interesting websites

Every once in a while, I'll run across a website that I think would be of interest to this group. I thought I'd start a thread for this sort of thing.

As a first website, this was three years of video from the Mars Rover edited down to three minutes. Surprisingly, it's a lot of sand and rock. :-)

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/11/8274228-three-years-on-mars-in-3...

If the above website becomes defunct, here is the video on Youtube without the news story:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpV8G0R84nI

Also, several times I noticed something that sort of looked like a Dalek if you squinted a little. Maybe that's why there's a lot of sand and rock. ;-)

#1 by pjfarm> C'mon, you can't let your eyes play tricks on you like that. It's that kind of ignorance that made the stupid "Face of Mars" so popular.

It's just a trash can.

With a plunger sticking out.

Whilst we're on the subject of the Mars rovers, there's an excellent unofficial blog following the progress of the rovers here:

http://roadtoendeavour.wordpress.com/

It's written by a British teacher who combines an interest in geology (areology, perhaps) with a sense of lyricism and good writing ability. Real Sense of Wonder stuff, if a bit heavy on rocks...

>2 and I didn't see any stairs on Mars either!!! What to do?!?

I like this article at Space.com on how "space shuttle technology" is still with us. It is about the USA's military X-37B space shuttle and its derivatives.

Interesting article. Perhaps America has finally woken up to the thought that Chinese pasport control on the Moon isn't inevitable.

Nice video. Lots of sand. Ummm....did I mention my enthusiasm about the sand? Yup. Sand.

1+2: If you look closely at the rover video you'll notice a couple of empty beer cans and a condom wrapper :)

The rovers are great and point to the obvious solution to the energy efficiency/reliable transportation problems. We clone the people who designed the rovers and have them design our earth vehicles! I hope the next big rover touches down in one piece - it is built for some long distance reconnaissance.

I wonder why no one has thought to put a big rover on the moon for a 5 or 10 year mission, it seems like that would be more cost effective for analysis of geologic material than an expensive short term manned operation. Unless the recent satellite surveys are just as effective.

I bet the military works up a version of the X-37 B or C that is compatible with the rail gun technology they have developed recently. A rail gun in the Atacama Desert at 10,000 feet or better would make for a much smaller booster to reach low earth orbit.

For Mars it would be great if they could develop a solar powered plane like the one that can stay aloft in high thin air almost indefinitely.

An orbiter with powerful ground penetrating radar would seem useful too.

I still think the rover images look like an earth beach are a bit ironic and so are a bit comical.

Looking forward to the new rover. Hope someone didn't forget to convert English to metric. ;-)

>8 You did notice that it took the Rover 3 years to go 13 miles didn't you? I doubt there's a lot of demand for that sort of vehicle on earth. :-)

3 years to go 13 miles

But efficiently! Although, you're right. Any vehicle you've got to park up over winter because the 'fuel' is a bit 'thin' is probably not going to work here. ;)

Here are some predictions of the near future, 2016, by IBM & others.

IBM Predicts Home Electricity From Your Bike, Mind-Reading Computers

I saw the new "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" today and one of the more watchable interminable previews was of the movie Prometheus, directed by Ridley Scott.  The scene looked like the "Alien" series and once I looked it up online it appears it was originally written as a prequel to
Alien.  One of the articles at a movie site with the trailer however disputes this by saying Giger's creature will not be appearing in the flick.  On screen the flick looked great, I have no idea of any release date.

Replied to the Prometheus topic here:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/130149

Here's some stuff I find interesting:

because I like to know what is where;

3-D Starmaps

Galaxy Maps

because I like stars and can't remember all the kinds, the H-R diagram etc.

Stellar classification

>16 & 18

Mia,

You are being flagged because your posts resemble spam for your blog.
i'm counter-flagging, but you might want to rephrase.

Ruth

Yes. They resemble spam much in the way spam resembles it. I waited until the second one within a week to flag, and then I flagged both. I was actually a bit optimistic that no one was posting messages about whether or not it was spam, but I guess that's what this thread will be about from this point onwards.

I think it's the appearance of self promotion that tosses it into spamland. The "interesting websites" on this thread are pages which posters have come across rather than created.

I don't think anyone checked to see who you are, and that you might just have mis-understood.

#21 by themusescircle> For one, once was enough. As I said, I didn't flag you until you showed up just a few days later, promoting your same blog. It also didn't help that though you've been on since last August, your only public posts have been three pumping your blog site and one saying you didn't receive a book.

If you need a guideline, just imagine this is a real life gathering of people sitting around talking about cool scifi websites. If you popped in and said what you did in your first post, people might chuckle at the "self-promotion"-ish tone, but they probably wouldn't give you a hard time. If you then came back five minutes later and did the same thing, they might have some impolite suggestions for your.

The internet is not all that different than real life, sometimes.

21>

Most people here aren't promoting their own websites -- there's a big difference between "Hey, this is a cool website I saw" and "Come to my blog", and even more importantly most people aren't repeating their suggestions multiple times.

Like brightcopy, I thought your first post was tacky but not spam; it was the second one that prompted me to flag them both, since it seemed that you weren't acting in good faith but just purely seeking blog traffic.

Back on topic: a PDF of a booklet apparently commissioned by The National Institute on Drug Abuse Research Issues in 1974 entitled DRUG THEMES IN SCIENCE FICTION, penned by none other than Robert Silverberg:

http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED112299.pdf

thanks art, neat link....I have looked up Arrowsmith and the word abnegation {hadn't seen it in awhile} so far.

::edit in:: I have read a bit more of the article and want to know how there has not been a band called Dream-Dust from Mars. I mean if Arrowsmith deserves a band Dream-Dust just begs the question.



BTW .....I will not be answering questions tomorrow during wiki's shut down ;-)

25> I did my post-doc at NIDA. Scanned the PDF. Thanks. That's about the weirdest thing imaginable (besides dogs wearing clothes).

Neuromancer wasn't out for another 10 yrs. That was a guy going at it hard. Yeah. There's a lot of people getting high in SF.

I recently read Ringworld Engineers that had the main character (Louis Wu) kicking from intracranial self-stimulation. His feeling were so on target that I had to wonder if Larry Niven had kicked opiates.

Thought this website was/is interesting, mostly because i'm interested in other cultural takes on the genre. I've mostly been exposed to western SF and SF from Japan (i love big robots), and would love to read SF from other countries. I know there's a big SF website in China, it would be great to see if any of the work gets translated. anyways Islam and Science Fiction captured my interest:

http://islamscifi.com/

> 28

Cool. Thanks for that.

I like this explanation of a recent experiment that discovered 2 genes responsible for long term memory. It does not give a link to the original publishing site.

I found this link after sneaking in the back door at Literary Snobs discussion group on LT. http://www.ubu.com/
you can find some neat obscure SF stuff on the films & video section- e.g. Sun Ra and Raashan Roland Kirk {Inspiration for Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull} for Jazz.

If you say something like:"Speed Racer and L. Ron Hubbard exemplify, respectively, the cutting edge of film and serious SF in the 20th century" You can fill your brandy snifter from the unattended cognac bottles of the more prominent members of the discussion group as they become apoplectic. ;-)

Fix your first link, Dug. ;)

OK link fixed :::blush:: forgot to proofread. Thanks Bright

Anytime!

Interesting read. I always enjoy reading about how memory and consciousness work (or, as science tends to target, how they can be made to NOT work). I've just been reading Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. It's sparking all sorts of thoughts about artificial intelligence, among other things. He adds a philosophical bent to the bare scientific approach, probing what it means to have no memories, to be unable to form new memories (e.g. Memento), or just having parts of your brain not being able to process reality in the ways we take for granted (e.g. mistaking one's wife for a hat).

It also made me realize the "mnesia" in "amnesia" comes from the same root as makes "mnemonic." The pronunciation always disguised it and I'd never thought about it before.

I have that book and a couple other Oliver Sack books on my read sometime list. I see his books mentioned all the time in science articles.

This is the first one I've read (well, I'm only one and a half patients in). I'd heard him on Radiolab several times and it was always interesting. One episode that is apropos is the one about face blindness:

http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2010/jun/15/strangers-in-the-mirror/

Here's a summary:

Oliver and Chuck--both born with the condition known as Face Blindness--have spent their lives decoding who is saying hello to them. You can sit down with either man, talk to him for an hour, and if he sees you again just fifteen minutes later, he will have no idea who you are. (Unless you have a very squeaky voice or happen to be wearing the same odd purple hat.)

Here is an interesting link to ExtremeTech that compliments the recent posts above on memory. Might post it in that grave yard of a LT science section.

A quote from the article: "MIT researchers have shown, for the first time ever, that memories are stored in specific brain cells. By triggering a small cluster of neurons, the researchers were able to force the subject to recall a specific memory. By removing these neurons, the subject would lose that memory."

There is a link to the Nature article where the research was published which would be good to check out. The tech article is descriptive but leaves a lot of wiggle room in the experiment interpretations. {::edit:: by that I mean I am not surprised a rat "cowered in a defensive posture with a recalled memory" when a laser went off in his brain. I would think anything would cower after a laser went off in its brain, but I imagine MIT explains it was a really tiny laser in their Nature article.}

On the topic of space travel, there's an innovatively designed website that hosts the full radio transcripts of the apollo 11 mission. Cool photos, cool web design, and an unexpectedly gripping story of survival (if a bit heavy on the strings of acronyms and numbers).
http://apollo11.spacelog.org/

>36
That validates the Fringe episode where it's revealed that Walter had three pieces of his brain removed so he couldn't remember certain things. :-)

He spent over 7 hours curled up in a steel sphere 1.1 metres across. I'm not surprised he's a bit stiff :-) Still, an amazing achievement. Can't wait to see the documentary. I'm just surprised there's no interactive website yet...

A link to a neat web site/blog of vintage photos etc .. that I stumbled across. A lot of the site is in French/Italian? Odd that they had photos of my new phone answering machine and my girlfriend when I am in France {that no one knows about ssshhhh}She waits for me on the beach like that. ;-)

>41

My favorite from the second link is the Life magazine photo that reads, "This diaper bathing suit of checked gingham is fastened with two buttons". One wonders what sort of remarks that must have elicited: "Darling, you look stunning, but really - must everyone know about your incontinence problem?" :D

I moved this article/link to a more appropriate topic "500 Exoplanets" http://www.librarything.com/topic/102861#3299649

thought this was interesting. i found the site through a Thomas Friedman article on education, there's a course on Fantasy and Science Fiction

https://www.coursera.org/course/fantasysf

May 19th, Tomorrow early morning 4:55 am EST scheduled launch of new private enterprise SpaceX capsule to space station....Safe Trip!!!

Below is a quote from an article about the evidently tenuous launch time of the delivery system for the USA to the space station. I am glad they are getting everything right and not thinking damn the O rings and launch anyway. These capsules land in the sea and are recovered - or that is the game plan.

"SpaceX has launched a Falcon 9 rocket just twice before, once with a Dragon capsule that reached orbit. The company has never gotten down to zero and flown on the first try, Shotwell noted, putting the odds of accomplishing that Saturday — with a scant one-second launch window — at 50-50 or a bit better."

Here is a link to the SpaceX website http://www.spacex.com

Oh well, Spacex is going to try again soon. Listening to the audio of the attempted launch on the radio it sounded like the fuse burned out before it reached the rocket engine - used to happen to me with bottle rockets as a kid all the time. Always wait awhile to make sure the fuse doesn't start up again.

Enough of the technical explanation here is a reporter's version :

"The problem came on engine 5. The computer detected chamber pressure was rising too high during the ignition. That indicated it was running too hot, which indicated there was too low a level of fuel in the combustion, Shotwell said. "This does not look like a sensor failure," she said."

Link to story at Orlando newspaper here:

http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-05-19/news/os-spacex-launch-dragon-2012...

With a reported one second launch window, it can't have been carrying a lot of fuel for maneuvering (i.e. not much Δv). Not exactly our science-fictional rocket ship, then.

I wish it had launched on time though, this is the future of space flight: and the beginning of van Rijn's mercantile space conglomerate.

#47 Astute comment. Would the fuel needed for extra maneuvering be in the last stage, to catch up or slow down to meet the station, or mean fuel pared down to the bare minimum in all stages?

That sounds logical for the non- manned versions.

New launch time, sorry if this bores folks but I would really like the delivery system to work.

"Dragon is now due to lift off atop SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 3:44 a.m. EDT (0744 GMT). Weather forecasters have upgraded the outlook to an optimistic 80 percent chance of clear skies for the launch."

Link to article:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47504449/ns/technology_and_science-space/#.T7rpr8WTV...

Aaand and they're off!

*applauds*

Great!!! An article mentions that the development of the SpaceX project cost a billion dollars, which if I remember correctly was the cost of a single shuttle launch and some change.

:::edited in::: From wiki: {for the shuttle program} "Per-launch costs can be measured by dividing the total cost over the life of the program (including buildings, facilities, training, salaries, etc.) by the number of launches. With 134 missions, and the total cost of US$192 billion (in 2010 dollars), this gives approximately $1.5 billion per launch over the life of the program."

According to the article, going along for the ride were:

"Hitching a ride into space, aboard the discarded second stage of the rocket, were the ashes of more than 300 people, including Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper and "Star Trek" actor James Doohan, who played Scotty. It's a redo flight for a paying customer, Houston-based Celestis Inc. The Falcon 1 that carried the first batch of their ashes failed in 2008."

Tribute to "Scotty" whose spirit helped I am sure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c1Kaa4KkvU&feature=results_video&playnex...



Astronaut L. Gordon Cooper prepares for insertion in Faith 7 (MA-9) atop Mercury-Atlas gantry for 22-orbit flight in May, 1963

Ye cannae break the laws of the market, Cap'n.

SpaceX at the ISS space station, Looks like they made it ok to the station, the "Canadian Arm" had grabbed the cargo capsule and was maneuvering it to a docking port.  {News Link with big photos}

I saw this economic evaluation of SpaceX and another "publicly traded space company: Orbital Sciences Corp".  Orbital has a mission scheduled to the space station later in the year according to the article.

Dragon Capsule lands, splashes down in ocean {and floats!}

From the AP: "NASA reported that the capsule landed on target about 900 kilometres west of Baja California, Mexico, and SpaceX recovery crews were on their way to the landing site"

Being an old phart who watched the first moon landing on tv late at night I find this rather exciting and hope the trips become mundanely, repeatedly successful.

Link to AP article

not as cool as space flight, but i saw this and thought it was interesting: Neal Stephenson is making a video game and he needs our help! (....or our money at least):

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang?ref=live

posted because of its approach to world building, linking to SF fans, etc.

That looks interesting. I know several people who were on fencing teams in school and worked with a guy who was/is a kendo instructor. I am not sure how fixed they are for disposable income these days however. Is there any chance you can ever get back your investment with kick starter?

Wish I had signed up for lessons with the Kendo guy, that would make walking with a stout cane more interesting.

Two interesting websites I recommend are those of the science fiction writer James P. Hogan and the LongNowFoundation (co-founded by Stewart Brand, Esther Dyson, and others):

http://www.jamesphogan.com/heretics/toc.php

http://longnow.org/

#58 I liked both sites - especially the Longnow site. It has nice esthetics design along with the information.

In honor of July 8, 2012 being the 65th anniversary of the Roswell UFO crash, we have this article from the Huffington Post. The guy says he is ex-CIA and has info that he's not going to share but he's sure that it really was a UFO and aliens.

Oh, and he has a sci-fi book out now that needs publicity so it'll sell.

There's probably no connection between those two things. :-}

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/08/roswell-ufo-cia-agent-chase-brandon_n_1...

#61 I have seen videos of the military loading "crash dummies" inside of saucer like capsules to be dropped from planes. They were classified as "secret" for decades was the explanation given for their not being shown. Of course those films could have been made by aliens covering up their crash here!

Seriously, though. The cover-up was actually* instigated by the manufacturer of Flying Saucer®, in a futile attempt to stop them from being sued for the shoddy Dark Matter® brakes that were fitted to the 1945 model UFO®.

The resulting case in the Intergalactic Superior Court sent them bankrupt, which is why there have been no visitors ever since.

*may not be actually actual.

*may not be actually actual.

Oh good grief. Be a real roaming reporter, grow a second set of yarbles, stand firmly on all three webbed feet and make a statement !!! Not some waffling Silurean mediator's nestlings pap condescension to the facts!

This is pretty damn useful:

http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/Publisher:Project_Gutenberg/List_of_Speculat...

I'm still scratching my head regarding the inclusion of Moby-Dick, though. :/