s gonna get ugly soon, folks, ’cause one of these formats is going the way of Betamax and DivX. Right now, it seems Blu-Ray is probably the better product (66% higher capacity), but HD-DVD is closer to cornering the market. Either way, I doubt I’ll be buying all that many DVDs until the new format is chosen, Highlander-style.
Rebel Fleet.
“‘Space is virgin territory,’ Branson says, trying out a prospective marketing line and shooting another grin. ‘Is that 21st-century enough for you?’” In this month’s cover story, Wired checks in with Richard Branson and his ambitions for Virgin Galactic. I am so loving this space race among the mega-rich.
Angel in America.
“A few years ago I started down this path of creating this 3D camera system and once I started working in that, I couldn’t imagine myself going back and shooting with the camera that I used before. It just seemed like going back from a car to a bicycle, and I don’t want to ride a bicycle again, so the question is, at what point can I use the kind of imaging that we’re able to do now for a feature film?” From the Rebel Billionaire to the King of the World, James Cameron (fresh off Aliens of the Deep), talks up 3D cinema and his next project, a live-action Battle Angel Alita.
Distance Learning.
By way of Cliopatria, Google announces an agreement to digitize the holdings of many of the world’s great libraries, including those of Harvard, Oxford, Michigan, Stanford, and the NYPL. My, that should be enormously useful for researchers the world over once they get it up and running. That noise you heard in the background was millions of historians’ frequent flier miles suddenly crying out in terror and then suddenly silenced.