Sep/090
Permanent Space Post: a step closer
As you most likely know already, our moon does not have a atmosphere as Earth's, which, among other things, holds the precious oxygen that we breath and use to grow food or create water. Lack of oxygen has been one of the main limiting factors to create a permanent space post in our celestial body as is not only essential for our own survival but also it makes possible to burn the rocket fuel used in the space aircraft.
Scientist from NASA have just tested components of a oxygen generator that will produce the element from the silicon dioxide and metal oxides contained in the lunar soil to make sure it works in lunar gravity environment (about 6 times weaker than the one in Earth). For this they have used "Vomit Comet", a fixed wing plane specially designed to briefly provide a micro gravity environment.
Sep/091
“United” Nations
Adam Thinks goes back to business to show us what happens in the House of United Nations when things go off the record.
Via Adam Thinks
Sep/090
Sci-Fi corridors
One can find opinion just about everything, this compilation shows and rates the different Sci-Fi corridors in several films. An interesting point is that a huge number of them share the well known Eurostyle type face that we were used to see in the 60-70s space films.
Sep/090
Pigeon post faster than internet
A South African IT company has proved it is faster to transmit data via a carrier pigeon than to send it using the country's leading internet service provider. The 11 months old pigeon took one hour and 8 minutes to carry a memory card on his leg a distance of 80 km while the internet provider took more than two hours to make the same process.
While wars made Europe and the States get the level of technology they have now - sort of - it looks like South Africa is having another approach, they are laying more than 11.000 km of data cables, including oceanic links, to get ready before the football World Cup next year.
Sep/091
100 years of dreaming
Kotte published this shocking video showing the evolution of special effects in cinema during the last 100 years. Now we do make things look so real that it is starting not to impress so much, and that's because we not only feel through the eyes...
Sep/091
Changes
Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes but when you look back everything is different.
Sep/091
Personas
The MIT media lab is displaying until the end of this month a piece of software that visually characterize the name of a person based on the web data available for that name: Personas.
The project shows again how the vast information available nowadays, when processed by a computer, can lead to completely inaccurate results, in this case due the inability of the machine to separate the data from two different persons with the same name.
Sep/090
Of how our everyday’s websites used to look
Daily Telegraph has published a very melancholic article where we can see how those webs that we all know used to look when they were born. For that they used an old website, which I almost already forgot about: web.archive.org. Web archive is ongoing project that started in 1996 meant to give access to historical web data - websites, images, texts and even software - to researchers, scholars, historians and general public.
It is worth to have a look at how the website of your university used to look 10 years ago - if they did have website at all. Mine looks just awful.
Sep/090
60s Ikea
Sara's mum managed to keep in mint condition a copy of what she claims to be the most printed "book" - please note quotes and italic there - after the bible. The Ikea catalogue from 1965, please go and check those chairs...
Aug/092
No more 100W bulbs
As part of the UE decision last December, next Tuesday the 100W bulbs will not be long sold in the EU market. This is part of the process of eliminating all low performance bulbs in 2012.
September next year all 75W bulbs will be gone, a year later the 60W ones, and by 2012 none of the old bulb types will be sold on the UE market.
The EU research estimates that the energy savings will be about 40 Terawatts per hour, this is like switching off the whole Romania and that will save about 15 millions tons of CO2 emissions.
Here in UK there is massive opposition to them, from people that complain about them being too dim - have they bought the right bulb, I ask - to associations of people that suffer migraine that claim that they have strong head aches caused by the small flickering of the light.