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.

The newest, and biggest, XPrize was announced yesterday. Google is putting up $30 million for the first private firm to put a robot on the moon. If I'm reading this press release correctly, there is also $20 million dollars for any firm that is able to land a rover on the moon by the end 2012.

Google is having a Sketch Up contest to see who can create the best model of their college campus. The winner gets a free trip to Mountain View, CA to participate in 3D modeling workshop with some of the experts at Google. The judging panel is a very distinguished group of professionals from the gaming, graphics, and architectural communities. Entries are due June 1, 2007.

Yesterday I looked through a few of the entries for the contest, as well as some of the other figures uploaded to the '3D warehouse'. I was inspired by the amount of quality work and interesting junk already uploaded. It also struck me that Google appears to be the largest contributor of images to their online catalog. I suppose Sketch Up isn't the most popular feature of Google.

I was reading about a new semantic search engine called Hakia. Titus Hoskins wrote an article on Site Pro News about how semantic search could be the death of Google. I'm not trying to preach about how google is the enduring world champion of the internet. Eventually Google will slide into the background of the popular imagination, eventually. However, Hakia is not going to precipitate that slide. Why do I think so?

On the topic of semantic search, Titus overlooks Google's own efforts in this arena. The admitted Google efforts to develop AI are likely based upon semantic recognition. Google is not being blindsided by the efforts of startup's like Hakia or similar semantic search companies.

According to this article which is only interesting for providing the quote from Larry Page, “We have some people at Google [who] are really trying to build artificial intelligence (AI) and to do it on a large scale…It’s not as far off as people think.”

While the guy from the link sounds frightened, I'm not so worried about the possible implication of Google's servers suddenly demanding that we gas Kurdistan. I'm primarily just interested in what they will do with the technology. If you have ever used Google AdSense, the program that enables a website owner to advertise in the Google search results, you may have seen the related Keywords feature. This feature does a great job of finding words that are really and truly related, not only syntactically, but also in theme to the search word provided. For example if I tell google that I want to advertise for the phrase, "Space Exploration", they will give me related results like "Space Explorers", "Space blah blah", and "Blah blah Exploration" which is what I would expect from a simple computer program. However they will also give results like "Smi2le", which is Timothy Leary's acronym related to space migration. Google evidently is watching the terms that you search for and checking which pages you actually visit. By comparing the two pieces of data with the content of the site you visit google can build an AI system based around the contextual meaning of words - which in my (not very well educated) opinion is among the most difficult aspects of AI. Seen in this respect google has created a constantly evolving neural network that is edited by millions of real human interactions every day.

Google, the University of Washington, and Arizona University will work together on the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) project that will produce a huge database of points in the solar system. The telescope is planned to begin operation in 2013. The project is dubbed as a 'movie of the universe'. It seems as though the plan is to put together all the 30,000 gigs of daily images into a consistent moving picture.

More Information about LSST

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif., Dec. 18 -- NASA Ames Research
Center and Google have signed a Space Act Agreement that formally
establishes a relationship to work together on a variety of challenging
technical problems ranging from large-scale data management and massively
distributed computing, to human-computer interfaces.
As the first in a series of joint collaborations, Google and Ames will
focus on making the most useful of NASA's information available on the
Internet. Real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution
3- D maps of the moon and Mars, real-time tracking of the International