Recent Reading

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More space-related reading from recent weeks:

Why can Hubble get detailed views of distant galaxies but not of Pluto? (Emily Lakdawalla for Planetary Society) Because galaxies are really big and planets are really tiny by comparison and Hubble was made to look at big things.

Up: the story behind Richard Branson’s goal to make Virgin a galactic success (Adam Higginbotham for Wired UK)

Swimming with spacemen: training for spacewalks at NASA’s giant pool (Lee Hutchinson for Ars Technica)

AmericaSpace Exclusive Interview With Golden Spike’s Dr. Alan Stern — former NASA scientist Alan Stern headed up the New Horizons mission to Pluto, and now is President and CEO of Golden Spike, a private lunar exploration company.

Space Launch System Truths and Misconceptions — another AmericaSpace interview, this one with Dan Dumbacher of NASA, whose agency title is a mouthful: Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems in the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. (Mostly meaning “person in charge of Orion capsules and the big rockets that launch them.”)

China’s Long March 5 Will Not Launch Until 2015 (Bradley Perrett for Aviation Week) On delays affecting China’s production of future rockets.

NASA’s LRO Sees GRAIL’s Explosive Farewell — As the GRAIL spacecraft crashed into the moon at the end of their mission to observe lunar gravitation, the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter was able to observe the plumes of dust kicked up by the impact.

Green East Coast Meteor

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Saw a bright green fireball in the sky tonight, low over the northern horizon (as seen from Fairfax) going west to east. I couldn’t get a photo in time, but I sketched it with Paper app on my iPad mini while the image was fresh in my head.

Quick Paper app sketch of East Coast meteor tonight

This fireball was nowhere near the intensity of the Chelyabinsk meteor, but was still high and bright enough to be seen all up and down the east coast. The CapitalWeather story on the event has a couple of videos, and the American Meteor Society’s update has an approximate ground track.

Looks like any fragments from the object probably landed in the Atlantic Ocean. (I wonder if the green color of the fireball was from oxidation of metallic compounds consistent with a spent rocket stage. The west-to-east track might be consistent with the angle of some past low earth orbit launch. This is all speculation, though.)

Recent Reading

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“Sell Out,” a story by Simon Rich: Part One, Two, Three, Four. (New Yorker)

DuckTales invented a new animated wonderland — that quickly disappeared. (Onion AV Club)

The extraordinary science of addictive junk food. (NYT)

Your fat has a brain. Seriously. And it’s trying to kill you. (Outside Online)

Sunk: The Incredible Truth About the ‘Bounty,’ a Ship That Never Should Have Sailed (Outside Online)

The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble. (NYT)

Meet the men who spy on women through their webcams. (Ars Technica)

Social work in the Tenderloin will kill something inside of you. (Vice Magazine)

Not your usual listening exercise: 6000 people’s perceptions of aid delivery (How Matters)

Photoshop is a city for everyone: how Adobe endlessly rebuilds its classic app. (The Verge)

How to Use Introversion for Career and Personal Success. (Lifehacker)

Pad Thai. (The Morning News)

Evgeny Morozov: ‘We are abandoning all the checks and balances.’ (Guardian)

Resenting Hipsters. (Jacobin Mag)

Why I left news. (Allyson Bird)

Why RSS still matters. (The Verge)

Twitter Archive

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About a year after I complained about Twitter’s lack of archiving, they implemented a kind of backup solution involving a zipped tweet archive.

The Twitter archive is a bit of a headscratcher. It’s a searchable offline snapshot of tweets stored in JSON files organized into a year/month navigation UI — usable in any browser, but you must first request the archive from Twitter Settings and then retrieve it as a ZIP file after the server builds it and notifies you by email.

The nice part is that your full Twitter history comes to you as a portable web app that you own; a self-contained snapshot to store or upload to your preferred web host. On the down side, why decouple the archive from the stream in such a manner that you must return to the download page for a new snapshot every time you want an updated version? It seems like Twitter could have deployed the archive as a feature of every user profile, with the downloadable archive as backup. It seems a disjointed approach to what should be a simple archiving problem, which makes me wonder what kind of coding issues Twitter faces that would make a dated message log anything other than straightforward.

For now, my tweet archive lives in the history section, where I also keep backups of the embarassing older iterations of my web presence.

Google Reader Shutting Down

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Google Reader is shutting down effective July, 2013. I use Google Reader everyday multiple times per day to keep up with webcomics, news, technology, lolcats, and the internet in general, and shifting to an online life without it will be a difficult transition. (I barely use Google Plus at all.)

There are many alternatives, and it’s good to hear that my Google Reader-based iOS app of choice, Reeder, has backup plans. Still, a whole ecosystem of article reading, link discovery, and web traffic was built around RSS with Google Reader as a main hub, and now websites must prepare to take a hit to visitor engagement after they lose one of the internet’s main traffic drivers.

O’Donnell predicted this last October, after they killed sharing and deprecated Feedburner APIs. It’s a disappointing and cynical move by Google, but not surprising given their ongoing shift away from open formats like RSS towards the closed walled-garden approach so favored now by the big networks. That Google would capriciously shut down a widely used service without trying to make it work effectively and profitably gives me pause about continuing to use any of their services. Again, migration will be difficult.

Marco thinks this a good thing; with Google Reader out of the way, now a million new reader apps can bloom. I do hope so, but I’m still saddened that Google would kill off Reader like this.

So far, Bloglines. Newsblur, Feedly, and The Old Reader are all getting hammered. I’m not moving yet; we have till July. This gives time to watch people flee to other services, and see the feedback come in from the alternatives. Now let’s see what gets built, and what the crowd coalesces around.

More from Cortesi, Alastair’s Adversaria, Mat on Wired, GigaOm, Atlantic Wire, MetaFilter, Reddit, and Quora.

Update: I went with Feedly.

More Dollar Store Finds

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Remember View-Masters? Well here are some “Animals in Viewer”:

Dollar Store "Animals in Viewer"

44 Presidents of Ameirca!

Dollar Store First Family 2013 Calendar

Benign Girl is apparently a common thing, and I’m wondering exactly what it was meant to be translated as by whoever was naming this line of dolls:

Mini Baby Benign Girl

Trans-Robot, a toy totally not intended to resemble a certain other transformable robot franchise:

Trans-Robot

We leave you now with an Aeroplane, Good sized:

Aeroplane Good-sized

More stuff in my “Dollar Store” tag.

Recent Reading

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My article queue has been space-heavy lately: lots of space history, and a few recent developments which highlight what an exciting time we are in for human spaceflight potential.

“For the Tenth Time”: the story of Soyuz 4 and 5 — Part 1, Part 2: The first Russian orbital docking and EVA transfer mission in 1969, after which Soyuz 5 had a module separation failure which caused a dramatically hard reentry and landing.

Disaster at Xichang: Astrotech safety specialist Bruce Campbell remembers the deadly 1996 launch failure of a Chinese Long March 3B rocket with Intelsat 708, captured on video here.

Timeline of tragedy: The Columbia disaster: Ten years since the Shuttle Columbia disintegrated in the atmosphere due to structural failure on reentry due to wing damage from tank foam. This 2004 article remains stark. Also see William Langewiesche’s “Columbia’s Last Flight” from the Atlantic, Nov 2003.

Secret Space Shuttles: Air and Space Magazine roundup of classified Space Shuttle missions for defense and reconnaisance purposes which remain secret.

The Last Shuttle Flight: Recap of STS-135, the last Space Shuttle mission on board Atlantis.

Elon Musk, SpaceX Founder, Battles Entrenched Rivals Over NASA Contracts: HuffPo piece on Elon Musk and SpaceX as “David” to Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s ULA “Goliath.” Musk is cocky and outspoken, but he has the drive and resources to get amazing results.

More than you probably wanted to know about Curiosity’s SAM instrument: Highly technical and detailed (but still lay-accessible) overview of the Sample Analysis instrument on Mars Rover Curiosity by Planetary Society’s Emily Lakdwalla.