The Fredösphere

Call my generation Coddled and Entitled if you like, but my memory of the moon landing was not amazement, so far as I can remember. I think my attitude was something like David Weber's and David Brin's in that I was thinking "well, yeah, of course we made it to the moon." I was born in 1962 (in fact, I was born hours after John Glenn's first Mercury flight) and thus my little brain was molded by the 60s, the Decade of Space Hype. I suppose it is unsurprising in hindsight that our space program became bloated and timid (it is a government program, after all) but like many my age I stand continually amazed at our failure to achieve new space milestones. Space shuttle: bah!

And please someone explain to this person (who elsewhere has a lot of interesting information about the development of the Saturn V rocket) that the casualty rate of our space program has been way too low. Yes, that's right: I want to see more deaths. Any program of exploration, involving untested, insanely cutting-edge technology, must either produce way more results than what we've seen from NASA . . . or must have a risk/benefit balance that is seriously out of whack. Increase the risk, stop halting the program for months on end every time there's a fatality, greatly accelerate the launch schedule (and build the dang Orion now— or better, fund more prizes for private sector efforts) and see if we have any trouble finding volunteers to staff the missions. Does anyone seriously believe space exploration would suffer from pilot scarcity if the death rate doubled? Where there's glory, there's guts.

UPDATE: Others go even farther than I. The Guardian, quoted by a blogger at Futurismic, calls for the UK to start sending astronauts to space (go, Brits!) and asserts there will be no shortage of volunteers—even if the trip is one-way. Wow. That's commitment. Reminds me of the old joke about the ham-n-egg breakfast: the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.

Labels: Final Frontier, Technology

If you've been following the kerfuffle over Amazon's summary deletion of certain ebooks from customers' Kindles, you'll be amused to know that 1984 is one of the titles that have been disappeared. Thanks to my friend Jeremy for pointing this out to me, and also thanks to my friend Victor, who was reminded of a piece from Byte magazine that imagines how a certain famous book would be published the way software is: Moby Dick 2.1.

We have added several new characters to version 2.1. In particular, several readers reported that the character of Harold the bookkeeper, who was intended to act as a foil for Ishmael, simply did not work. This character has been replaced by Queequeg, a South Seas savage.

Labels: fun, Technology

The last time (which was years ago, sadly) I spoke to my friend Greg the amateur singer and professor at the University of Michigan's Engineering School, he told me he was one of a group of researchers pursuing an elusive dream:  a search engine for audio.  Today I noticed SFF Audio is hyping HuffDuffer.com, a system of applying tags to sound files.  Is this the first baby step toward Audio Google?  And may I suggest the next step?—try tagging locations within audio files, which would be analogous to tagging faces within photos rather than the whole photo itself.

Labels: Technology