Things I’ve seen, heard, or was told by someone. Item in this category usually originate from the Internet.
My former SAAS Senior Prom date, Lia DiBiase, is now engaged. I only mention this because she was my prom date and I get a chuckle1 out of it for some reason. You may not return to your regularly schedule program.
1A good kind of chuckle. The one perhaps made whilst reminiscing about times past and thinking how fun it was back In The Day™.
(Photo by Lia DiBiase)
Ten years ago on September 15, 1997, Stanford grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered the domain name google.com.
Imagine what the next 10 years will bring!
I had this idea (as far back as 5th grade, I think), of building a robot to go to school for me. I would be at the other end controlling it and thus would never have to get out of bed. It really was just a ploy to not have to go to school.
Well, someone has actually done it. Although instead of not going to school, they’re not going to work.
It’s not that Bowman doesn’t have hands or a mouth; they’re just in Halifax, along with the rest of his body.
In fact, it’s not really Bowman in the Waterloo office at all. It’s IvanAnywhere, a robot Bowman uses to interact with his colleagues in Waterloo from his home office 1,350 kilometres away.
“Robot” is a bit of a stretch, actually. IvanAnywhere is basically a coat rack on wheels with attached speakers, camera and touch-screen computer.
The computer screen displays a live shot of Bowman’s face from his living room in Nova Scotia.
via MAKE
I’ve been a great deal of my life dreaming about the stars. I grew up watching Star Trek and now I’m at an engineering school to become Rocket Scientologist (okay, electrical engineering…but it has practical applications in Rocket Scientology).
I current work for a company that is in the aerospace business and I’m now with a team on campus that is helping design a robot that could go to the Moon (2008 Regolith Excavation Challenge). I need my space.
Lately, space has become dull. Without delving too much into the details, I attribute this dullness to a lack of funding and ambition on NASA’s part. That’s why things like this practically tickle me pink:
In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to go into space and orbit the Earth. Two years later, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space (she orbited the earth 48 times — take that, Yuri). By the end of the decade, the Apollo teams, rising to President Kennedy’s challenge, made Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin the first human beings to walk on the Moon.
Great things can happen when you reach for the stars. That’s why we’re thrilled to be sponsoring the Lunar X-PRIZE, which will award a total of $30 million to teams competing around the world to land privately funded spacecraft on the Moon.
Why does Google love space? Well, for one thing, we just think it’s cool.
Insert lame joke about space being cold here.
See ya’ll on the other side of the moon.
From teamworktandem.blogspot.com:
You wonder why no one is picking Seattle to make it back to the Super Bowl? Go to the CBS Sportsline NFL Teams map. Now find Seattle on the map, it should be easy because the next closest NFL team is 800 miles away (yes, I Google mapped it). 800 miles, they might as well not even exist. I’d bet other NFL teams don’t even know Seattle has an NFL team until the ‘Hawks come rollin’ into town.
John has a really interesting point. Take a look at this map:
It basically a bunch of dots on the east cost. Some stuff near California. And then Seattle. Kind of makes you wonder how we even got a team.
Forty years ago today, on a little network called NBC, a little TV show from Desilu hit the airwaves for the first time with an episode entitled “The Man Trap” or as everybody else knows it, the one with the salt vampire. Six TV series and 726 episodes later, Star Trek has grossed billions of dollars and changed the world as we know it.
Yea, that’s right. I’m a Trekkie. So what? Saturday nights watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and eating pizza with Dad. Great times.
Peace and long life.
If you have the latest version of Google Earth, you are also now the proud owner of your very own flight simulator.
From earth.google.com:
To enter the flight simulator mode, press Ctrl + Alt + A (Command/Open Apple Key + Option + A on the Mac). Once you have entered flight simulator mode for the first time, you can re-enter the mode by choosing Tools > Enter Flight Simulator. To leave flight simulator mode, click Exit Flight Simulator in the top right corner or press Ctrl + Alt + A (Command/Open Apple Key+ Option + A on the Mac).
Using data from Google Earth is a great way to get more realistic terrain in a simulator and avoids having to load gigs of data onto your hard drive before hand.
P.S. Click on image to make it bigger
via MAKE
[tags]Google, Earth, flight, simulator[/tags]
they [psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynsk] assembled 22 Tucson municipal court judges. They told the judges they wanted to test the relationship between personality traits and bail decisions, but, for one group, they inserted in the middle of the personality questionnaire two exercises meant to evoke awareness of their mortality. One asked the judges to “briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you”; the other required them to “jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead.” They then asked the judges to set bail in the hypothetical case of a prostitute whom the prosecutor claimed was a flight risk. The judges who did the mortality exercises set an average bail of $455. The control group that did not do the exercises set it at an average of $50. The psychologists knew they were onto something.
The rest is a very interesting read. There’s a book I started reading, “False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear” by Marc Siegel, MD, that talks about how fear overrides many of our rational judgments. I think I’ll have to go back and read the entire thing now.
via BoingBoing
Some cool stuff that happened today that I want to be sure everyone knows about:
Halo 3 has gone gold. Read the announcement over at Bungie.net. Here’s the pull quote (emphasis mine):
From blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com:
“We have to say thanks to everyone at Microsoft who helped us make it the best game we ever made. We have to say thanks to our tireless team of artists, designers, engineers, musicians, technicians, writers, directors, producers, thinkers, administrators, ninjas, specialists, gorillas, webmasters and pimps.”
Also, BetaNews says: New iPods Expected September 5. “It is largely expected the iPods will incorporate a touch-sensitive screen and “Cover Flow” user interface found on the iPhone.”
One of my coworkers sent this to me:
From ken.coar.org:
Unified Field Theory by Tim Joseph
In the beginning there was Aristotle,
At objects at rest tended to remain at rest,
And objects in motion tended to come to rest,
And soon everything was at rest,
And God saw that it was boring.Then God created Newton,
And objects at rest tended to remain at rest,
But objects in motion tended to remain in motion,
And energy was conserved and momentum was conserved and matter was conserved,
And God saw that it was conservative.Then God created Einstein,
And everything was relative,
And fast things became short,
And straight things became curved,
And the universe was filled with inertial frames,
And God saw that it was relatively general, but some of it was especially relative.Then God created Bohr,
And there was the principle,
And the principle was quantum,
And all things were quantified,
But some things were still relative,
And God saw that it was confusing.Then God was going to create Ferguson,
And Ferguson would have unified,
And he would have fielded a theory,
And all would have been one,
But it was the seventh day,
And God rested,
And objects at rest tend to remain at rest.
[tags]Unified Field Theory, Aristotle, Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Ferguson, God, Seven Days, Tim Joseph[/tags]