All posts by Chris

Google backs a $30 million Lunar X-Prize

Space, Technology

Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!  The X-Prize Foundation just launched a new competition, offering $20 million to the first team to send a rover to the moon and send back high-definition photos. From the Beeb:

To claim the cash, any craft reaching the lunar surface must perform a series of tasks such as shoot video and roam for specific distances.

Firms interested in trying for the prize have until the end of 2012 to mount their Moonshot.

The prize money comes from Google, which is a very good sign.  I like this trend of rich technology companies funding space endeavors, because it means a group of really smart and successful folks end up in charge of making this stuff actually happen. Go geeks!

What happens when Google fails?

Technology

I had an eye-opening experience tonight. Google isn’t responding on port 80 (basically to Web requests) from any of its core sites, include search, news, maps, and ads. This is pretty bad by itself; I’d guess over half my browsing is to those sites. Even worse is the effect on the rest of the Web, most of which has some Google content on it. When Google goes down, those sites become almost impossible to reach as well because their pages bog down with broken requests.

For instance, I went looking for information about a new local restaurant tonight. My first stop was Google Local, of course, but that wasn’t responding. Google search (to find the restaurant’s own site or Web reviews) was the logical next step, but that was out as well. I went to Yahoo (which responded instantly), but the restaurant was new enough to be missing from their local listings as well as much of the search index. My next thought was to check Yelp, but that was killed because of their reliance on Google maps. Next stop was the San Diego Reader, which came up only after I forced it to ignore the Google ads. Even my own work uses enough Google content on it to make the site difficult to reach right now.

So yeah. What’s up with Google? Normally I’d check the news for a mention of outages or issues, but that would be Google News. RSS reader? Google, of course. Blog search? Technorati actually works, but there’s no mention of a problem. It can’t just be me; I double-checked using other computers around San Diego. I don’t have access to anything outside of the area, but it seems strange that anything outside Google itself could block port 80 for only Google sites.

So what is up with Google? And should I start stocking up supplies?

UPDATE: So almost the exact moment I posted this, all Google sites came back for me. Still, the question remains: do we rely on Google’s stability far more than is actually justified?

SpaceX rockets update

Space

I’ve been catching up on space things in preparation for the Mars Society Convention next week. Today I ran across an exciting summary of the progress that SpaceX has made toward launching their next Falcon 1 rocket as well as their much larger Falcon 9 rocket. According to the “monster progress update“, the next launch is scheduled for January 2008, with a launch of the Falcon 9 (the one big enough to carry people) in late 2008. They’ve also been doing lots of engine testing and other groundwork, plus they’ve been granted access to Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral, bringing their total number of launch sites to 3.

Nicely done all around. I can’t wait to hear what SpaceX founder Elon Musk talks about at the convention.

on keywords and importance

Blog, Plain foolishness

I’ve been looking for a few choice keywords to describe what we talk about here at Global Spin. You know, “science, culture, politics, writing, foolishness” kind of thing. One of the places I checked was Compete, which offered the oddest suggestion yet: “important punctuation.”

So, yeah. I just had to Google it. There on page 2 was an old article on the importance of punctuation. The link was bad and it needed an update, but there it is. Science, culture, politics, writing, foolishness, and punctuation.

aerogel, my new favorite thing

Science, Space, Technology

A brick supported by a wisp of aerogelI’m just about running out of awe lately. It’s like awesome things are showering down from the sky, perhaps in an attempt to counteract all the craptacular things that we are usually made aware of.

So you can imagine that I started reading this article about the wonders of aerogel with a depleted awe supply. Yeah, yeah, it’s really light. Great, it was developed by NASA. Sure, it’ll have all sorts of space applications. Fine, it was used as shoe insulation by a mountain climber whose only trouble was that her feet got too hot.

What was that last thing again? Really? And 6mm of it protects against a dynamite blast? Huh. And photos of it look really spooky, like there’s nothing really there. Well, now.

So now I want to get some. You know, just to have. I’m sure I could think of something to do with it…