To the consternation of some privacy advocates, Google unveils its funky new satellite map feature. I’m not too worried yet — the images are apparently between 6-12 months old…but wait, isn’t that Berk and I frolicing in Riverside Park? (Direct link via Supercres.) Update: In keeping with the meme (seen at Girlhacker), here’s home from above. This satellite image is at least a year old, as attested by the missing Columbia School for Social Work across the street — it’s been completed since last summer.
Tag: Tech
Life on Mars, Death from Space.
“I’d give it a 50-50 shot that you could find it somewhere underground. But then that’s a guess.” The NYT surveys the current thinking about prospects of Martian life, and how astrobiologists plan to go about proving or disproving its existence. (To wit, the European Space Agency plans to send an tricked-up rover to the red planet after 2011…hopefully, it’ll get past the Dubya Pentagon’s rash of Moonraker weapons.) Update: In somewhat related news (to the second story), Slate‘s Fred Kaplan assesses the Pentagon’s overly enthusiastic vision for ground-based future tech.
The F-Chip.
“I might as well be reading tabloids out of the grocery store…Anything to get a rise out of the viewer and to reinforce certain retrograde notions.” Sam Kimery, a former Republican precinct captain, builds and markets a device that blocks FOX News from infecting your television. Looks like Christmas will be easy this year.
We are Dancing Mechanic.
“In the quest for artificial intelligence, the United States is perhaps just as advanced as Japan. But analysts stress that the focus in the United States has been largely on military applications. By contrast, the Japanese government, academic institutions and major corporations are investing billions of dollars on consumer robots aimed at altering everyday life, leading to an earlier dawn of what many here call the ‘age of the robot.‘” And to think I was geeking out over the Roomba just a few weeks ago.
Abe Lincoln and the World of Tomorrow.
“Bob Rogers, BRC’s founder and chairman…draws two circles, labeled ‘scholarship’ and ‘showmanship,’ on a sheet of yellow paper. The circles overlap, but only slightly. That tiny slice of shared space, he says, is where the museum needs to be.” By way of Dangerous Meta, the Washington Post examines the mild controversy surrounding high-tech exhibits at the Abe Lincoln library. If BRC is consulting a sizable number of outside historians on the scholarship, as they seem to be doing, then what’s the problem? Gimmicks like Tim Russert introducing 1860 campaign ads are a bit facile, sure, but if they help get more laypeople intrigued in Lincoln’s life and times (and don’t unduly misrepresent the history), I’m all for it. Besides, my feeling is, if historians don’t get behind such efforts, they’re going to happen anyway, and with much less historical rigor to them.
Near-sighted.
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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.