aerospace
- Foxit Software (which sells a line of very good PDF-related software, including the Foxit Reader, which I use daily) has announced an e-ink based ebook reader, the eSlick. The device isn’t being shipped yet, but there have been some early reactions in Wired and other places. I’m interested because Foxit is unlikely to claim (as most ebook enthusiasts do) that PDF is the spawn of the devil. Worth watching.
- The Loopy Idea of the Month comes from two Ohio academics who have recently patented the notion of collapsing hurricanes by flying around them in supersonic aircraft and (somehow) using the sonic boom shockwaves to scramble the storm. Apart from the fact that supersonic aircraft use fuel at a prodigous rate, I still don’t quite follow the physics of how this is supposed to collapse the storm. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Jim Strickland passed a long a detailed how-to for extracting metallic titanium from white pigment. The process is straightforward, if (as it must be) highly energetic. I think the stickier question is working the titanium after it’s been isolated. Titanium is difficult to melt and very difficult to machine. I have a piece in my curio cabinet, and I’m very glad I don’t have to make anything from it.
- Many people sent me the latest version of the old joke that “If Programming Languages Were Religions…” most of them lamenting that my favorite language—and my favorite religion—were not included. So it goes. I’m guessing that Pascal, like Catholicism, is patient: There will be only one programming language in use in the hereafter, and it will not be C++. You’ll have to go somewhere else for that.
- The Wall Street Journal tells me that the RIAA is abandoning its mass-lawsuit strategy of copyright enforcement. It hasn’t worked at reducing music piracy, and its sole effect was making the music industry bigshots look positively evil. One can only wonder why it took so long to figure this out, and whether the damage can ever really be undone.
- Here’s a wry peek at what we may see come out of the Big 3 bailout. Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link. Have you driven a Pelosi lately?
- Also from Pete comes word that Werner Von Braun wrote SF. This actually looks pretty good—gotta love that cover!
- Sorry for the silence here; I rarely go a week without posting but a lot of things ganged up on me. Many have noticed that I'm gradually moving toward posting less often but doing longer posts. I've discovered that it doesn't take me a great deal more time to write more detailed posts than shorter ones, but not posting at all on some days allows me to concentrate more fully on other projects.
- There is a major total lunar eclipse tomorrow night, 2/20-2/21, which will be almost perfectly positioned for viewing in the US. See the NASA page for details. And if you're not up on lunar eclipses generally, ask Mr. Eclipse.
- Flash memory is getting bigger; a 16GB SDHC card would hold a lot of ebooks.
- Pertinent to the above: I'm not bullish on solid-state drives based on Flash, especially if they're positioned to replace ordinary spinning-disk hard drives. Flash storage cells can change state only so many times until they cease holding a state reliably, and extra hardware is needed to “spread the wealth around” so that frequent write activity in a particular location doesn't kill cells. Flash is thus best used for things like storage of music and ebook files, where you write data rarely but read it a lot.
- Also, Flash may evenually be superceded by nonvolatile phase-change memory. We're still a few years off, but phase-change is faster than Flash and may even replace volatile RAM. No information yet that I've found on whether the cells degrade or die after a certain number of write cycles.
- One other ebook note: Although most early reviewers claimed that the Kindle's SD slot was limited to 2 GB cards, the truth is that the card slot is SDHC and many owners have reported success with larger cards up to 8 GB. I don't have 8 GB of ebooks yet and may not for several more years. I just don't read that fast. For people who are actively converting their print library to ebooks, however, larger cards are a very important issue.
- This nice link to NPR came over from Don Doerres, concerning the growing hobby of watching satellites. We used to go out and freeze butt looking for Echo in the early 1960s, but these guys are calculating orbits, photographing flares (momentary bright sunlight glints off polished satellite parts) and profoundly irritating the spooks. Watch the videos. Really watch the videos.
