Wednesday 31 March 2010

newspapers vs what matters to most people

It's like there are two worlds: the one covered by the Times and Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, with front pages replete with stories about gridlock in Washington and infighting in the White House, and style sections that cover boring and repetitive fashion and gossip about dull people, and the one that I find unceasingly arresting, where people with lives and passions who actually know something and do stuff that can make the world a better place hang out. 

The first one, increasingly out-of-touch with what matters, is Landliner Nation.

The second, where the action is and where people are spending more and more time and money, well, I'm not sure what to call it.

Hear here.

Wednesday 17 March 2010

The Bloom Box: An Energy Breakthrough? - 60 Minutes - CBS News

The Bloom Box: An Energy Breakthrough? - 60 Minutes - CBS News: "Bloom boxes will power not just our richest companies, but remote villages in Africa and all our houses.

'In five to ten years, we would like to be in every home,' he told Stahl.

He said a unit should cost an average person less than $3,000.

'You are an idealist,' Stahl remarked.

'You know, it's about seeing the world as what it can be and not what it is,' Sridhar replied."

Tuesday 9 March 2010

Were you smiling? 10/03/06 GEOS-5 portrait of Earth





















Were you smiling? Awesome portrait of Earth taken Saturday







Did you feel like you were being watched on Saturday? In fact, you were, and we have the pictures right here to prove it. Reacting to the groundswell of admiration for its full-disk pictures of Earth we showed you last week, the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio uploaded these brand new shots of our blue marble, taken Saturday, March 6, 2010.

The scientists from Goddard were amazed at the reaction all around the blogosphere to the shot of the earth we showed you a couple of weeks ago, especially since it's been the default wallpaper on the iPhone since its debut, and has been around for years. They figured they'd really dazzle us with these even-sharper and newer shots, and they've succeeded in a profound way. Be sure to click on the pictures in the gallery below for intense enlargements.

But wait, that's not the half of it. The most spectacular visual of our planet is one we can't paste in here, but it will be worth your while to follow this link and be astonished by an HD moving image of the Earth as it looked on a single day, on January 2, 2009. These were all taken by the GEOS-5 satellite (Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5). Before it became grossly overused, this is what the word "awesome" really meant. So were you smiling? We are now.

Here's another sequence of images, taken by GOES-5 on August 17-26, 2009:

































Goddard Space Flight Center, via Flickr