Straight into the links: The NASA yard sale is underway.
One piece, at least is coming to Alabama:
The U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville will receive a space shuttle orbital maneuvering engine for display as NASA begins parceling out parts of the shuttles. The shuttle program is ending in June after two more flights.
“It’s fantastic,” Center Director Dr. Deborah Barnhart said shortly after the announcement. “Anything having to do with propulsion, that’s us.” Barnhart was referring to the fact that the shuttle’s propulsion system was developed and managed at Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center.
After this summer’s last flight the only place you’ll be able to get a sense of size of shuttle plus rockets will be in Huntsville. Apparently they have the only full “stack” around. And in as much as the shuttle program was a detour of sorts, this is still somewhat sad. Given the nature of things the detour isn’t being corrected with newer and better rockets to the moon and Mars. Right now we’ll be lucky to hitch rides to the space station and send robots out beyond a Terran orbit.
If we stay here at home it’ll just be that much easier for the ads to find us. It is about to become a lot more easy:
Far surpassing the powers of print, broadcast and the web, a host of new technologies is converging on the opportunity to use smart phones to intercept – and influence – the consumer as she walks past a store, wheels through a supermarket or reaches toward a product on the shelf.
The technologies include not only the increasingly ubiquitous GPS-equipped smart phone but also window stickers that broadcast messages, interactive bar codes that instantly link to a website and increasingly sophisticated databases that track your individual activities so they can precisely target products or deals to you.
This has been discussed for several years now, but this particular future is here. How it is received will be interesting. I bring this up to students and they always gringe. They don’t want advertisers to know where they are. But they’ll grow used to it.
Just imagine what Don Draper would do with that. There are a few ideas.
From squirrels to statues:
Jeremy Davis can remember a picture he sketched at the age of 3, a squirrel sitting on a stump his mother always held in high regard.
[…]
It took years for him to get from a small town without a stop light to the University of Alabama in 2007, when he truly began to develop his artistic side.
Davis’ decision to return to school after a brief hiatus to earn more money resulted in the ultimate lesson while working on a unique project. Davis is credited with sketching and sculpting what developed into the Nick Saban statue.
Leaving aside the Alabama part and the inherently creepy statue-of-a-living-person discussion, that is a neat story.
Auburn, in keeping up with the Joneses at Alabama and Florida, is unveiling statues of the Heisman winners. If one must have statues I’d prefer a different group of individuals. We venerate football players enough and they’re in little danger of being forgotten, but that’s neither here nor there. The Auburn statues were designed and created by a Montana sculptor. He’s incredibly talented, his work is on display at the University of Texas and across the country, but it would have been nice for an Auburn artist to get the commission. It isn’t like they don’t have an entire academic department devoted to the discipline.
I go straight to the links today because one of my RSS feeds found this morning to be a good time to cough up 209 posts it had been saving for a while. I was goaded into reading them all. And, completist that I am, I would have. But they were all old posts from a year or two years ago. I’ve already read them. So now I’m giving my RSS reader a hesitant look. What else is it planning? And will it carry me away in the scheme?
The problem of the information age, really, is that no one moment will be the SkyNet moment. But any number of them could be the cumulative steps to getting there. By the time you, you pesky human, figure it out, the thing will be over. It will be too late. And then you’ll just try to remember what you learned from Noah Wylie in his gripping summer television series on how to fight back.
You are going to watch, aren’t you? Because this is the sort of information that could be useful at some point.
Class today. More Dreamweaver. That will be the operating condition between now and the end of the semester, as we work our way through the perplexities of fairly powerful software which is useful when it wants to be, and mysterious whenever a student comes up with an outside-the-box idea.
I come back from each class with a small list of things I’ve promised to investigate and resolve because “Why isn’t that working as it should?” is not a fun question for anyone.
Critiqued the paper today, where we were a bit late in getting the dormitory bathroom explosion prank story. We’ve only two issues left on the year. I hope they solve the mystery so we can put it in the paper.
Else we might have to do follow ups on snake sightings. They are prolific on our wooded campus.
Also had the first talk with next year’s editor today. He’s a sharp young man. I believe he’ll have a fine year.
Went to the movie trailers tonight. I watched a movie after sitting through 28 minutes of previews. I go to the dollar theater, so I’m always a little behind, but there are some woofers in these promos. As for the best commercial:
True Grit, though, was pretty good. At least Jeff Bridges is playing the part of Rooster Cogburn, rather than John Wayne saying Rooster’s lines and wishing he were Ted Williams. On IMDB the original film lists Wayne, and then Glen Campbell as LaBoeuf (also considered for the role: Elvis) and then Kim Darby as Mattie Ross. In the modern film the listing is Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross and then Matt Damon as LaBoeuf. That’s about right.
Darby, meanwhile, has played in 82 movies and last worked in 2007. Hopefully Steinfeld will still be working in 2051.
Did you see the LOMO blog today? Tree new entries for you there. That’s it for here. More fun will be had tomorrow.
