“I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.” Via my sis-in-law Lotta, GOP Senator Ted “Bridge to Nowhere” Stevens (R-AK) seems more than slightly confused about the functioning of the Internets, to use Dubya’s parlance.
Category: Tech
Warren Peace.
“You have an innovator and a world business leader — the combination of the two making such a huge personal investment of time and wealth, it does raise the bar and raise the profile of philanthropy..” A tip of the hat to Warren Buffett for his recent decision to turn his considerable assets to philanthropy and help the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation better our world. “The foundation, already the nation’s largest with a $30 billion endowment that has largely come from Bill Gates, will hand out more per year than the gross domestic product of nearly 40 countries, including Mongolia, Togo and Zimbabwe.“
Seed Capital.
Authors of postapocalyptic sci-fi yarns, take note: Norway has announced it will host a post-Doomsday seed bank on the Svalbard archipelago. “While the facility will be fenced in and guarded, Svalbard’s free-roaming polar bears, known for their ferocity, could also act as natural guardians, according to the Global Diversity Trust.“
Digital Empire.
“It costs about $1,200 for a print and about $200 for a digital print. So what you do is charge the distributor the same $1,200 they would ordinarily be charged, and $1,000 of it goes into a pot that eventually pays for all the projectors and everything. In about five years you would basically reconvert the entire industry.” TIME‘s Richard Corliss discusses Indy 4, the Star Wars TV show, and the future of cinema with a “retired” George Lucas.
On Avatar and Mars.
More James Cameron news: Harry of AICN has a wide-ranging conversation with the director which, if you can get past the usual Knowlesisms, reveals that Project 880 is in fact Avatar, and that Cameron has been working with NASA on a “Live Video Stereo Motion Image” (3-D) camera for the next Mars Rover.
Slip the Surly Bonds.
In remembrance of STS-51L, a.k.a. the Challenger accident, twenty years ago today.
Googlarians unite.
“What’s going on? Google has become the new ground zero for the ‘other’ culture war. Not the one between Ralph Reed and Timothy Leary, but the war between Silicon Valley and Hollywood; California’s cultural civil war. At stake are two different visions of what might best promote authorship in this country. One side trumpets the culture of authorial exposure, the other urges the culture of authorial control.” University of Virginia Law professor Tim Wu surveys the controversy over Google Print, and makes a cautious plea for writers and academics to get behind the project.
Houston, we’ve had a problem.
“‘It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path,’ Griffin said. ‘We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can.'” In an interview with USA Today, NASA head Michael Griffin calls the Space Shuttle and ISS programs mistakes. Hmmm, interesting. This article reminded me of a quote I’ve seen attributed to Jerry Pournelle: “I always knew I’d live to see the first man walk on the Moon. I never dreamed I’d see the last.“
Alpha Fight.
“It’s a horrible precedent, allowing the subject of an entry determine what can and cannot be written about them. It would be one thing if the slanderous and innaccurate entries from one particularly psychotic fan were allowed to go through and remain in place, but the entire Wikipedia project has shown that self-policing is it’s greatest strength.” By way of LinkMachineGo, longtime and often-controversial comic writer-artist John Byrne goes to war over his Wikipedia entry. (Comparison of the two entries here.)
The Apollo Creed.
“‘We must deal with our short-term problems while not sacrificing our long-term investments,’ Griffin said. ‘The space program is a long-term investment in our future.'” While nodding to the funding issues created by Katrina, NASA unveils its ambitious plans to return to the moon by 2018. The plan, involving a lunar-lander like CEV that can carry 4 to 6 astronauts, basically seems to be a hybrid of the Space Shuttle and “Apollo on Steroids,” and has been designed with future missions to Mars in mind. In general, I’ve been impressed with NASA head Michael Griffin despite Dubya’s faulty emphasis on space-weapons (and I generally agree with his take on NASA funding), so if he thinks this rocket-hybrid is the way to go to get to the moon and beyond, I’m all for it.