20 Jul 2009 - permalink
Today marks the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing by the Apollo 11 crew of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. There are obviously tons of sites mentioning this historic occasion and I thought I’d chime in with a few good links.
The always interesting Jason Kottke has a Giant Apollo 11 post with many high quality links, including the brilliant We Choose The Moon with the activities replayed as they happened.
The Big Picture by Boston Globe is always fascinating and this time they’ve compiled a list of 40 remarkable images for Remembering Apollo 11.
I find the loss of the original tapes of the moonwalk unfortunate beyond belief, so I am glad to see that NASA has released a set of restored high definition videos of the preserved footage.
NASA’s new LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) has returned some impressive images of the moon and the resolution is so much better than anything achievable from Earth that you can quite clearly see the landing sites of the Apollo missions. According to NASA, future images from LRO will be of even greater detail and should put any remaining (and unfounded) skepticism to rest.
7 Jul 2009 - permalink
Necessity is the mother of invention, this time from a two year old US law on energy efficiency to take effect in 2012. Described as “tough standards”, the law requires incandescent bulbs to be 30% more efficient that today’s (Wikipedia). In contrast, the EU has agreed to put a complete ban on incandescent bulbs by 2012.
“There’s a massive misperception that incandescents are going away quickly,” said Chris Calwell, a researcher with Ecos Consulting who studies the bulb market. “There have been more incandescent innovations in the last three years than in the last two decades.”
I wouldn’t go so far as the author and call it the cutting edge (they are still way behind compact fluorescent lamps), but there are certainly improvements on the way and with an estimated 90% of all private light sources in the United States being incandescent that is definitely needed.
Indeed, the incandescent bulb is turning into a case study of the way government mandates can spur innovation.
30 Jun 2009 - permalink
BBC asks 13-year old Scott Campbell to use a Walkman over his iPod for a week:
It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.
