The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘space-station’

Houston, we have periwinkle New Gorillapod uses rare earth magnets, sticks to your car Proactive RAID monitoring from your iPhone Blip gets reverse-engineered. Proves that the computer was cheating. Your view doesn’t compare to the new view from the International Space Station

Originally posted here: 
Daily Crunch: Rocket to the Moon Edition

Believe it or not, the current plan for the International Space Station is to abandon it in 2015 and let it crash into the atmosphere in 2016. Sad, right

Continued here:
The European Space Agency wants to extend the ISS’s life until 2020

This story is not nearly as interesting as I was led to believe. Some guy bought something in the online game Entropia Universe .

Read the original:
In-game item in Entropia Universe kinda sorta bought for US$330,000

Lucky cosmonaut and astronauts. Not only do they get the best corner office view ever, but they also have a legit version of Star Trek  downloaded

See original here: 
Star Trek was screened on the ISS

“I find it frightening that the first alien contact we might make could be a tweet.”
Truer words have never been spoken by a YouTube commenter.

NASA astronaut Mark Polansky, who will be commanding the next mission to the International Space Station, has just posted a video to NASA’s official YouTube channel inviting YouTubers and Twitter fans to take part in his next mission, submitting video questions via YouTube and following mission updates over Twitter.

To ask a question, Polansky says to create a video of around thirty seconds and post it to YouTube, then send it to his Twitter account using an @reply. He’ll respond to the questions on NASA TV, which is broadcast nation-wide.

Polansky won’t actually be the first person to Tweet from space - that title will likely belong to Mike Massimino, who plans to Tweet from Space Shuttle Atlantis, which embarks on mission STS-125 in less than three days.

NASA has recently been making a big push in using modern consumer technology, the web, and social sites to reach a broader audience. Yesterday it launched a collection of very impressive Photosynth galleries of the ISS and Mars Rover. And they have more exciting releases in the works. This is something that is long overdue - the public may not be as enamored of space missions as it was a few decades ago, but the feats these astronauts are undertaking are no less impressive. And frankly I’d much rather follow the updates of true heroes than yet another celebrity on Twitter.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if alien races will stumble across the tweets and conclude that our brains are only capable of interpreting 140 characters at a time.

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Today was supposed to be a big coming out party for stealthy search engine Wolfram Alpha. Computer scientist Stephen Wolfram gave the first public demonstration of his knowledge mining search engine at Harvard. But to be honest, not too many people were paying attention because A) who wants to sit through a two-hour Webcast and B) Google decided to tease its own efforts at adding structured data to search during the demo.

Not long after that, we received the screenshot above from an anonymous “benefactor” of Wolfram Alpha asking “which one is computing about the future?” The Wolfram screenshot shows a search for “ISS” and the results show the flight path and current position of the International Space Station, along with its altitude, velocity, inclination, orbit type, and other useful stats. Google population search, in contrast, plots basically one data point over time (although, you can easily add others). The suggestion is that Google quickly ginned up its public data search feature to undermine Wolfram’s debut. And it worked. Nobody really paid attention to the two hour snorecast (except Larry Dignan at Cnet—thank you Larry for sitting through it so the rest of us didn’t have to).

To be fair, some people who have seen it are very excited about the Wolfram search engine (Nova Spivack, for one, argues persuasively that it is going to be big). But it is hard to get excited about canned demos and promises of computer science breakthroughs. Google’s structured data search might be relatively simplistic but at least it isn’t vaporware. Google actually launched it. Anyone can try it out. When will Wolfram do the same and let people actually play with his vaunted search engine? It is going to take more than a leaked screenshot to convince anyone that Wolfram has something Google doesn’t or can’t build in a year.

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