Category Archives: inthenews

Space Shuttle Era

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Today is the launch of the final mission of any of the space shuttles.

The first test launches occurred when I was in high school.  I loved space and space science.  I always dreamed of being the first computer programmer to live on the moon – someone would have to keep those things running.  I attended a 2-week summer “camp” that was space themed at Texas A&M, Galveston in high school.  I wanted to return the following year, but was too old having just graduated, so instead I was an intern on the same program I’d attended the year before.

June Scobee was the head of the program and I loved working with her.  She happened to be married to an astronaut, so we got a lot of great access to things going on at NASA JSC.  I had talks with June about her husband and her son (an air force pilot at the time). At the end of that program I helped June move stuff back to her place and met her husband Dick, and shared an iced tea with him on his back porch: casual, friendly, Houston warm.

shuttle launchI was almost always aware of when there was a shuttle launch.  In the early years of the program it would still be mentioned on the lead-up, and interrupt most television for the launch.  But six months later, in January of 1986, I was returning from a test a bit before noon.  This was a time before mobil phones or social networks.  I remember the post-test relief walking across a sunny campus back to my dorm.  I exited the elevator on my floor to the area that was the TV Lounge.

It took all of 10 seconds before “it blew up, the space shuttle blew up”.  Initially, I though he was confused.  Then I thought maybe it was a launch pad fire. I tried to get him to explain it; all he could say was “it blew up”.  I sat.  The sinking feeling was deep, waiting for the news people to figure out what they knew.  The tone of their voices told me it was bad. Then I back-calculated the launches and remembered this was Dick’s launch.  The sinking feeling got deeper.

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The Eyes Have It

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Box Jellyfish

art by fisher

I was listing to one of my regular podcasts on Saturday: 60-Second Science from Scientific American. [iTunes]  This particular snippet of science in the news was titled Box Jellyfish Eyes Aim at the Trees.  It seems that box jellyfish have 24 eyes, and four of them point above the water’s surface.  They use those four exclusively to navigate.  They live in mangrove swamps and use the tree limbs as navigation markers.

Box jellyfish, and most jellyfish, have minimal brains.  The multiple visual sensors allows less central processing by a brain able to pull out the variety of signals, redirect sensors to different targets when desired, and perhaps screen peripheral information to change task of a particular sensing organ.

 

For years, human language recognition tried to model language the way linguists understand it.  There were large breakthroughs in the area when massive computation became more available and we started treating it more like an engineering problem.  Solving the problem the way we thought we solved it seemed a good direction.  Early AI research has many similarities to this.

There have been a lot of robotic devices that have had one or two cameras for “eyes”, and we have done some work on image recognition from these.  Feeding this information (perhaps with other information from infrared or pressure sensors) to a central programming location.  Maybe an attempt to decentralize robot computation, and increase the number of sensors might lead to some interesting uses and solutions.

Just a thought.

Is This Disaster Natural Enough For You?

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Last Friday I read an innocent enough tweet from @Slate:

Tornado outbreak now the worst US natural disaster since Katrina:http://slate.me/m8ZWnN – Apr 29 2011

My first reaction was “wow, those tornados were nasty.”  Which is, i’m sure, how it was intended. Then I thought “worst? what are they using to determine badness?”  Of course, this was somewhat of a second-level headline.  The main headline said it was the “deadliest US natural disaster”.  So the manager of the twitter account had taken the step from death = worst (i tweeted a response), which the author (Josh Voorhees) of the article likely didn’t mean to imply.

I’m sure the economic impact of Hurricane Ike was much greater than that of the recent tornados.  Tornados are pinpoint, one block can be toothpicks the next unharmed.  Hurricanes paint with big brushes, but thankfully we get advanced warning which mitigates deaths.  I’m would guess that Ike left more homeless as well.  (Death tolls: Katrina ~1800, Ike ~200, recent tornadoes ~300+)

Not wanting to figure a calculus for death vs. destruction, I soon focused in on “natural disaster”.  Hurricane Katrina, like Hurricane Ike, was itself a weather event, and caused a natural disaster.  But the Flooding of New Orleans was not a natural disaster.  It was caused by the breaching of a human-made levee, a combination of engineering and bureaucratic failure.  I would certainly not attribute all those deaths to “natural disaster”.

Was the collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis a natural disaster?  Certainly the elements caused it to deteriorate, but I think all of us would answer “no”.

The recent earthquake-tsunami combination in Japan was certainly a natural disaster.  Was the subsequent Chernobyl-sized welt-down and the economic and possible death toll?  I would certainly say “no”.

So, I ask again, was the Flooding of New Orleans a natural disaster?  The only answer can be no!

KTRU’s Passing Will Mark the End of the End

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Radio in Houston has been going downhill for decades.  And when I say radio, I mostly mean music radio.  I still use the radio to listen to news, or the odd Astros game (though I stopped tuning to 740 AM because I would find myself so disgusted by its content on off-sporting hours).

KTRU is the only radio station I will tune in to listen to music anymore.  It hasn’t been a lot of late, but it’s comfortable knowing it’s there.  Student run, student programmed, and with a huge broadcast area, I hope it’s a beacon to non-conformist youth throughout the region.

That will all change soon.  The news of University of Houston purchasing the transmitter from Rice University leaked out last week when UH had to approve the “up to $10M funding” to purchase it.  The actually sale cost has been reported as $9.5M.  You would have thought their would be an announcement or some discussion over on the Rice campus before this happened.  The lack of discussion about the decision is the biggest punch in the gut.

In a day, the Save KTRU site popped up, and today is their first protest.  I saw a lot of student protests at The University of Texas in the late 80’s, but I don’t remember any of them getting what they wanted.  I don’t think this sale will be stopped either. Continue reading →

New Venture

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I’ve been working construction for months in an old building in Midtown, mostly installing, framing and trimming windows, with a variety of other miscellaneous tasks.  Once it’s open I will be managing one of the stores.

There was an article on the front page of the Sunday Business section of the Houston Chronicle.  Included below:

Midtown’s Continental Club is known for its live music and comfy Texas roadhouse feel.

The club, it turns out, is also an incubator for entrepreneurs who will soon open their doors one block away from the club at 3600 Main on Metro’s light rail line.

Most of the 3600 Main retailers have Continental Club connections: One tends bar and several play music there. Two helped build the club and another lives upstairs.

The soon-to-open shops at 3600 Main will not be mistaken for Highland Village. The barbershop Big Kat’s, for example, will feature a tattoo parlor with a 1940s sailor theme. Most stores will have a retro feel.

When Metro rail passengers look out the window, they may glimpse burgers grilling, a band playing and people dancing on the big patio of comfort food restaurant Natachee’s.

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iPad and NYT

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The New York Times was a bullet point in the iPad introduction.  The application they had already developed looked quite nice from a cursory glance, particularly with its lack of advertising.  The Apple Gazette recently discussed the pricing conundrum they are having at NYT.

There have also been rumors that most of the Times’ content is going to go back behind the pay wall.  Assuming that is the case, I think there’s an obvious strategy for moving forward with their iPad pricing.

Initial price: $10, and that covers 3 months of content.  Get everyone hooked!  After that start charging $10/month.  Also, strategize how you might include minor and strategic advertising content into the app.  Possibly set up a new pricing scheme for advert-less versions.

Also, make sure you build in a “you can’t buy next month’s content until you upgrade the app to the newest version available – it’s free”.  This would enable you to enforce any new restrictions you add to the app and keep the majority of your customers on the same version.

Of course, I would prefer if it were free.  But that’s not how businesses work.  If they keep the entry cost low enough, it might be enough to get me back into the daily habit of reading the newspaper again.