Category Archives: technology

RoboCup

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So on Wednesday night while cooking dinner I was listening with half an ear to Talk of the Nation on NPR, and at some point found that I was listening to a discussion about Robots. They were talking to Lee Gutkind about his new book about Robots, and about the future, and robots as tools, and interfacing with robots and so forth. All very interesting, all bruno robot made somewhat more engaging by the very deliberate way the interviewee spoke, taking great care with every sentence he uttered. This feat rather kept my attention more than the material, which I’ll hasten to add was not uninteresting -and certainly a topic I spent a lot of my youth dreaming about especially given all the Asimov books I used to devour- but not my focus was elsewhere I suppose. You can listen to the program here, and it is all certainly worth thinking about, it is a very serious and important topic, and robots (although mostly not in the form we see in our dramas on tv and in the cinema) may well dominate our society the way computers have become so central to us right now… so go right ahead and listen to what he has to say.

What finally grabbed me, this time, was not the serious “issue” material. It was this: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Not Nominal

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sea launch platformThe Sea Launch organization is a private satellite launch company. This is arguably the shape of the future of a lot of space activity, so it is interesting to keep an eye on them. They launch, using their Zenit-3SL rocket, from a latitude near the Equator, out in the Pacific ocean, from a platform that looks a lot like an oil platform (it is a converted one, in fact). The whole thing sails out from near here, at Long Beach, and steams along to the launch site, like some super-villians’ outfit. It’s all rather James Bond. More about them here.

sea launch zenit rocketIt’s strangely fascinating to look at the videos of past launches. (The October 30th 2006 XM-4 launch video, for example. Their archive is here.) They have a sort of old-fashioned feel to them that is riveting, although utterly boring at the same time since there’s not actually a lot going on, and the video quality is not so great. If I’m honest, I think the attraction for me is the slightly mechanical Eastern-European-accented female voices saying things like “we have lift off”… “separation phase complete”… “propulsion system nominal”… “pitch angle nominal”…. “auxiliary control nominal”….. Most of the videos are pretty much these people saying stuff is nominal, with occasional bursts of chatter layered above and below. It was strange entertainment for me last night while cooking. Go and have a look. Their whole site is worth a browse.

They had a bit of a bad day yesterday, though. Definitely not nominal. News story here. Spectacular video on YouTube here: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Vaporstream or no Vaporstream?

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Want to have a confidential email conversation about a sensitive issue? There’s not really been such a thing so far, really. Better to pick up the phone and talk in person. Or meet at random near that noisy fountain in the park. But wouldn’t it be nice to be able to send an email and not worry about it being forwarded on, saved – or “reply-all”-ed to the entire organization? I just heard a piece on NPR about a company that claims to offer this service. It acts as the place where you can send and pickup these mails. Once they are read, they are gone. Self-destructed. All very Mission Impossible

The service is called Vaporstream, and you can hear more about it in the NPR story, by going to the NPR site. I can’t give you a link to the clip directly as it does not seem to be on their site anywhere, so perhaps you will just have to listen to the whole program. (All Things Considered- The Monday 22nd Jan show, toward the last half hour or so.)

Interestingly, it seems that there’s only 8 posts tagged with it on Technorati. It’s been a long time since I saw something with so few entries there! I wonder how long that will last?

I wonder if Vaporstream will catch on and we’ll all be using it regularly in a short time. Will it be one of those things, like YouTube and Google, where we’ll all be wondering what life was like before them?

I find myself confused by why this elementary possibility is not a problem: While […] Click to continue reading this post →