Posts tagged Short
Goldilocks, A Dwarf and NASA’s Short Term Future
Feb 3rd
Space sucks. Literally. The void of space is one perpetual vacuum that would suck the brain out of any exposed human through their ears. In space there is also unfiltered radiation, extreme temperatures and a multitude of other ways that humans can be harmed outside of low-Earth orbit. Learning how to mitigate radiation and improve space crews’ health are two of 16 recommendations made by the National Research Council to NASA for the agency’s technological focus in the next five years.
Researchers announced yesterday that they have discovered a new potential “Goldilocks” planet in a different solar system. A “Goldilocks” planet is one found within the habitable zone in orbit around a star – not too hot, not to cold – that could potentially support life. In hundreds of years, after humanity has exhausted all of Earth’s natural resources, we may need to migrate to one of these planets. So, NASA should hurry up and get cracking on the NRC’s recommendations. Best to be prepared in the face of an uncertain future.
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The NRC’s recommendations come in three objectives. See the chart below.
The study was sponsored by NASA. It states, ” NASA’s Office of the Chief Technologist (OCT) should establish a rigorous process to select among competing technologies at appropriate milestones in order to ensure that the most promising ones receive sufficient attention and resources.”
The study focuses on the near term goals for NASA’s space flight program and recommends that the foundation for the goals be implemented in the next five years. NASA works on 20-30 year windows of technological innovation. Within that window, it is hoped, that humans will return to the Moon and maybe make a venture towards Earth’s irascible sister planet, Mars. Near and long terms goals in our solar system are to identify alien sources of water and determine if life ever existed outside of our little blue orb.
Goldilocks and A Dwarf
The most recent Goldilocks planet, dubbed GJ 667Cc, is found in the constellation Scorpio, 22 light years away from Earth. It orbits a dwarf star in a system with two other dwarf stars. It has a 28-day solar cycle, meaning its “years” are very quick. The planet is much closer to its star than Earth but researchers believe it receives as much energy from its star because of the weakness of the dwarf.
This is the fourth Goldilocks planet found as scientists become more proficient at finding smaller objects orbiting distant stars. Researchers did not expect to find a planet around the star because the system does not have a lot of metal-based material such as iron in comparison with our own solar system. Yet, the discovery shows that Earth-like planets can exist in a variety of conditions in the universe, greatly increasing the likelihood that another planet much like our own exists somewhere.
“This was expected to be a rather unlikely star to host planets. Yet there they are, around a very nearby, metal-poor example of the most common type of star in our galaxy,” said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz, in a release. “The detection of this planet, this nearby and this soon, implies that our galaxy must be teeming with billions of potentially habitable rocky planets.”
Now that humanity is getting better at identifying extra-solar planets, NASA and the international space community needs to take the steps we will need to eventually reach out to them. The first steps to inter-galactic dominance start with the decisions makers in Washington, D.C.
Top image: UC Santa Cruz
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Cartoon: To Make a Long Story Short…
Jan 28th
I’m somebody who can, uh, go on. At length. About nearly any subject. Ask anyone who’s taken one of my classes… or read one of my blog posts once I get on a roll.
So I can understand why I’ll get the odd “TL;DR” in response. And I try not to take it personally; instead, I look on it as a reminder to pare my text down, murder my darlings and generally indulge myself a little less.
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That’s on a good day.
On a bad day, I mourn the rapid decline of human civilization, curse people’s can’t-be-bothered-to-read-anything-longer-than-a-tweet mentality, and generally grumble about “kids these days”. I imagine scenarios where the instructions for disarming a doomsday weapon are three paragraphs long, and nobody on the planet has the attention span required to get through them.
And I’m finding my bad days now outnumber my good days by about five to one, and rising.
In fact, there are times when I…
No! Wait! Don’t go – the post is almost over! You’ve nearly made it to the cartoon! All that’s left is the “you-can-find-more-Noise-to-Signal-cartoons-at-Rob’s-web-site” and you’re there!
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iOS5 SDK for Branded Short Links from Bit.ly Available Now for Preview
Aug 24th
Bit.ly, the URL shortener and analytics service from New York incubator Betaworks, has developed a software developers kit that leverages the forthcoming deep Twitter integration in iOS5 to enable app developers to automatically share links on Twitter using branded URLs. ReadWriteWeb, for example, shares short links on Twitter automatically using rww.to – using the new Bit.ly SDK our iPhone app will automatically do the same with the new Twitter iOS features.
The SDK is only available to developers who have signed an NDA with Apple, but it’s available to check out on request. It’s enough to make a person wonder what other kinds of APIs and SDKs will be built on top of the new Twitter features in iOS5. Twitter is a great platform, but there’s no reason to believe that multiple layers of platforms will be placed on top of iOS, Twitter, location data, URL shorteners and more.
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Short Amazon Web Services Outage Takes Down Netflix, Others
Aug 8th
It appears that Amazon Web Services has suffered another outage tonight. The AWS Service Health Dashboard confirms that there were Internet connectivity issues at the EC2 location in the US-EAST-1, as well as issues with the Amazon Relational Database Service in Virginia. Amazon lists both issues as resolved but some sites, with the total downtime amounting to less than half an hour. It’s not clear how many Availability Zones were affected, or if this affected the entire US-EAST-1 region.
TechCrunch reported that several sites, including Foursquare, Instagram, Quora and Reddit went down. Each of these appear to be back up. However Netflix remains offline as of this writing. Update: As of 8:41 PT Netflix appears to be back up.
No word yet whether this has anything to do with the outage at AWS Dublin yesterday.
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The outage in April lead to a number of post-mortems, including one by AWS itself which claimed the outage was caused by an error during a network upgrade that resulted in Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes causing major malfunctions that spilled over to the Amazon Relational Database Service.
Many companies, including Netflix, vowed to investigate multiple region and multiple Availability Zone fail-over solutions. It appears that at least in the case of Netflix these plans had yet to be implemented at the time of tonight’s outage.
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Google’s New Official Google Only Short URL: g.co
Jul 18th
Google announced they have launched a new URL shortener just for official Google use. The new URL is g.co. Google said this URL will only be used to link to official Google properties, explaining it is reserved “just for Google websites.” Google explained that “you can trust that…
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RIM’s Q1 Report: BlackBerry Sales Fall Short, Layoffs Coming
Jun 16th
Research in Motion has just held its earnings call for the first quarter of fiscal 2012, and the news doesn’t look too great.
“Fiscal 2012 has gotten off to a challenging start,” said Jim Balsillie, RIM’s Co-CEO. “The slowdown we saw in the first quarter is continuing into Q2, and delays in new product introductions into the very late part of August is leading to a lower than expected outlook in the second quarter.”
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The delay in production of new products doesn’t bode well as RIM faces still competition from Google, Apple and Microsoft in the smartphone market, and form numerous competitors in the tablet market.
During the call, RIM confirmed that it shipped 500,000 units of its new PlayBook and 13.2 million BlackBerries. That last figure might not seem too bad, but here’s a figure to offer in comparison: 18.65 million iPhones sold, according to Apple’s recent quarterly earnings call.
And note the difference there. BlackBerries shipped. iPhones sold. It seems likely that many of the devices that RIM reported today are still sitting on store shelves.
As RIM didn’t meet its projections, the company says it’s announcing a “cost optimization program” that will include an undisclosed number of layoffs. It also revised projections downwards for the rest of the year and earnings per share for the full year fiscal 2012 are now expected to be between $5.25 and $6.00. Upon word of the report, RIM stocks fell sharply today.
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Google TV Falls 72% Short on First Quarter Sales
May 3rd
Google has launched some of its products amazingly quickly and effectively. The Android lineup of smartphones is one great example; Android currently dominates the market. And utilities like Gmail are consistently becoming more popular. But other territories have been out of reach for Google. Buzz was seen as a plummeting failure, Wave is waving goodbye, and – most recently – Google TV posted horrendous first quarter figures.
“Horrendous” is a mean word, but Google TV may just deserve it. Google TV devices from Logitech got $22 million in sales in the final quarter of last year, and Logitech projected $18 million in sales for Q1 of 2011. Their actual sales figures? $5 million. That equates to about 72% short of goal, and also led to a 28% increase in held inventory.
What’s the reason for the major shortfall? First, Google TV itself has been receiving negative reviews, based largely on lags in the UI, the high cost of the devices, and long delays in promised interface improvements. These same reviews caused Google to delay the presentation of several peripheral units at CES this year. Second, Logitech has slowed down marketing of the device, likely as a response to slower sales. Logitech’s CEO has stated, however, that the company “fully prepared to re-accelerate those activities at the appropriate time.”
But what will the appropriate time be? Well, it may be shortly after Google I/O, where insiders in Silicon Valley have told us Google will be showcasing numerous new features and other improvements to Google TV. This may be anything from the long-awaited UI improvements to the integration with Android Market to a new set of hardware that can run the Google TV tasks more effectively. In any case, Google is pushing forward with Google TV despite its lack of success so far, and we’ll find out more during Google I/O on May 10th and 11th of this month.
[via Google Watch]
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Google TV Falls 72% Short on First Quarter Sales
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