This has an ironically pointless appeal. Not that Windows isn't enough of a productivity sink now, let alone in 3.11, two major revisions before it became less trouble than it was worth.
From DownloadSquad:
The Beeb is actually a lot less Chicken Little about this than most other outlets, but even it's a little wonky. With that many satellites, it seems surprising there aren't more collisions, but living in shallow 3-d we have an inaccurate perception of how big space (any space, not just the black-and-airless kind) is once you get your feet off the ground.
We only perceive the space around us, usually in the space that extends from our eyeline to about waist level (that's why people trip on things that are easily visible but are below knee level, unless they see them while still relatively far away). So anything we perceive as "near" is usually on that plane and within a distance that changes based on the size of the object and the speed with which it or we are moving. Excellent perceptual basis for a creature that once climbed in trees and needed to be sure where the stable branches were, but was a lot more comfortable not thinking about the distance to the ground.
Once you get more than a body length off the ground, though, the volume of space around you increases by orders of magnitude (Add a zero to whatever number you were thinking.)
When you get up as high as orbit, it's a challenge just seeing something that's near enough to be a danger. The International Space Station is 270 miles below the satellites that collided. And it's not directly below. It's somewhere on a giant sphere whose radius is 270 miles smaller than the one the satellites are sitting on (geometrically speaking, of course, where the spheres are the distance from Earth that equates with their orbits. Here's a decent illustration.)
The two sats are each about the size of a smallish car, 528 miles above ground. That's a lot of space to fill. And pretty long odds against anything hitting anything else by accident.
The collision between a US and Russian satellite in space highlights the growing importance of monitoring objects in orbit.
It also shows that there are still major capability gaps in current systems set up for this task.
There are about 17,000 man-made objects above 10cm in size that orbit Earth - and the tally is constantly increasing. This in turn raises the risk of collisions between objects. ... rest of the BBC story is here
I got a spam this morning trying to get me interested in watersports, and it was about boating!
This is actually a link so Technorati can find me and get me into its search engines. Kind of self-serving, I know, and nothing readers are particularly interested. Makes me wonder, though, how much promotional crap has to appear on a blog before it starts pissing people off.
A lot of people freaked out when cable stations started putting little logos on the screen to ID what channel you're watching. That never bothered me; actually I rarely noticed them. Those things have been growing to the extent that you often have a whole layer of identifiers and promos for other shows running at the bottom of the screen.
That's a little distracting, but only really annoying when they start rolling clips or dynamic grafix down there.
I don't usually pay much attention to the social-networking promos or links on web content, either, except when they get really excessive, as is the case with one of the sites I write for.
The links I put on here are mainly to get the blog to appear in various places, not necessarily encourage people to go post links. So I hope they don't bother you.
There's a fine line between avoiding visual spam and keeping your radar profile so small no one ever finds you.
Thanks for reading, anyway.
Technorati Profile
No kidding. I know NASA used to arm unmanned rockets with self-destruct devices to blow errant rockets up before they hit populated areas, I didn't know they did it with manned shuttles as well.
Given how often they have false-positives on various danger tests and abortive attempts at take-off, reentry and honesty in budget proposing and airline-danger-report-censoring, you'd think this would make the astronauts nervous.
The intersection of Cool and Useful
Although this update might have it beat:
This is a much more interesting idea than it looks (though it actually looks like the reverse of those puffy, quilted-down vests that make everyone look like the Sta-Puf Marshmellow Hunter). It looks here like they're treating this vest like an elaborate comfort accessory -- snivel gear, essentially.
I'd be the last one to denigrate that; I'd probably buy the damn thing just for that reason, especially for anything involving a lot of effort and very little breeze during summer months -- hiking, yardwork, running.
But it turns out that heat is a major contributor to fatigue, especially during exercise. Cooling some part of the body (preferably one wiht a lot of blood circulation) during exercise reduces the core temperature and as much as doubles the endurance of some of the athletes who have participated in the experiments.
This is a fairly limited test, but I've seen others in which runners or cyclists on stationary equipment keep keep one hand stuck in a big heavy cooling mitt (it's not a glove, really, more of an appliance). They were able to keep going looong after they should have had to quit, because their blood was cooled as it circulated through just one hand.
I'd be very surprised if we didn't start seeing some similar bit of cooling gear -- either the vest or the glove or something wrapped around the shoulders or neck -- as a regular piece of equipment for not only race drivers and other competitors for whom weight isn't much of an issue, to even football players, cyclists and others who have to perform at peak over a long period during hot weather.
It could probably not only improve performance, but also reduce the rash of heart attacks and heat-prostration deaths you hear about every year when football teams come back to two-a-day practices in August.
