ACEIZE

In January and February of this year, I, G Kontos spent my nights and weekends being a giant dork. I spent my time programming an application for Google's Android Platform contest. Android is Google's new cell phone platform. At the moment there are several cell phone manufacturer's who are lined up to use the new platform. Unfortunately I don't know the names of any of these companies, but they are major players in the cell phone market. There should be phones shipping with Android by the end of 2008 -- October was the last actual date that I heard.

I love Bill Nye. I was well beyond the age of his show's target market, but I thought the way he presented science to kids was great. His show stressed the methods of science and the importance of asking questions. 'Bill Nye the science guy' may have even been a better show than 'Mr. Wizard'. That's right, I said it. Bill Nye is better than Mr. Wizard. Your childhood was wasted on the substandard science trickery of Mr. Wizard! Just think of how much better you could have been if.... Um. Yeah. That's enough of that. Enjoy the video (Click on the title of the article to view the entire post, and also the video).

Sarcos is still moving ahead with their exoskeleton project. Here's a video that was posted on Live Leak:

At the moment the suit has battery power for about 30 minutes worth of use. In these demonstrations the suit is wired up to a power source. The current suit generates about 20 times the wearer's strength. A software engineer named Rex Jameson was wearing the suit for some of the publicity events. He mentioned that there is a strange delay in the suit's response time to the wearer's actions. Apparently this just takes some getting used to and doesn't hinder performance. He said the learning curve was, "to relax and trust the robot".

"The Finnish invention would use long, positively-charged tethers to ride the solar wind, without the need for any sort of fuel or propellant."

"Two solar panels would power an electron gun that keeps the spacecraft tethers charged, creating propulsion from the similarly charged solar wind pushing against the sail. Researchers are looking into aluminum or copper alloy wires for the tethers."

The current plan is to test this rig using 5 mile long tethers in high Earth Orbit. The test will determine the force of the solar wind. The plan for this Finnish solar sail is to use a 'turbo' mechanism that increases the thrust of the sails. The turbo will use radio frequency electron heating to heat the solar wind particles. This is a theoretical idea at the moment.

If successful, the solar sail idea would provide a less expensive alternative for moving material around the solar system.

Last year Dona Ana County in New Mexico voted for an increased tax to help build a new spaceport in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico. Now it's time for Sierra County, including the town of Truth or Consequences, to take a vote. The county will vote on a 0.25% sales tax to help fund the construction of the spaceport. If the tax passes in Sierra County, then the government can legally begin collecting the spaceport tax. Apparently New Mexico tax districts are multi-county groupings. The new tax proposal has generated some news coverage by promoting contention between people who want the spaceport and people who don't want to pay the tax. A pretty common protagonist-antagonist match-up in the papers.

The Guardian published an article describing the possibilities and impossibilities of several popular science fiction ideas. Teleportation, Time Travel, Alien Contact, Invisibility, and Precognition were the ideas of interest.

Two lines peaked my interest.

1. A quote from Einstein which I wish I had remembered yesterday when writing about the Virgle Mars Colony. "If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

For April Fool's day, Virgin Galactic and Google teamed up to form Virgle. The mission of Virgle is to create a colony on Mars. That is, assuming Virgle wasn't a joke - which it is. Every year Google surprises me with the amount of effort they put into their April Fool's jokes. Last year was http://www.google.com/tisp/, the proposed business to put internet through the sewer system. Both ideas are somewhat thought out, and a decent of effort goes into the presentation of the idea.

This year Richard Branson had a short video calling for applications to be a Mars pioneer. Well, I took some time and made a little video in response. If you look really closely, you can see my freakishly large collection of Heinlein books...Once I put them all together in one place, I was a little ashamed of myself.

Wow. I took a long break. 4 months! There was a lot of good stuff that I missed. Just last week even...

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter found an old lake bed on Mars. The folks at NASA say it was 'habitable'
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19934328

Wilhelm Reich was a psychologist turned researcher in the 40's and 50's. In the late 50's he was arrested and imprisoned by the US government for ignoring an FDA ruling that outlawed one of his inventions. After Reich's arrest all of his books and research papers were burned by the US government. Yes, burned.

The hideous webapplication is done. For now. There are a lot of imperfections and little problems that make the application somewhat short of what I wanted to see. However, I made a decision to run with the release anyway. I need to see if anyone in the world is interested before go on working my nights away. It's a tough decision, because I don't like to share unfinished projects.

I'm still trying to let my schedule settle back to a more regular pace so I can post my regular insightful articles. Unfotunately today is not that day. But I've got a few links I've been saving.

AP News -- 'Robots take on social tasks', an article about the current hopeful market for robotics; Moving from the Roomba to more advanced household and hospital helpers.

She's a gadget nerd. With a blog.