More Asteroids

My favourite non-Boosh Zooniverse has relaunched: Asteroid Zoo - helping astronomers spot and catalogue new orbiting rocks.  The pics are bigger, the interface is slicker, but the best thing is the new colour-rotation mode; it highlights differences in the four image sequence, so a moving object shows as a line of flashing dots against the solid white star field.  It also coincidentally creates the effect of watching a short silent movie of the sky, complete with occasional blips, scratches and frame wandering. Another side-effect shows when a bright star causes a kind of lens-flare - the overloaded pixels around the edge gain a pleasing early-arcade-game rainbow colour cycle.

Virtually Real

The brains behind the greatest 3D games of all time have been assembled.  The nebulous research phase has moved on to concrete engineering.  The funding is backed by the richest of website companies.  Finally, a mass-produced device for total immersion is in sight.  Don't worry Mr Gibson, it will be alright this time.

Other ideas

As people are finally taking Space Elevators seriously, it looks like this company specializes in researching other crazy-until-we-build-them ideas.  Highlights include: a 2001-alike space hotel, transparent pyramidal pod cities, a hexagonal robot-built moon base, 30km diameter artificial oases, and, most crazy of all, a ring of solar cells around the moon that transmit power to the Earth.

Forecast

"...six more weeks of winter it shall be."

- Punxsutawney Phil, occasional meteorologist

Space Elevator Update

Recently I found a nice round-up of the state of building a tower into orbit, the only sane way to get stuff up there. Here are a few highlights:

• a space elevator could be built on the Moon using existing materials
• LiftPort has been resurrected and is working on this right now
• carbon nanotubes could be the "diamond thread" that A C Clarke described in his novels
• International Academy of Astronautics says that a space elevator "seems feasible"

Art Tech

Years ago, I saw a documentary by artist David Hockney that argued that the Dutch Masters achieved their extraordinary photo-realism with aid from secret lens-based devices.  Now a new film is being released with a similar theory, in which an American inventor with no art training attempts to recreate a Vermeer painting using advanced-for-its-time lens technology.  Although art experts prefer the "he was just a genius" idea, this seems very convincing as a way to make photos before photography was invented.  What is fascinating is the lengths people had to go for something we all take for granted now.

More Old Computer News

The National Museum of Computing has a new exhibit, a 1960s ICT 1301 otherwise known as "Flossie". Weighing in at over 5 tons, this one only has few tubes but is full of early germanium transistors, along with apparatus for punched cards, tape storage and printing.  It's claim to fame is being the first mass-produced business computer, and as one of the curators says, this meant that no special wiring/ducting was needed in the office where it was installed.  The once cutting-edge looks were apparently shown off in a Bond film, and I also suspect a similar device was the titular star of the second sequel of a certain other spy film series.