10.25.09
Posted in Books, Culture, Good Stuff at 9:14 pm by thomas
While I usually pretend to keep abreast of what books are coming out, this one was a surprise purchase, oh, about ten seconds after entering our local Barnes and Noble late last week: “Unseen Academicals” by Terry Pratchett.
For some reason I hadn’t seen any announcements for this one, so dragging the hardcover book to the checkout counter filled me with glee. And it’s good – started reading it and like it a lot.
At the same time, I got my copy of Memories of the Future by Wil Wheaton. I’ve read most of the original posts that make up the base material for this book, and I already know it’s great. So I’m going to try and read it slowly to enjoy all the nuances of the final, edited book.
OK, enough blogging – I have two books to read! 
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10.18.09
Posted in Good Stuff, One World, Science at 11:58 pm by thomas
This picture is already two years old, but I just recently found that page and thought I share…
Here we have a photo taken of all of us by the HiRISE camera on board of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter – at the time Mars was about 142 million kilometers from Earth, which is comparatively close as these things go. So this is what Earth looks like through a reasonably sized telescope on Mars:
At the very moment this photo was taken, you and everything you own and about a 100-kilometer circle around you fit into one pixel.
I find it always deeply humbling to see all of humanity squished onto that tiny little marble in space that we call home. All of our lives and dreams fit into a 60 by 60 pixel square in that picture above… only 24 people ever made it to the top right corner of that photo – a trip of about 400 pixels – and only a dozen ever landed on the moon. Everybody else has been in the bottom-left corner only.
In photos like these our Earth always looks so incredibly fragile, just a small blue orb, maybe made of eggshell-thin Venetian glass. If you could reach into this photo and hold the planet in your hand, you would be deeply afraid to press too hard, or to let it slip and shatter on the floor…
Looking at this beautiful blue world, it is clear to me how incredibly lucky we all are to be here – the universe is a very violent place and for now we only have this one, small, fragile planet as shelter and home.
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10.17.09
Posted in Programming, Tech Nostalgia at 11:59 pm by thomas
Over at DadHacker, Landon is celebrating his 30th year of programming in C. It’s a great reminiscence across several decades of coding, ending in three golden rules that should be repeated in the first chapter of every future programming manual:
- Leave the existing brace style in the code alone or change all of it
- Keep your comments neat, relevant and typo-free
- Delete all unused code – and then go back and delete some more
Approaching my very own three decades of programming pretty soon, I can only agree wholeheartedly. There are many old code examples of mine that horrify me now with how messy they are, and I can definitely tell that over the years my coding style has become ever more clean and neat. Past debugging sessions on nasty chunks of my own code have taught me some hard lessons…
It’s interesting to see in Landon’s post that he very early on fell for C and that he was lucky enough in his career to be able to return to that language that suits him best – certainly something that not many programmers can say, since we are often forced by pre-existing code or by the vagaries of a client’s wish list to use whatever language is necessary.
My own experience with C came later in my programming path, only after several flavors of Basic, an unfortunate run-in with Pascal and a deep fascination with machine code. C was fun, and later on I wrote several smaller projects with it, but it never captured my imagination.
The favorite language of my programming career was a late addition just over ten years ago – JavaScript. Certainly not everybody’s favorite, but due to many lucky circumstances now quite a powerful actor on the stage of computing. I deeply miss working closer to the hardware, as it is possible with machine code or C, but JavaScript instead fascinates me with it’s close integration with the user interface.
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10.15.09
Posted in Good Stuff, Science at 10:31 pm by thomas
Just found this via the always great Bad Astronomy blog:
You have to click through for the larger version!
What you see here is the result of dust devils removing the red surface dust in graceful arcs, with the grey sand in this particular crater on Mars shining through. Now how cool is that?
Of course it could also be Martians doing donuts in their offroad vehicles, but for now we’ll go with the other theory.
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10.03.09
Posted in Good Stuff, Modern Life, Science at 10:55 pm by thomas
It is very satisfying to finally see something that really, really belongs into the 21st century. If you haven’t followed the developments at the International Space Station lately, here are a couple of things to meditate over:
- There are currently four spacecraft docked at the ISS: Three Russian Soyuz and a Japanese resupply vehicle.
- The ISS can now support a permanent presence of a crew of six, but when the Shuttle swings by, there have been up to thirteen people in the ISS at the same time.
- Over the next year, there will be five new modules that will be connected to the ISS.
- The ISS has now two robotic arms.
It is also nice to hear that NASA is now slowly moving away from the rather insane idea of the previous administration to de-orbit and throw away all of this investment just in time when it is finished in 2016. It looks like full use until 2020 is already being planned for, and from what the Russian experience with their previous hardware shows, thirty years of use is not impossible.
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