Archive for January, 2004
Martian-Go-Round
Spirit has a color panorama of Mars. You can also see it in Quicktime VR. The final cord connecting Spirit to its lander has been cut, and the rover is now turning in place in preparation for its roll onto the red soil. Latest photos, maps, and animations here.
Deconvolve This
“diffract fluffy dodecahedron bolshevist heretofore fondle astronaut compulsory biracial germantown covert eskimo material b</bluefish>u</deconvolve>y<bismuth> amen” Welcome to spam’s new can: “hash-busting”: long strings of randomized words which spammers send to try and confound your mail application’s spam filters. Joke’s on them, of course. Mail filters don’t just hash out specific words, they also check other [...]
The Greatest Show on Earth Part II
And how could I forget dear old Ping? He is one of Ferdie Marcos’ own creations, a dark and ruthless police chief who attempted to demolish Gloria by exposing the First Husband’s marital-financial immoderacies, while Gloria’s administration attempted to demolish him by dredging up dubious connections to drug trading, and his bloody record of human [...]
The Greatest Show On Earth
Philippine politics is crazy. Crazy, crazy, crazy. I’m trying to come up with a summary of recent events in Philippine politics, and the unfolding plot and cast of characters sounds like a bad, drawn-out telenovela. I don’t know where to begin. Okay, another movie star, FPJ, runs for president. He’s a close friend of the [...]
Sssss…
The elusive source of the Space Station’s air pressure drop — a leaking window hose — appears to have been found and fixed, or at least temporarily plugged up. (Was it the big window, perhaps?) If this were the starship Enterprise, the ship’s automated Damage Control would have registered a minor hull breach and activated [...]
Saddam in the House
LGF recently linked a firsthand photo of Saddam’s capture from Military.com, which I figured was of doubtful authenticity; but now, Radley Balko has received a whole bunch of “Candid Captured Saddam” pics showing not only Saddam Hussein’s capture, but the scenes immediately afterward. The Formula 409 shot is especially striking, if only for its anachronistic [...]
Brrr.
Low of 11° tomorrow. And just so we’re clear, that’s in fahrenheit. New York is getting it even worse.
Rendered Unto Squish
Obliterating Animal Carcasses with Explosives. It’s in a “laugh” directory, but it looks like it was a serious page. Hey, it worked (kind of) for whales.
Blogging MERA
In addition to SpaceFlightNow’s live status reports, also check out the Mars Rover Mission Blog. (Found via adot’s notblog.) Latest news is that the rover has stood up and gotten its thermal spectrometer running.
Going Up?
So the latest buzz is that Bush is about to announce a return to space. (Isn’t that the funniest possible photo to accompany that headline?) I was just reading a Wired article on NASA emergency escape systems, which mentions on page 2 that the Apollo spacecraft computers ran on “just 5,000 integrated circuits and … [...]