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.

Over 520 pocket protectors in one place. At the same time. It sounds so nerdy I can smell the empty cans of coke and flaccid pizza boxes from here. John Pojman Sr has put together the museum, which presumably exists beyond the cyber realm (probably Mississippi, where he teaches). His website has lots of pictures, and tons of very extraneous information about the under-estimated protector of pockets.

From Boing Boing

Infosthetics put up a little post about the 'Mars and Beyond' Mars space colonization documentary from Disney circa 1957. There are 6 videos in the series.

The remaining 5 videos are in the full text of this post.

This video, subtitled in French, provides a concise introduction to the idea of strange attraction (at least I think that's what it is called when two atoms remain in the same state across a distance?). It's tough to tell the name of the series that this clip comes from. However, it seems like the video would make for a great classroom introduction to the idea for school children.

Sonopia.com offers people the ability to setup their own 'wireless provider service'. Sonopia allows people to brand wireless service from Verizon - although they put it in fancier terms. Sonopia is buying air time from Verizon, and allowing people to customize the service. It sounds silly, but fun. For the most part, current customers are non-profit organizations. Some of these organizations hope to use their own cellular provider status to allow their group to use more social networking functions of cell phones.

A nice documentary that lays out NASA's plan to build a space colony and the technology involved in the venture. In the video they cover the development and testing of new space suits, lunar habitats, mining the surface of the moon, extracting water and oxygen from lunar soils, and how the O

Sometimes the space program isn't what it appears on the surface. This documentary in the style of Ken Burns details the darker side of NASA's early days. NASSA, the segregationist program NASA has tried to keep from the light over the last 50 years. Watch and learn the hard road traveled by