Martian orbital space is getting crowded enough that the orbiters can take pictures of each other as shown in this NASA press release.
I remember what a big deal it was when the first Viking lander touched down. Now NASA has multiple satellites and vehicles on the ground at the same time. And don't forget the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express orbiter. Welcome to the 21st century.
A student at MIT is requesting help to publicize a time travelers' convention he will be holding on May 7 on the MIT campus. His idea is to make this convention so well known that all future people with time-travel capabilities will know about it and come for the event. So, in the interests of helping out, here are the details:
The Time Traveler Convention
May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC)
(event starts at 8:00pm)
East Campus Courtyard, MIT
42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W
(42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)
Unlike most political analysis, FactCheck.org focuses on providing links to the facts, not just spouting opinion. They got started mostly for the 2004 elections, but they are continuing to keep track of current political debates.
Turns out all the hype about Social Security going bankrupt is a major exaggeration. If we do nothing, the most pessimistic projection shows that the SSA will have to cut promised benefits by 27% beginning in 2042, and by 2075 benefits would have to be cut by 32% from the promised amount. I'd hardly say that Social Security is going bankrupt.
While we probably should do something about SSA, there's no need to rush into "solutions" that could make things worse. And the political venom is not helping matters.
FactCheck.org's latest article on the Social Security debate covers Bush's April 28 statements on plans slow the growth of benefits in the future for higher income workers.
Back in 1984, Infocom and Douglas Adams released a text adventure game based on Adam's Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy books. I remember playing this on my Commodore 64 in the late '80s.
BBC Radio 4 has converted the game into Flash so that you can play it on-line. Even better, they have two different illustrated versions of the game. It's still a text game, but with illustrations of each location as you play the game.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game.shtml
To play the game, choose which illustrated version you want, then have fun.
The Colgate Computer Science Department has a Cryptology class that includes some nice web-based tools and also applets.
From Scott Adams' Dilbert Newsletter #60:
Sometimes my brain ties together things that are better left alone. Here are three things I've thought about recently:
I wonder if any cryptographers have looked at that junk DNA to see if it's a message from the designer. I'm guessing that it's a code that says something like, "I am Kaloopah, from the star system Nebulon IV. I have sent this evolution program into space as my eighth grade science project."
Below is the second half of a Vermont Agency of Natural Resources article. You may want to read the first half of the article if you're interested in a bit of history on flourescent lights.
Many people continue to believe that it takes significantly more electricity to turn on a
fluorescent lamp than to operate the lamp for long periods. Modern fluorescent lamps, however,
use little starting energy. Turning them off actually helps them last longer and lowers lighting
energy costs. Researchers at the U.S. Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory have found that a
fluorescent lamp
The O'Reilly CodeZoo site hopes to do for Java what CPAN did for perl, and what Boost
did for C++. CodeZoo is not a "complete" list of all open-source
java, rather an edited list of the best bits of re-usable java
code. Like CPAN and Boost.
For example, if you go to the "The Da Vinci Code" listing on Amazon.com and scroll down a bit, you will find this section:
Statistically Improbable Phrases: cilice belt, lame saint, seeded womb, lettered dials, corporal mortification, rosewood box, sacred feminine, royal bloodline, stone cylinder, sweater pocket
Amazon's says this about the feature:
Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", show you the interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases that occur in the text of books in Search Inside the Book. Our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to how many times it occurs across all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.
A bit of Google'ing in the blogosphere seems to indicate this feature appeared in mid-March. I actually stumbled across this on my own when looking at Amazon.com.
I wonder if this feature will interfere with people who like to googlewhack?
Okay, We Give Up
There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.
In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.
Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.