Water plume seen on Jupiter moon Europa
The wonders of space, never cease. It has long been theorized that Europa has a liquid ocean below its frozen crust. Now, it seems that images taken by the Hubble Space Telescopt have captured a large cloud of hydrogen and oxygen on the moon’s south pole. Modeling suggests that Europa could be spouting 3000 kilograms of water per second. Head over to the New Scientist article for more on what this might mean for future space missions, and an idea of why it took so long to capture a plume.
Space Needle
A short and sweet Friday treat. Go to the Space Needle website, and scroll, scroll, scroll.
OS/2, This Is Your Life
Do you remember IBM’s OS/2? Chances are that if you have been in the computer game for a while, it at least rings a few bells. And if you have been in the computer game for a long while, you may have even used it back in the day. But how well do you know the history of OS/2 and its place in the war between IBM and Microsoft for PC dominance? It is a fascinating story, chronicled amazingly well in this post at Ars Technica.
Jeremy Reimer walks through the whole saga, from the first deal between the companies, to the crushing end when IBM finally threw in the towel and sold their PC business to Lenovo. Along the way there are all kinds of interesting bits. Like the fact that OS/2 2.0 came on 21 floppies. Remember that? Or how the OS/2 Warp name ran afoul of Paramount and Star Trek. You may also be surprised to learn that OS/2 is actuallly still in use today, under a different name. And one of my favorites, this horrible ad. It was the early 90s. Why would the aging cast of M.A.S.H. seem like a good marketing idea?
The whole thing is a fantastic look at a part of our computing history that really shaped the world as we know it today. I’m also fascinated by the fact that it really could have gone the other way. OS/2 wasn’t without its merits. This paragraph sums it up well.
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It makes one wonder what might have been.
45 years of the mouse
Courtesy of SRI International
The mouse is something we take for granted in our modern technical world, but it wasn’t always like that. Huffington Post has an interesting article celebrating the 45th anniversary of the little workhorse that has become a part of our every day. It all started in December of 1968, when Douglas Engelbart demoed the new gadget at the Fall Joint Computer Conference. Also worth noting is that he had actually invented it four years earlier, but had yet to reveal it. It really is one of the greatest inventions of our modern times. Perhaps the best evidence of that is the simple fact that it is still in widespread use today in, essentially, the exact same form factor.
More fun with Google Maps
Yes, that is a charter bus hanging over Interstate 5 in Seattle. You can view the widescreen version of the scene if you click the picture. Or you can go to Google Maps and get the 360° view. It’s a crazy scene, that only gets crazier when you hear the whole story. The Seattle PI has the 2008 accident archived on their site. An iffy bus-route that takes a street that probably should have been closed given the conditions. Two buses that were minutes away from their destination after traveling 175 miles from Moses Lake. The second bus nearly pushed the first over the edge. Fortunately, there were only minor injuries.
That one time, in Australia
Here’s an old entry from the ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ department. Did you ever hear about the time Frank Sinatra was stuck in Australia, because they wouldn’t let him leave? It’s a crazy tale from July of 1974. The whole thing started with reports about Sinatra’s mafia connections in the local paper while he was in town. He responded. An apology was demanded. And it all went downhill from there, eventually snowballing to the point that no member of a union at an airport was allowed to provide any service to Sinatra or his party. The whole story is completely bizarre, and worth a read.
Iron Bowl 2013 Game Winning Play
If you follow sports at all, and quite possibly even if you don’t, you heard about the shocking end to this year’s Iron Bowl. That is, the annual rivalry game between Auburn and Alabama. Chris Davis returned a field goal (Yes, you can do that!) for a game winning touchdown as time ran out. It was great on the national broadcast. It’s even better when you hear the local call from Rod Bramblett. And now, we can experience it all over again in the most bizarre fashion as Kaitlyn Reed lipsyncs Bramblett’s historic call of the play. It is so wrong, and so right, all at the same time.
HP’s Moonshot
The Moonshot server is an interesting idea. The basics of it involve specialized servers built on a cartridge using low-power mobile processors. These cartridges share the usual common resources; power, cooling, fabric, switches, ILO, etc, which are all part of the chassis they are inserted into. The end result is that you can have 45 servers in one 4U rack space, using a fraction of the power. You can see it in the picture at the top of the post. Each of those individual cards is a different server.
The processors are Intel Atoms and each server has 8GB RAM and 1 SATA or SSD disk. The current focus is on web and cloud functionality, but the future calls for more server cartridges with different specialties, like memcache nodes as an example. For now, it is an interesting new direction worth keeping an eye on. There is a ton more information at the HP Moonshot website. And here is a shot of one of the Moonshot servers.
Han Solo’s DL-44 Blaster
This post started out as a link to this auction listing for a DL-44 prop from Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi. The fact that it has an estimated price of $200,000 – $300,000 is pretty interesting, right? Some might even say crazy. But before I could get to that, I took a trip down the internet rabbit-hole looking for info on replica DL-44 blasters. And that’s where things get even more fascinating.
Take a read through this post on Tested. It chronicles the long journey of two people to make the best A New Hope version of Han’s blaster that they can. The level of detail in the post, and the crazed obsession of the community behind the project is incredible, and filled with tidbits you had no idea about. Things like where all those extra bits on the gun came from. Look closely at the detail on the magazine in the photo. See the piston from a V8 engine model kit?
The more you read about it, the more intriguing it becomes. It turns out that one of the big breaks in the project came in the form of a Frank Sinatra movie, The Naked Runner. Didn’t see that one coming, did you? And it just keeps getting better. The post gets into the different version of the gun that popped up throughout the films, even highlighting the bizarro blaster where the scope, for some reason, appears reversed. The whole thing makes for a terrific read that celebrates the obsession for detail that thrives in fan communities.
The ‘Magic’ Of Johannes Vermeer
Chances are you probably don’t know the name Johannes Vermeer. Until reading this Vanity Fair article on the Vermeer controversy, I didn’t. But his is a fascinating story, both at the time of his work in the 1600s, and today, as people puzzle over how he did what he did. What he did, was paint masterpieces. Appearing virtually out of nowhere at 21, with no training of note, he began produced work that would, years later, become incredibly valuable.
But lots of artists do that, right? What makes Vermeer’s case special is that the speculation that some sort of optical device enabled him to create his art. You have experts weighing in on both sides of the debate. Where this gets really interesting is when you meet Tim Jenison. Jenison is the founder of NewTek and has spent his career making hardware and software for video production. Along with that, he’s a tinkerer. Upon learning about Vermeer from his daughter, he took up the challenge. After years working out the system with materials available in the Vermeer era, he ended up with an answer to the riddle of how Vermeer might have done it.
The story gets even better as Penn & Teller join the party. Upon learning of Jenison’s project, they decided to make a documentary of the whole process, getting their chips in the game before they even knew if it would all work. The result is a film called Tim’s Vermeer that will be released in February. The story at Vanity Fair is fascinating, as the film certainly should be. The image at the top shows the real Vermeer and Tim’s version using his method. Click it to get a closer look, and decided for yourself how close he may, or may not, be.