A Space Geek Moment

Gotta love this story and accompanying photos sent back by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter of a couple of the current known residents of the planet.

I still can't get over how Spirit and Opportunity are still functioning (even if Spirit has developed a limp) almost three years after starting what was scheduled to be a three month mission. _darkvictory and I watched the original landing on NASA TV and got all excited then, and I still get a little bit of that excitement now when I see stuff like this. What can I say? Just a remnant of my youth when they'd roll the TV into the classroom for the Mercury and Gemini launches and landings.

Actual good news from the current administration

Contained in this story from the DOE website.

40% efficient solar cells? That means that a square ~265 miles on a side in someplace like the U.S. Southwest would provide sufficient electricity to meet the entire world's current need. Which means that obviously a bunch of smaller farms scattered around the globe could have us all set for quite some time.

Hey, Southwestern Native American tribes! Don't build another casino, put up some solar farms and sell juice. That reservation land that the government had thought was useless? Who's laughing now?

And in more science/tech/space news...

Liquid water on Mars?

Sometimes interesting isn't just in the Chinese sense.

PING! colleency

Just wanted to clue you in about this, as I know you have interests that run in those directions. They have others, as well.

A little test...

So, I've picked up a bunch of scripts to use with my voice dictation system and the Mac Journal program. This post is a little experiment of how well the voice transcription software will work for journal entries.I don't expect all leave this journal up long, as it's really only a test. There's no need to comment, or make any wise ass remarks.Since I'm still training the voice recognition software, this isn't necessarily as fast as I could normally type. Although it is always interesting seeing exactly what mistakes the software makes.

Struggling with new technology is something that we all have to deal with on almost a day to day basis. How comfortable we become with that technology, and how easily we are able to integrate it into our lives, may well become the survival skill of the future.Technology that resists integration, whether through poor design or purposeful elitism, will be doomed to failure. Or at least obscurity.

The past several days, I've been struggling with getting a wi-fi card functional on a Linux-based laptop. It's still not working, even though I struggled through five different sets of terminal commands and compiling multiple applications through the package manager.While I applaud the philosophy and emotions behind the open source movement, until this stuff is as easy to use as proprietary operating systems for an average user, I just can't see it gaining that much traction. I mean, I'm a pretty serious geek and it's making me vow to go back to a stylus and wet clay.Can anybody recommend a good book on basic cuneiform?