Category Archives: personal

Cloud Mirror

Daniel Burnham, Anuj Patel, and Sam Bell created for their embedded systems class at Georgia Tech a bathroom mirror / information display. Dubbed Cloud Mirror, it is essentially a partially silvered mirror placed in front of an LCD television, hooked up to a WinCE box with some Phidget sensors.

The User controls the display by waving his/her hand across eight infrared sensors (four across the top, and four down the side). Swiping across the top. the display is toggled on and off, while various modes (weather, news, traffic, and calendar) are controlled through the sensors on the right side. (Video after the jump.) Obviously, it is prototype level technology, but is a bit interesting. Basically, they were thinking about how to integrate typical morning information gathering into daily grooming rituals.

Continue reading

1% Want Landmark for Garage

Not content with having an exception to land their party plane at Moffett Field, Google’s triumvirate want a historic landmark for their eight private jets. That’s right. The triumvirate says they’ll pay for restoration, if they get to park their planes.

While I support keeping Hanger One, it just feels to essentially like an an attempt by the ultra rich to indulge their whims on public property. If it was a straight up philanthropic gesture that’s one thing, but this is reeks of a crass move. They (and numerous other Silicon Valley multi-millionares) have wanted to use the NASA field as their own private airfield, and now it looks like they’ve sensed the opportunity to get it. The most depressing part of this whole thing is that this could be the only way to keep the landmark.

Pharama Payola

Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma has REAL compensated doctors hawking Pradaxa? Why should I trust those doctors’ judgments if they suggest Pradaxa to me?

Doctors are already influenced by marketing. Boxes of free pens are important, discounted drugs are important, and the American Pediatric Society has expressed concern about payola.

Is this better? Well at least these doctors’ conflict of interest is exceedingly transparent. If I was the patient of any of these doctors:

  • Dr. David Montgomery of Chicago
  • Dr. Minerva Santo-Tomas of Miami
  • Dr. Dennis Finkelstein of New York

I’d change doctors. I can’t trust that their judgements about treatments are unbiased.

“No Man. No Problem.”

Fourth in the series of indeterminate length, Recolonizing Detroit

The root cause of the problems Paul Romer encountered in Madagascar was the local population. So how about founding these cities not just in unpopulated areas, but in areas people do not identify with as well? Could this be effective? From the European perspective, that’s what the era of colonization was, but most of us have a more expansive view of ownership now. Today, the only land that doesn’t have recognized claims on is Antarctica (Actually, it’s a bit more complicated on that, but more on that later.), but that location is not likely to attract many people to it. What if instead of land, these cities were built in international waters, or somewhere else unclaimed by any country? What then?

That’s right, we’re talking about micronations.
Continue reading

The Photos of Anders Behring Breivik

This post is not about what Anders Behring Breivik (allegedly) did. Instead it’s about the photos.

Everywhere you look, you see professional portraits of the suspect. Where did these images come from? Obviously, they came from the Anders Breivik, but where did the media get them? What was the context that they were taken in?

I found the proximal answer to where the media got them. Most photos of the man on CNN are attributed to Getty Images, but where did Getty get them? I didn’t know, until I read the attribution on the above picture from CNN. “Facebook via Getty Images.” [Original Link]

Wait. “Facebook via Getty Images?” What does that mean? How does Getty get the attribution? Do they own the right to license the images to news agencies or what? Did Facebook just invoke their right to sub-license (See section 2.1 of Facebook’s Terms and Conditions) Anders Behring Breivik’s photos to Getty for (blood) money?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Update: Mon Jul 25 01:28:50 PDT 2011
Let me be clear. It’s not not just Facebook and Getty. There’s this photo that carries a Reuter’s copyright notice no less. This photo appears again, this time with “AP Photo / Twitter” attribution. And again, but with Getty. Either Getty, AP, and Reuters are engaging in widespread unauthorized redistribution of copyrighted materials for commercial gain, someone (meaning Facebook and possibly Twitter) has sublicensed the photos, or the AP, Reuters, and Getty are making a very dubious fair use claim over distributing the photos.
Continue reading

It’s Over

Atlantis just landed at KSC, its permanent home. What can I say? The era is now over. The one honest spaceship is no more. I’m a pretty much in agreement with Miles O’Brien’s take. The space shuttle just never quite lived up to its potential. As O’Brien points out, the shuttle was designed with the one of its main ideas as building a space station, which it finally did some 17 years after its first launch.

I was looking at the list of canceled missions, and while most were simply got converted into unmanned launches, one did stick out to me: STS-144. The retrieval of the Hubble Space Telescope for display in the Smithsonian. Yes, it would have been a mawkish mission, but I still have loved to of had that happen.

So long shuttle.

Previously.

Taking a Byte Out of Bandwidth Costs

Estimated Number of Internet Users 1.971E+11

Average Number of Objects on a Webpage 85
Average of HTTP Requests Made
When Loading a Webpage
86
Average Number of Websites Visited
Per User Per Day
94
Total Number of HTTP Requests Each Day 1.59336E+13
Estimated Cost to Transmit 1 Gigabyte $ 0.03
 
Total Dollars Phillip Hallam-Baker has
Personally Saved the World Each Day
$ 445.18

So Long Shuttle…

So today was the last shuttle mission. I remember my mom waking me up early that April morning and asking me if I wanted to watch real spaceship launch. Of course I did. We went into the living room, and sat in front of that old black and white television we had, and watched it live on channel 12. I may have had the first of my die cast space shuttles with me as we watched it. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen in my 5 year old life. I was a huge space geek then, and remained so up until sometime in high school I guess. We bought that day’s issue of the Southern Illinoisan, and I kept that folded yellowed displayed on my bedroom bookshelf for years. The front page had a large four color crew photo under the headline. That was unusual, as color printing wouldn’t become common for maybe ten more years. There was another story on the front page. It was about the latest developments in the Atlanta child murders.

Two days later, I watched the spacecraft that launched like rocket, land like an airplane.

Seven years later, after attending Space Camp, I witnessed the launch of STS-26, the first flight after the Challenger disaster. We were a few miles away, on shore of some inlet at Kennedy. My friend Billy got the passes by writing our congressman. We watched the launch through binoculars, and was looking directly over the top of the orbiter, just like on television. Over loud speakers, we heard the countdown, watched the boosters ignite, and then shuttle rise from its plume of steam and fire. Seconds later, we were hit with a wall of intense heat and noise. I didn’t expect that. We tracked the craft as it moved higher and further away until it disappeared behind a cloud. Behind the cloud, the SRBs separated, and the shuttle emerged, it was only barely pinpoint of light.

Then it rained. Apparently, a common, yet relatively unknown, but obvious, side effect of shuttle launches. Mix liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, and what do you get?

And now the shuttle is gone. Of course the shuttle was oversold. It never launched every week. It never carried enough payload. It tried to be all things to all people, and of course never completely satisfied anyone. Yet, it was an honest to god spaceship.

The designs for the shuttle replacement Orion / MPCVSpaceX’s Dragon, and Boeing / Bigelow’s CST-100 all are just capsules that seem like 1950s technology. While I don’t doubt they’re more practical, they seem disheartening. We’ve come a long way from the days of the “National Areospace Plane” (I always found it a bit weird that the artist depictions always made it look like Air Force One.)