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NASA

Submission + - Dying Man Shares Unseen Challenger Video (nycaviation.com) 1

Submitted by longacre
longacre writes: An amateur video of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion has been made public for the first time. The Florida man who filmed it from his front yard on his new Betamax camcorder turned the tape over to an educational organization a week before he died this past December. The Space Exploration Archive has since published the video into the public domain in time for the 24th anniversary of the catastrophe. Despite being shot from about 70 miles from Cape Canaveral, the shuttle and the explosion can be seen quite clearly. It is unclear why he never shared the footage with NASA or the media. NASA officials say they were not aware of the video, but are interested in examining it now that it has been made available.
Sci-Fi

Avatar Soars Into $1-Billion Territory 782

Posted by CmdrTaco from the but-what-did-he-do-to-that-dragon dept.
Suki I writes " Avatar soars into $1-billion territory. 'Strong foreign ticket sales help make the science-fiction movie the fifth in history to pass the watermark. ... One of the riskiest movies of all times is now officially one of the most successful at the box office. When Avatar opened, its solid but far from stellar results left 20th Century Fox uncertain about whether the $430 million that it and two financing partners had invested to produce and market the 3-D film would pay off.'" Given that the big alternatives were Sherlock Holmes or Alvin & the Chipmunks, I think the winner was clear.
Power

Submission + - GE's Sodium Fast Reactor Cleaning Up Nuclear Waste (esquire.com)

Submitted by mattnyc99
mattnyc99 writes: No matter what you think of Esquire's Augmented Reality issue, inside it are the magazine's always illuminating Best and Brightest profiles, including this extra-illuminating story on Eric Loewen, the average-geek GE engineer whose nuclear-waste transformation process might provide the world with a plan for when the oil reserves dry up. At least one Republican seems to tentatively support the fourth-generation "PRISM" reactor, and while Bill Clinton shut it down and Obama has yet to approve, Steven Chu might push liberals behind a suddenly advanced version of what was once a McCain-campaign agenda. From the article: "I was intrigued because from [Dr. James] Hansen's description, it sounded like we must be nuts for not pursuing this. If you discovered a machine that turned lead into gold, you'd think the government would exploit the machine for the good of the country."

Submission + - Stats Say Americans Still Aren't Drinking, Gamblin (esquire.com)

Submitted by
mattnyc99
mattnyc99 writes: "Nate Silver from the great geek politics blog FiveThirtyEight.com has an interesting column in this month's issue of Esquire, essentially crunching the numbers to find out there are no sins left to tax. That is, for all the broke states out there looking for answers, they're not going to find money in people wanting to go to new casinos or wash away their sorrows in booze. From the article: "Conventional wisdom has long held that gambling is recession-proof. In Las Vegas, it's been anything but. Gaming revenues received by local casinos were down 12 percent in 2008 as compared with a year earlier. (This figure and all others in this article are reported on an inflation-adjusted basis.) And 2009 will be even worse: So far, revenues are off almost 15 percent from 2008's already depressed figures. The recession, then, appears set to cost Las Vegas more than a quarter of its business.""
Space

Submission + - What Would You've Said If You Were Neil Armstrong? (esquire.com) 2

Submitted by mattnyc99
mattnyc99 writes: Monday, as we all know, is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Esquire.com is running a cool archival story today from its July 1969 issue, in which they asked heady famous people — Asimov, Nabokov, Ayn Rand, even Leonard Nimoy — what the first lunar quote should be. Which leads to my question: What would good space geeks like us have made our first words spoken on the moon if we's gotten their before Neil Armstrong?
Robotics

Submission + - Air Force Planning New Drone Fleet for Pakistan (esquire.com)

Submitted by mattnyc99
mattnyc99 writes: With tensions high on the border, a new commander in Afghanistan, and complaints of civilian deaths from robotic U.S. strikes in Pakistan raising anti-American sentiment, the Air Force is sketching out concepts for new robotic hitmen, reports Esquire.com. Among the new drones (which are all very small) are the Suburb Warrior (loaded with four or five mini missiles for semi-urban environments), the Sniper targeting system ("that can lock on to multiple targets, allowing a single drone pilot to coordinate the attacks of a squadron of robots"), and a backup fleet of flying buggies that act as suicide-bomber snipers. From the article: "Picking through the dozens of systems in this briefing, many of which will be flight-tested within five years, there's a clear set of goals: build smaller, even microscopic drones with smaller weapons that can hunt in swarms and engage targets in the close quarters of urban battlefields. And hunt as soon as possible."
Cellphones

Submission + - A Full-Blown Map-Based Location-Aware Mobile World

Submitted by mattnyc99
mattnyc99 writes: Two weeks after the launch of Google Latitude, your inbox is probably full of requests and privacy advocates probably have even more concerns than they did at first. But some tech pundits are already seeing the bigger picture of a digital lifestyle based around the always-on, GPS-based mobile map. The NYT's always reliable John Markoff, who called for a new Internet on Sunday, has a great piece in today's Science Times about the map as metaphor for a time when "future systems will probably begin to blur the boundaries between the display and the real world." Over at Esquire.com's Tech Therapist, Erik Sofge talks to the geek behind Latitude and offers a similar reality check. From the article: "Latitude will be precisely as annoying as e-mail and social networking sites and cell phones themselves — and just as useful. What won't stop Latitude, or the wider rollout of location-based tracking, is bitching about it. These are juggernauts of free, culture-reorienting technology. And you and me, we are but posts on the massive Facebook profile of history."
Robotics

Submission + - telepresence robot controlled by Google Android (surveyor.com)

Submitted by
Howard Gordon
Howard Gordon writes: "We have developed an open source application for Google Android G1 phone that remotely controls and accesses live video feed from the open source Surveyor SRV-1 robot controller. There are 3 different video clips demonstrating this capability, including two ground-based robots and one robotic blimp. Here are the details -

Our blog post -
    http://www.surveyor.com/cgi-bin/robot_journal2.cgi/2009/02/15#201

Open source project on Google Code -
    http://code.google.com/p/srv1console/

Video clips -
  http://www.youtube.com/v/MmzeTcKvmjE
  http://www.youtube.com/v/zz6X4BJ1ZFw
  http://www.youtube.com/v/hxn8gNZhe7E

Information about the Surveyor robots and controllers -
http://www.surveyor.com/SRV.html
http://www.surveyor.com/index_blackfin.html

Information about the Surveyor blimp -
http://www.surveyor.com/YARB.html

Technical details on Forknife 2 robot -
http://www.macpod.net/misc/forknife2/forknife2.php

Thanks,
Howard Gordon
Surveyor Corporation"
Government

Submission + - Why Shovel-Ready Infrastructure Projects Are Wrong (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by
longacre
longacre writes: "The term "shovel-ready"--as in, infrastructure projects that are ready or almost ready to begin--has become a favorite of policy makers in recent weeks. As the Senate gets ready to vote on a stimulus bill, it looks like the idea has stuck: The latest bill gives only projects that are able to start construction within 90 days eligibility for funding from the $90 billion set aside for infrastructure. Popular Mechanics looks at how a shovel-ready mandate for the U.S. stimulus plan consists of the same short-sighted thinking that begot our current crumbling infrastructure. "If you want to patch some potholes in the road, this is a good program. But if you're hoping for anything long-term with this approach, throw away all hope. It can't happen," says Robert Bea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Many of the eligible projects have been sitting on shelves for years and call for outmoded equipment and designs. "No one's building a smart electric grid or revamping a water system on 90 days notice.""
Democrats

Submission + - Inside Obama's Plan for All Those Email Addresses (esquire.com)

Submitted by mattnyc99
mattnyc99 writes: At this point, many Slashdot users are used to receiving emails from Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, who had a spam war of his own until November. Now his plans for Grassroots 2.0 (aka Organizing for America) in 2009 and beyond have been revealed, first quietly by Obama himself just before inauguration and now in this great new profile from Esquire: "The idea is a national operation, likely named Organizing for America, that will resemble Obama's grassroots operation in reach and love. It will be as finely tuned as the campaign behemoth and funded the same way — no money from third parties. If Obama has a policy initiative he wants to push, or a message he needs to disseminate, or a gaffe he wants to bat down, he will call David Plouffe and Plouffe will unleash the many-million-mouthed dog, just as he did all across America for these past two years. If you believe in Obama and in the need for change and for a new, streamlined, hyperlinked Democratic party, then this is a watershed idea. It is a mechanism that could truly morph the power structure in Washington — waking up the unused, overslept public, as Plouffe successfully did on the campaign, and making an end run around lobbyists and interest groups."
Space

Submission + - Remembering NASA Disasters with Eye Toward Future

Submitted by mattnyc99
mattnyc99 writes: This next week marks the anniversary of three sad days in NASA's history: three astronauts died in a capsule fire testing for Apollo 1 exactly 42 years ago today, then the Challenger went down 23 years ago tomorrow, followed by the Columbia disaster six years ago this Super Bowl Sunday. Amidst all this sadness, though, too many average Americans take our space program for granted. Amidst reconsiderations of NASA priorities from the Obama camp as the Shuttle nears retirement, then, the brilliant writer Chris Jones offers a great first-hand account in the new issue of Esquire — an impassioned argument against the impending end of our manned space program. In which camp do you fall: mourner or rocketeer?
Patents

Apple Awarded Patent For iPhone Interface 449

Posted by kdawson from the can't-touch-that dept.
Toe, The writes "Apple's 358-page patent application for their iPhone interface entitled Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics has been approved after more than two years of review by the US Patent Office. Apple's claims include: 'A computer-implemented method for use in conjunction with a computing device with a touch screen display comprises: detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display, applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device, and processing the command. The one or more heuristics comprise: a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command, a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a two-dimensional screen translation command, and a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a command to transition from displaying a respective item in a set of items to displaying a next item in the set of items.' As Apple seems eager to defend their intellectual property, what will this mean to other touch developers?"
Government

Submission + - Obama & McCain Conflicting on Net Neutrality (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by
longacre
longacre writes: "For all their incessant bickering in the first two presidential debates over conflicts of interest and government regulation, PopMech columnist Glenn Derene is puzzled that the candidates have yet to be challenged on a vital issue directly related to both those topics: Net neutrality. John McCain and Barack Obama have stated elsewhere their opposing views on the issue, with McCain being opposed to Net neutrality and favoring light regulation of the Internet, while Obama is in favor of neutrality and seeks Government involvement. In any case, since there is no standard accepted definition of "network neutrality," until the candidates elaborate on their positions (which they both declined to do for this piece, nor anywhere else so far, for that matter), "both sides can make a credible case that they're the ones defending freedom of innovation and open communication.""

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