Ex-NASA Official Pleads Guilty in Contracts Case, WS Journal
"A former high-ranking National Aeronautics and Space Administration official pleaded guilty in Mississippi to designing contracts that netted him more than $270,000 in illegal profits. Liam P. Sarsfield is a former chief deputy engineer in Washington, D.C. ... Mr. Sarsfield will be sentenced June 24. He pleaded guilty to one charge of acts affecting a personal financial interest."
The attempted bombing of Flight 253 last Christmas was thwarted by passengers, thankfully. But what if he had been able to get the bomb detonated? Not what you'd expect, actually. Updated: There's some clarification regarding the pressurization on the plane.
The BBC did a test on an old decomissioned 747, putting a dummy with the same type and amount of explosives found on the underwear bomber. As you can see in the above video, the flexibility of the outside of the frame allowed it to absorb the blast. If the bomb had gone off, the plane would have still been able to fly and land.
Of course, the damage inside the plane still would have been horrific. But it's nice to know that the trusty 747 can stand up to such abuse. [BBC via PopSci]
Update: Just like Gizmodo's readers, BBC's readers questioned how accurate this experiment was since it took place on the ground and not in the air, with the plane's cabin pressurized. Here's the clarification BBC added as a result:
Some readers have questioned the validity of the experiment given that the plane was tested on the ground. The programme-makers gave this response:
At the time of the attempted detonation, Flight 253 was descending rapidly and its altitude has been estimated to be around 10,000ft.
At that height the difference in pressure inside and outside the plane would not have been great enough significantly to affect the explosion.
So the explosion team ruled that the decommissioned plane's lack of doors was not a factor in the test.
With this quantity of explosive, the peak pressure and impulse are over quickly and decay rapidly over distance. The doors were sufficiently far away that the overpressure would have dissipated before it reached them.
I have a 1994 Vauxhall Astra which despite being well past the UK government's 'scrap by' date has only done 73,000 miles and is a clean and normally reliable car.
This morning it developed a fault however. Whenever I go much past 30 mph the alternator warning light starts flic
As I get started writing about energy, I’m interested to get a sense of what readers are most interested to discuss…
Wind?
Solar?
Hydrogen Fuel Cells?
Cellulosic Biofuels?
Nuclear?
Oil?
Algae?
Tidal Power?
Corn Ethanol?
Coal?
Fossil Fuels?
Natural Gas?
Offshore Drilling?
The relationship to climate change?
The economy?
Jobs?
Water?
The list could go on and on, so let’s start a thread of your questions and get the ball rolling… Which technologies do you think hold the most promise?
Dear Friends.
Hope, u all are well and busy in your professional life..
While connecting a CT, the output of secondary is shorted and grounded... but my question is that... are the CTs internally shorted or not????
Regards
Jawwad Siddique
Theoretically, this RGB lamp concept could mix 16 million color variations, but really, we'd be happy enough with seven in this shot. [macmeier and dailytonic via mocoloco]
With over six million views in six days, OK Go's video for "This Too Shall Pass" is the latest in their unprecedented string of runaway YouTube hits. Lead singer Damian Kulash shared OK Go's video philosophy—and history—with Gizmodo.
Q: At this point, OK Go may have the best track record of anyone at creating these incredible viral music videos. Why are yours able to stand out?
A: I think it has become increasingly clear to us, as we have chased our most exciting ideas, that there's been a dissolution of the distribution system for music. That seems really depressing when you see that records aren't selling, there's no way to make any money, the system's falling apart. But if the system itself is falling apart, then so are the rules wrought by it. Videos evolved in this very restrictive environment of MTV. There were only maybe 100 that would play at any time, and labels weren't willing to invest in them. So now that the system is falling apart, there's also no reason to stick within the confines of the definitions that were built up during that system. This sounds heady and pretentious, but it means for us the ability to chase our most compelling ideas. We don't have to think so much into the box of "Will this song work on this radio format?" There's an infinite world of possible audiences out there for whatever you're making now.
It's not like we sat down one day and the brain trust came up with idea for "This Too Shall Pass." Tim [Nordwind, the bass player] and I have known each other since we were 12, and it's always been the animating passion of our lives to make fun projects together. Everything from making home videos to recording songs. So the fact that the band got signed and gets to make records is all well and good, but that's all just a part of our creative relationship. Now that we have an outlet for these other things, all the better. The video for "A Million Ways" [below] was originally just a practice run for a live show. When that catches fire… We're now in a position where we don't see restrictions on what we can do at all.
Q: So "A Million Ways" wasn't even supposed to be a video at first? How'd you stumble onto that dance?
A: Before we were even signed, we were all living in Chicago and there was this incredible public access show called Chic-a-GoGo. It's like a lo-fi Soul Train. You bring a five year old in and an art student with a gorilla neck and everybody has a dance party. We only had one song at that point. We got a chance to perform there, which was great, but it was so low budget that they couldn't record our audio. We decided if we're going to lip sync let's swing for the fences, and we came up with this totally ludicrous dance routine to the only song we'd at that point recorded ["C-C-C-Cinnamon Lips"].
Tim worked at NPR at the time, and Ira Glass was a fan. He took us on tour as his opening act for "This American Life," and we kept the dance routine.
Rock shows are such a known quantity. The band does this, the audience does that, and there's a particular range of emotions people go through. But when you bring something people don't expect, it really shakes it up and is very different and weird and fun.
As for the dance for "A Million Ways," we'd come out with our second record and we didn't want to do the same dance that we'd done for our first. My sister choreographed a new one for us, and we worked on it in our backyard. The video was a practice tape, but there was something so funny and awkward and weird about it that we just sent it around to friends. Then it suddenly had 500,000 hits, which was more records than we'd ever sold.
I truly and honestly did not believe that numbers close to that video's were achievable again. A lot of it was dependent on YouTube being brand new at the time, and people discovering the service when the video came out.
Q: Do you feel pressure now for every video to go viral? Especially one that took as much time and effort as "This Too Shall Pass"?
If "This Too Shall Pass" could have a broader footprint than "A Million Ways" or "Here It Goes Again" did, that's great. But that's definitely not our intention. From our perspective, the upshot of these things being successful is the ability to do a lot more of them in the future. We've done a lot of videos in the last few years. I'm definitely happy with the video of "WTF?" and this latest one, but when these videos do well it makes it so much easier to get the other ideas we've conceived done. Saying "I'd love to do this thing [in a video] with six cars" is tough, but now it's more likely that someone will actually give us six cars. It's less that they're designed for viralness and more that the operating principle of our creative life is chasing down those ideas.
Q: Where did "This Too Shall Pass" come from? Do you consider it a continuation of your previous efforts or a jump forward?
A: "This Too Shall Pass" is a combination of a bunch of things. Making the treadmill video ["Here It Goes Again"] and the wallpaper one ["Do What You Want"] after that, I just got really obsessed with these contingent systems. Looking at choreography not as dance or movement but as a performance or a system that requires lots of disparate elements to work in perfect synchrony, or sometimes imperfect semi-synchrony. I was thinking a lot about loosely choreographed pieces. What sort of systems can you do that aren't specifically dance, but you get the effect that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, because everything works just where it should. Rube Goldberg machines are also, I think, universally magical.
Our label, bless their moronic hearts, was given our record nine months ago. It kept getting pushed back. We basically wound up with several months of our lives to just get in trouble. If we'd had to go into promo land and get on tour we wouldn't have time to do this kind of stuff. Basically I got home when the record was done and wrote down my dream list of videos. This whole project started with a two-paragraph description that I put down online as a job post, essentially. I asked for two creative engineers, because I figured that's about what it would take. Two engineers, and a couple of months. It ended up being more like 60 engineers, and five months of work.
Q: The set looks like a walking death trap. Did anyone get hurt, or were there any close calls?
The camera man was actually hit by the giant blue barrel that falls from the ceiling. You see the camera takes jolt at the end, right around the time the airplanes take off. That's the big blue barrel running into him. Otherwise, there were a few bumps and scrapes and bruises. Brett got hit by the bowling ball when it didn't stay on the ramp once. But none of the super dangerous things every hurt anyone, that I know of.
In terms of putting ourselves in harm's way, what makes these things exciting is the experience quality of it. The essential element of this would be lost if we made a film that depicted all these components but didn't actually have them. I can think of other music videos that show Rube Goldberg machines, but they're all carefully edited things. It loses the idea of being there for the people doing it or the people watching it. I pushed the design team to make the ways the machine treats us stranger, rougher. I was hoping the part where I get rocketed across the room would be a catapult. The professional circus riggers who set that up said we couldn't do that. I was pretty insistent, but they were very clear that no, making you airborne is going to hurt you. And I was like, don't people do this all the time? And they said sure, there are stunt men who train for years and/or do this with a lot of CG. I wanted to do it, but apparently this is as dangerous as it gets.
Q: Wait… you had circus riggers on-set? What other professionals came together to help build this thing?
A: It was such an incredible group of people. The doors that fall at the end were designed by a rigger/builder guy who everyone called "The Pirate." His mains source of income is working on longships, so he's actually literally a seaman. The person who painted them is the guy who designed the most recent Coke bottle. It was a crazy group of people. The reason we got that spread is we didn't walk into USC and ask for their brightest engineers. We posted this stuff on the MindShare Labs list. I think they're called Syyn Labs now. They're basically a community of nerdy, creative folks in Los Angeles. Anybody who was wont to go to a lecture series as a drinking venue had access to this. Basically anybody who sees the smart/fun/creative side of engineering.
Q: Why such emphasis on "old-school physics" and practical effects instead of CG?
A: On the basic level, this whole project is only exciting because it is real. It's not a labor of love for anyone to go make a commercial. This is an art project for all these people. If it ain't the real thing, it's not worth it. They're not there to make a video that promotes a band. They're there to make this awesome project. Any time someone suggested a way to do something easier, I gently pushed them away from it. What makes Rube Goldberg machines so universal is very hard to describe and very easy to lose. If you make it failproof, the thing completely loses its magic.
Q: Would you say that's how you've historically approached your videos?
A: Across our videos in general, it's not really a requirement but it's something that attracts me. I once wrote out a list of 20 things that make a good video. One of them is that it's something that anyone watching could, with enough time, have done themselves. Treadmills and choreography and all the things in "This Too Shall Pass," none of those are specialized access. A broken piano costs like 70 bucks. It's not like you have to be an engineer to get that.
Look, we were working with engineers from NASA. Three people who worked on the Mars Rover worked on this machine. And it was wonderful getting people to stop using the specialized part of their skill and get them to use the inspired part. A lot of times I had to explain what "magic" was and what they weren't allowed to do. You want to use optical gates? Okay, but it has to be followable for the audience. What about lasers? You can't use something from your lab you worked in, but you can use a laser pointer from a gas station. What if you dissected a Blu-ray player? Fine, but only as long as people can tell it's from a Blu-ray player. You'd be surprised how much communication it takes.
Q: Any parts in particular stand out where you could've been spared a lot of trouble given a CG or manual assist?
A: Almost every point in there could have been cheated. There's no way to cheat the table I'm sitting on in the beginning. I suppose you could maybe put together that machine and then animate the balls but that would've been incredibly difficult. Almost everything else would have been a lot easier with a manual cheat or CG cheat. The timing on everything was critical.
Take for instance the sunrise contraption, the umbrella that comes up as the sun. The timing delay between the sun coming, the flowers coming up, and the birds coming down—we could have just triggered all that stuff electronically or manually. The way it was actually done is changing the fulcrum of the 2x4s that those things were spinning on, so the weights on the end would spin around more slowly. A hammer gets hit on the fulcrum on the back, and by changing where that hammer was, you change the delay until the release of the flowers. That kind of stuff, there's no reason we couldn't have cheated all this, but the 60 people who built this thing wouldn't have had the challenge and the satisfaction of the finished product.
Q: So what's next? Do you feel pressure to keep topping yourselves?
Mostly I'm just excited because I think this makes it more likely that we'll be able to do more in the future. Finding people who will help us pay for some of these things should be a lot easier right now. And finding collaborators. As wonderful as the team was, there's no way that those people—no matter how compelling an internet posting I'd put up—there's no way they would've signed up to do this if we hadn't already done the treadmills. The success of any particular project is that rather than lifting the bar and creating pressure to come up with new ideas, it opens you up to more and more of them. Now it's more likely that when we call to find an anti-gravity chamber in NASA, it'll happen.
Q: Ha. Is that something we can expect to see at some point?
A: Oh, man. Weightlessness would be the final frontier, I think.
Want to hang out with stormtroopers from the 501st, sword fighters from the medieval and Renaissance eras, MC Frontalot, and innocent bystanders attending the South By Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas? Then come to our party!
SEE the clashing of swords! HEAR the nerdcore stylings of MC Frontalot! DRINK free booze!
Time Bender starts at 8 PM on March 13 and is 21+. No exceptions.
You won't want to miss the brief sword fighting demonstration at 9 PM, featuring fighters from the awe-inspiring High Fantasy Society, and Association for Renaissance Martial Arts. And you definitely won't want to miss MC Frontalot at 10 PM.
We'll be located at the lovely Pure Volume House, 504 Trinity St., Austin TX, and will be guarded by members of the local Texas garrison of the 501st Legion (of stormtroopers!).
You must RSVP - that's Texas law when there's an open bar. You can RSVP via Facebook, or by mailing sxsw@io9.com. The event is free and open to the public. Space will be limited so don't blame us if you get there late and there's a giant line.
It's official, Valve's digital distribution service Steam is coming to Mac, and bringing Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series (along with Source) with it this April. But there's more.
Apparently, through Steam Play, gamers will be able to play supported titles (anything built on Source, it seems) on a PC (say, at work) then continue the game from the same point on their Mac (say, at home). Both versions of these games come bundled in one price—which is completely, totally, unbelievably forward-thinking and awesome. [Image by Kotaku]
VALVE TO DELIVER STEAM & SOURCE ON MAC
Leading Gaming Service Expands to Mac Platform
March 8, 2010 - Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve's gaming service, and Source, Valve's gaming engine, to the Mac.
Steam and Valve's library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April.
"As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients," said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. "The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services."
"Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac," said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. "Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play."
"We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation," said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. "The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows."
Portal 2 will be Valve's first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. "Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step," said Josh Weier, Portal 2 Project Lead. "We're always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.
Gizmodo Poland launched today. The guy in charge is Rafal Tomanski, who was a finalist on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Poland, and walked away with the 500k prize after not wanting to risk it all on a single question. He speaks 8 languages and has degrees in Japanese cinema and international relations and has been a freelance writer for a long time. He's kind of a genius and I'm glad he's representing us in Poland. [Gizmodo.pl]
Comcast is fairly evil, to be sure. But if they're doing one thing right, it's the latest version of their free iPhone app, Comcast Mobile App 2.0.
In this walkthrough, you'll see that not only can you set recordings from your iPhone, but you can do so over the multiple DVRs that you may have in your house. (Note: so far, this function is only available in select areas.) Meanwhile, everyone receives new push notifications reminding you to watch or record your favorite shows...which admittedly sounds a bit useless in the DVR era.
If you're watching the clip, skip about 20 seconds in to get to the meat of it. (Not that Scott the Comcast guy doesn't seem very nice.) [iTunes via Comcast Blog Thanks Simon!]
Once upon a time, Tony and Thomas lead sedentary lives. Thankfully, they “chucked” it all for travel and invite you to join their journeys at Contemporary Nomad. Self-described as a mixture of adventure, travel, culture and opinion – they cover all vividly.
In honor of the Oscars, I spent last night watching a movie. It was set on another world, populated by exotic flora and fauna (e.g., a blue creature with a long tail). The good inhabitants of this world live as one with all nature, and refuse to kill or do harm. A caucasian human shows up, and saves the world from disaster by being brave enough to kill. The movie was in 3-D, creatively combining real-action and animation, and was lushly filmed with dramatic scenes of waterfalls and forests and mountains. The movie’s title starts with the letter “A”.
Of course, I’m talking about Alice in Wonderland. What, is there some other movie you were thinking of? Spoilers follow (although it’s not the type of movie that gets spoiled), so if you’re hyper-sensitive about such things (as I am), cease reading now.
Alice and Avatar make an excellent study in contrasts. They both use the same canvas, and there are remarkable superficial similarities between the two. However, I found Alice to be much more interesting and satisfying as a film. Avatar, as the entire world seems to have noted, has a completely mundane and predictable story, with a sound-byte message. Within about ten minutes of the film, you know more-or-less the full arc. It’s a reasonable story, with lots of visual candy, and I can’t say I was bored (which is saying a lot for a three hour film). But, at least for me, it left little mark. To go to such great lengths to build up an entire world, you’d think you’d have something profoundly new and interesting to say. Sean does a nice job of summarizing some of Avatar’s failings.
I found Alice, on the other hand, to be much more entertaining. For any self-respecting science geek, having a movie which revolves around a vorpal sword has to warm the cockles of your heart. But there’s substance behind all of the talking flowers and Jabberwocks. For example, consider the good and bad queens. They had interesting, quirky personalities, and didn’t play directly to stereotype. In Avatar, these roles would have been completely one dimensional. In Alice, the Red Queen has moments of doubt, and seems genuinely surprised that she is not loved. Images of hearts proliferate, to no avail. The White Queen, meanwhile, swats at “dragonflies” while professing her love for all creatures. She seems somewhat annoyed that she’s not allowed to wreak mayhem on her rival, as if she’s struggling within the bounds of the “good queen” convention. There are subtle physical manifestations as well: her snow white hair is dark underneath, and she has slightly dark circles about her eyes. The distance between the two queens (and sisters) is not as great as it initially appears. These satisfying levels of grey give the characters more depth and nuance (something that is completely absent in Avatar). Alice demands that the viewer do some work; the movie does not present everything neatly wrapped with a bow. The moral of the film is left a bit hazy. It has something to do with letting your imagination run wild. Resisting convention. Living in the world you want, rather than the one you find. At the end of Avatar, the main character remains on Pandora. Alice, on the other hand, chooses to leave Wonderland and return to London. Which film is more courageous?
hello everyone,i would like to ask you a question about earthing empedance calculation following formaulas are for a one ground rod but they are from different sources, R=(ro/2.pi.L).((ln4.L/r)-1) R=(ro/2.pi.L).((ln4.L/r)) now both these formulas calculates the empedance. First one is fro
Will we ever get a solid answer on what killed the dinosaurs? According to a new “K-T Boundary Dream Team” comprising of 41 international experts, including geophysicists and paleontologists, yes, the question has been settled: An asteroid is indeed to blame.
For years, scientists have argued over different theories of what killed the dinos–including one hypothesis that has gained ground recently, which suggests that massive volcanic activity in India’s Deccan Traps wiped them out 65 million years ago. However, the latest expert panel stuck to the asteroid theory, saying a massive impact wiped out the dinos and more than half of the Earth’s other species. The panel’s review was published in the journal Science.
After studying all the available data on the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) mass extinction, the panel concluded that the catastrophic event was caused by a 6-mile-wide asteroid that struck Earth at an angle of 90 degrees and a speed of about 12.4 miles per second – about 20 times faster than a speeding bullet [Guardian]. The asteroid hit Chicxulub, Mexico, with a force one billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima [Science Daily News].
The impact of the crash would have triggered large scale fires, landslides, earthquakes that measured 10 on the Richter scale, and subsequent tsunamis, scientists said. Debris loosened by the impact would have shrouded the planet, clouding the skies, causing a global darkness, and “killing off many species that couldn’t adapt to this hellish environment” [Science Daily News], according to study coauthor Joanna Morgan.
The scientists noted that the asteroid put an end to dinosaurs, the bird-like pterosaurs, and large marine reptiles, but it also marked a new beginning. Said study coauthor Gareth Collins: “Ironically, while this hellish day signalled the end of the 160 million year reign of the dinosaurs, it turned out to be a great day for mammals, who had lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs prior to this event. The KT extinction was a pivotal moment in Earth’s history, which ultimately paved the way for humans to become the dominant species on Earth” [Science Daily News].
The asteroid theory is far from new. The idea was first proposed by the father-son duo of Luis and Walter Alvarez three decades ago, when they found high levels of iridium in geological samples around the world. The element iridium is rare in the Earth’s crust but is common in asteroids, and can be found at asteroid impact sites. The current panel analyzed soil samples to find that immediately after the iridium layer, there is a dramatic decline in fossil abundance and species, indicating that the KT extinction followed very soon after the asteroid hit [Science Daily News].
The team also based their conclusions on “shocked” quartz. Quartz is shocked when it is hit very quickly by a huge force; shocked quartz is found only at asteroid impact locations and nuclear explosion sites. The abundance of shocked quartz in the rock layers associated with the KT boundary add further weight to the asteroid impact theory, the team declared.
Study coauthor Kirk Johnson says the team discarded the theory that large-scale volcanism made the dinosaurs extinct because the eruptions at the Deccan traps site started at least 400,000 years before the Chicxulub impact with no effect on life. The team traces the extinctions to within plus-or-minus 10,000 years of the impact 65.5 million years ago. “So we are back to where we started with the Alvarez hypothesis, a single, large, (6-mile-wide) impact,” Johnson says [USA Today].
Related Content:
80beats: Forget “The Asteroid”: Could Supervolcanoes Have Killed the Dinosaurs?
80beats: In the Permian Period, Erupting Super-Volcanoes May Have Killed Half the Planet
80beats: Dinosaurs Ruled the World Because They “Got Lucky,” Say Scientists
DISCOVER: Did an Asteroid Really Dust the Dinosaurs?
DISCOVER: When North America Burned explains how the asteroid could have set our continent on fire
Image: Nasa
Hi, I'm looking for input on the best practice for maximum lifetime usage of my $500 elictric bike battery. I commute 8.5 mi each way and use approximately 3.5 amp hours from the 48 volt 20 amp hour battery. I currently charge it only once a day after 17 miles. Should I drain it further before recha
We’ve been studied. Bora points to a new paper by Inna Kouper in the Journal of Science Communication. The title is “Science blogs and public engagement with science: Practices, challenges, and opportunities,” which pretty much explains what it’s about. The author picks out a collection of eleven blogs — Pure Pedantry, Synthesis, MicrobiologyBytes, Bioethics, Wired Science, DrugMonkey, Scientific Activist, Pharyngula, Panda’s Thumb, and our own humble offering — and analyzes posts and comments to judge how effective these sites are at promoting science communication.
The list of blogs chosen is — okay, I guess. I have no idea how it was constructed, and the paper doesn’t seem to provide much guidance. Bora has a critique of the methodology that wonders about that, and about exactly how objective the study is. It’s very hard to assign numbers to things like “ratio of informative posts vs. rants,” or “degree to which the cause of collegial communication was harmed by use of intemperate language.” The paper reads like someone read a bunch of blogs and typed up their personal impressions.
For the most part I don’t disagree too strongly with the impressions, with the obvious caveat that it’s almost completely useless to study “science blogs” as a group. People don’t read randomly chosen collections of blogs; they read very intentionally chosen subsets that appeal to their own interests, and different reading lists will lead to wildly divergent impressions about what blogs are really like.
More significantly, though, I can’t really agree with the moral that the author draws from these experiences. Here is the telling quote from the paper:
The blogs employ a variety of writing and authoring models, and no signs of emerging or stabilizing genre conventions could be observed. Even though all blogs mentioned science or a particular scientific discipline in their descriptions, they differed in their voice representations, points of view, and content orientation.
It’s hard to disagree with that, but I think it’s a good thing, and the author clearly does not. Blogs differ in many ways, and happily avoid the encroachment of stabilizing genre conventions. That’s one of the biggest benefits of opening up communication channels to a tremendous variety of content providers, rather than restricting things to just a few mainstream outlets; writers can have their voices, and readers can choose who to read, and everyone is happy.
It’s clear that a lot of people want blogs to be just like some pre-existing communication medium, just with comments and occasional expertise. And there are blogs like that, if that’s what you’re into. And there are blogs that aren’t, likewise. I hope it stays that way.
I can taste the change. I'm swimming in change. Oh thank God we got rid of Bush! This Obama guy is a total opposite from that bloodthirsty, warmongering hick.
With his decision to boost defense spending, President Obama is continuing the process of re-inflating the Pentagon that began in late 1998 — fully three years before the 9/11 attacks on America. The FY 2011 budget marks a milestone, however: The inflation-adjusted rise in spending since 1998 will probably exceed 100 percent in real terms by the end of the fiscal year. Taking the new budget into account, the Defense Department has been granted about $7.2 trillion since 1998, when the post-Cold War decline in defense spending ended.
The rise in spending since 1998 is unprecedented over a 48-year period. In real percentage terms, it’s as large as the Kennedy-Johnson surge (43 percent) and the Reagan increases (57 percent) combined. Whether one looks at the entire Pentagon budget or just that part not related to the wars, current spending is above the peak years of the Vietnam War era and the Reagan years. And it’s set to remain there. Looking forward, the Obama administration plans to spend more on the Pentagon over the next eight years than any administration since World War II.
The Commercial Spaceflight Federation’s 2009 Annual Report [pdf] is now available on our website.
“This report showcases a year’s worth of exciting progress for the commercial spaceflight industry and the members of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation,” says Bretton Alexander, Commercial Spaceflight Federation President, in the opening page of the report.
The 2009 Annual Report report is available for download by clicking here [pdf].
This draggable, zoomable map of NYC is made from old 8-bit NES elements. It is as awesome as it sounds. [
