Two stories from the Welcome to the Future dept: NASA and the European Space Agency send dueling rovers to Mars in search of life, while scientists perfect gecko tape technology to create real-life “Spiderman” gloves. There’s a few origin stories in here somewhere.
Category: Tech
X Gonna Give it to Ya.
Aircraft designer Burt Rutan unveils SpaceShipOne, a rocket plane designed to make private space tourism affordable. The design could garner him the X Prize, to be awarded to the first privately funded manned space flight. If it works like it’s supposed to, I expect Rutan will make a good deal more than $10 million.
The Revolution will be Googlized.
Google buys Pyra(!) (First seen at LinkMachineGo.) Congrats to the Blogger crew [or should I say cabal? (3/28)] If weblogs aren’t mainstream enough already, they will be in very short order.
Death from Above.
The depersonalized video game nature of modern war has been noted in a lot of places (Patriot Games, for example), but this video of a US raid on the Taliban from an AC-130 Spectre Gunship really drives it home. A fascinating look at the 21st-century military at work, although a bit unsettling once you realize the white dots fleeing in every direction are in fact enemy combatants.
Gotta be the shoes.
Several people have told me that my sister Gill is featured prominently in an off-line New Yorker article about recent advances (and controversies) in ballet shoe technology. I haven’t read it yet, but thought I’d drop a note here anyway.
Betamax and DivX Redux.
Three different formats vie to become the standard for blue laser DVD’s, expected in the market by 2005. No 8-track worries just yet – all models will be retro-compatible with red-laser DVD’s.
Scram!
An Australian research team may have pulled off a successful scramjet test, which, according to the article, would mean “one of the most significant technological advances since American Chuck Yeager became the first person to break the sound barrier in 1947.” If nothing else, to be able to fly to Australia and back in two hours would be something else.
My Buddy.
Surfers go ga-ga over their IM buddy-bots.
Oh, shut up already.
Normally, I just stay out of the computer wars, since (a) Mac people tend to be so vehemently evangelical and since (b) – even though I’ve been using ’em since my dad bought a TRS-80 back in the day (on which I used to play the hell out of a game called “Sword of Zedek,” which for some reason I can’t find anything on the web about )- I’ve never been much more than a moderately informed user (which, in blog circles, makes me ridiculously uninformed.) That being said, every time I catch one of these annoying new Apple ads, I become ever deeper entrenched in my fondness for PC’s. “Using my PC was like being stuck in a bad relationship?” Please. Like I want to wait an extra eighteen months for new games to get a Mac port.
While I did have an Apple IIc as a kid (Mmmm…”Old Ironsides,”) I didn’t really use Macs until I was forced to in high school and, to cut to the quick, I thought they were crappity crap. When a PC goes down, even a rudimentary user like myself can try to ascertain the problem in DOS. When a Mac went down…well, you were stuck looking at that stupid icon. It’s a glorified calculator. It’s no doubt true that the Windows OS is and has been a complete facsimile of the Macintosh, but I’m kinda hoping we move past GUI’s eventually. Ok, I’ve probably betrayed my ignorance a few times over in this post already, so I’ll close it up. Suffice to say, those Apple ads irk me to no end.
Soldiering On.
A report from the Sixth Annual Webby Awards.