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.
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.
Sunday was bright and warm. At church in the morning we heard a message from Reverend Paula Dempsey of the Alliance of Baptists and sang an Emma Lou Diemer gradual. After a Thai lunch we walked down through DC to the National Gallery, stopping by the White House and the Renwick Gallery en route.
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.
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.
I got these panoramas of the Main Reading Room and the Great Hall:
…while Human Understanding looked down from The Dome:
The Main Reading Room was crowded with people all interested in seeing this chamber normally closed off most of the year. TV screens fed information to the general area, while a Flickr Meetup easel offered a gathering point for photographers.
The old card stacks were open to the public, too, and I found the Philippines:
Always an amazing place; it never fails to give me massive visual information overload.
A small asteroid named 2012 DA14 flew close by Earth on Friday 13 Feb 2013, flying south to north, 17,200 miles from the surface at closest approach: much closer than the moon and even within the orbits of farther-out geostationary satellites. This was going to be the live space event of the month — until it was upstaged by the unrelated Russian meteorite earlier that day.
A meteor (or bolide, the term for a bright, exploding fireball) exploded in the sky over Russia, with a bright flash of light and multiple loud bangs seen and heard in Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains. The shockwave injured people and caused light damage to structures in the city. Since dashboard cameras are so prevalent in Russia, many drivers caught the early morning fireball:
This is one of my favorites, as the split screen lets you see both the meteor and the driver’s reaction:
Rumors are flying in the early hours after the incident, but there’s some comprehensive photo and video aggregation of the fireball and its aftermath on Say26, RMNB, Zyalt LJ (some funny images towards the end of that latter post). Take with grains of salt all around. The Russian hashtag челябинск is also interesting (and occasionally hilarious) to watch.
Phil Plait (aka Bad Astronomer) has some preliminary analysis, with more media, including these clips with the sound of the explosion, and the shattering glass that followed:
Multiple sources mention that this building was a zinc factory (?) in Chelyabinsk that was struck by meteorite fragments, but I’m skeptical, seeing as how the trail went over the city. I find it more likely that the building was damaged in a fire related to the shockwave:
Coincidentally, this comes the night before Asteroid 2012 DA14 swings close by Earth, just 17,200 miles from the surface — closer than the moon and geosynchronous satellites. There’s a temptation to think of a certain asteroid movie, but this meteorite is probably an unrelated coincidence. 2012 DA14 is approaching from a complete other direction: south, and this meteor was in the northern hemisphere.
Updates:
NASA JPL analysis of the meteorite showed this was unrelated to the 2012 DA14 asteroid flyby. (Simply explained with this graphic from Alice’s Astro Info) The meteorite had an estimated size of 17 meters, mass of 7,000 to 10,000 tons, and its primary explosion in the atmosphere had an equivalent yield of about 500 kilotons.
(I was skeptical about the 500 kt energy release estimate, seeing as how the Ivy King air-detonated nuclear test was of similar yield, but Chip Legett set me right with a reminder that the explosion was much higher in the atmosphere than the Ivy King blast, and exploding meteors release energy in a different way from nuclear devices.)
@brownpau @vnangia @ageekmom 500kt is very reasonable. Remember inverse square law. I.king was near surface, not 30kft @ burst (cont.)
On Meteors and Megatons — more from Nuclear Secrecy on the problems with measuring meteorite impact events in terms of nuclear weapons yield equivalents.
From two weeks later, Additional Details on the Large Fireball Event over Russia on Feb. 15, 2013. The word “superbolide” is used. Approximate total impact energy was estimated at 440 kt, with qualifications about the difference between that and radiated energy. Based on composition and orbit the fireball was definitely not associated with 2012 DA14.
