Space.com is carrying this story about the Genesis return capsule that returned to Earth today in a big way. I guess there won't be any trophies for the stunt pilots.

In today's news on NPR, the sheriff's department of Jefferson County, Ala., is organizing citizens to keep an eye on suspicious activity and report it to the police. Authorities say they began the "Cell Phone Posse" not because of an increase in crime but to help a budget-strapped department. And, since it's a radio network, you don't even have to RTFA!

Dig out your tinfoil hats. CIO Magazine has an interview with John Poindexter, resigned head of the TIA. In it, he tells us that many projects from the dissolved agency have gone underground but are still being funded, out of sight of public scrutiny. Similar reports have been seen on Slashdot before. He also says that he "never intended to build a single, central database to collect data on every transaction by every American." Gee, what was he planning, then? When asked what he'd do different, given the chance, Poindexter says he would've put more resources on spin control, or what he calls "getting the public diplomacy part stronger."

A local historical society has a huge collection of photographs (2.5 million images) depicting almost 150 years of life in the Pacific Northwest. While many of the photographs have been digitized for reproduction, a vast number of them have not. Furthermore, browsing the photographs for relevant information is difficult, particularly when the photographs are extremely small. I would like to help by setting up a photograph browsing workstation where visitors could wander through the archives, zooming in on details of photograps quickly and easily, search a keyword database, and mark (possibly cropped) photos for printing. Most of the Open Source packages I can find are geared toward putting personal photo albums on the web, and don't offer the level of pan and zoom that this sort of solution would require. I'm looking for a Linux- or BSD-based solution. What experience does anyone here have with sort of thing?

Those Brits are up to it again. They seem to have invented a machine that can design and run experiments, getting the same results as a class full of grad students. They mention possible application to forensics, though I can think of a huge variety of things that this sort of intelligence could do.

In this AP-supplied story on MSN, more details on the US moon base, retirement of the Shuttle fleet, and retreat from participation in the International Space Station. My favorite gem from the article, 'The moon has one-sixth the gravitational field of Earth, so moon-based aircraft could launch from there more cheaply.' Call me crazy, but air might just be another requirement.