Reuters - EU agrees public funding for satellite project
Supporters say it is a vital technological platform for Europe, but critics say it could be a costly white elephant because the U.S. system already has a dominant market position and Russia and China are working on their own systems.
Berlin had been blocking the use of unspent EU funds partly because it feared German firms could be shut out of major work under the initial tendering scheme, but also out of concern at the precedent of using unspent funds that would otherwise be repaid to member states.
TENDER REDIVIDED
To placate Germany, diplomats said EU leaders could issue a declaration next month pledging that the use of unspent funds for Galileo would remain an exception.
The total cost of Galileo — 3.4 billion euro ($5.1 billion) — is being raised from public funds after private companies declined to carry the risk.
Uncharacteristically, I am going to a political rant mode for a paragraph or two.
“…because the U.S. system already has a dominant market position and Russia and China are working on their own systems”? Isn’t this the main reason why this system is being built in the first place? I am amazed that it has taken this long and that people are not seeing importance of this project. As a mental exercise, just imagine someone pressing a big red button to turn off GPS for everyone else except the American Army. Is it an unprobable scenario? Perhaps it is, but if it happens, there really is no place to call and ask for your money back.
GPS has grown from a military platform to a global, ubiquitous navigation system that has thousands of applications all over the world. It is a mind bogglingly powerful ace card that USA has up their sleeve. They can use that big red button any time they see fit. GPS system’s selective availability could probably be enabled at a relatively small geographical area for a short period of time if needed.
In my opinion, 3.4 billion euros is pocket money to neutralize that threat. Well, granted, it doesn’t take much shoot down a competing satellite positioning system, but it is not only military threats that this system could be used for. Anyway, sometimes it is just time to bite the bullet and show that you have the muscle to get by relatively independently if need be.
This was a tiny little news item at Reuters which probably goes unnoticed by most media. I wanted to highlight it a bit to underline the importance of projects like this instead spending 200 million euros a year on MEPs commuting between Strasbourg and Brussels.
OK, rant mode over, thank you for listening. 
Posted by api at 14:05 - No Comments »
A designer friend of mine, Tuija Järvenpää, has come up with the idea of selling pictures of Christmas trees.
She’s been working with the concept of disposable objects of art for quite some time now. One of her earlier projects was a paper wedding dress. The works are dancing around in the gray area of ecological statements, conceptual art, household items and commercial products.
The paper Christmas trees are actually very large scale ink jet prints. They are 134 cm * 280 cm in size and can be stored in the shipping tube for the next year.
I helped her put together a little online store to make it easier for clients to place an order for the tree. Go ahead and mail her if you want one shipped outside of Finland.
Posted by api at 13:09 - 2 Comments »
Sunshine
The director also considered the story of Sunshine as an appropriate counterintuitive approach for the contemporary issue of global warming, with the death of the sun being a threat. Originally, Sunshine was scripted to begin with a voiceover talking about how parents tell their children not to look into the sun, but once told, the children would be compelled to look. Boyle described the sun as a godly personality in the film, creating a psychological dimension for the astronauts due to its scale and power. The director also described the film’s villain as based on light, explaining, “That’s quite a challenge because the way you generate fear in cinema is darkness.” The director also sought to have the characters experience a psychological journey in which each person is worn mentally, physically, and existentially and is experiencing doubt in their faiths.
I like to get a little dose of science fiction every now and then to keep the subconsciousness nourished with far-out ideas. Sunshine was just what the doctor ordered as far as the science part of the movie is concerned. In the movie a “Q-Ball” , the nucleus of a supersymmetric particle, gets itself lodged in the Sun. The hypothetical Q ball eats through normal matter, ripping apart the Sun’s neutrons and protons and converting them into supersymmetric particles. The Earth’s last and only hope? Why, to launch and detonate a gigantic nuclear bomb to fix the problem, of course!
Here’s an interesting review with the scientific advisor of the film.
Well, science aside, I think the film makers did a pretty good job with many other aspects of the film. The art direction and visual effects in general were well made. More importantly, they were also original and refreshing, which is not an easy task to accomplish in this day and age.
I found it particularly inspiring that the sun was treated as a god-like entity much like the ancient egyptian Sun God Ra and the aztec god Huitzilopochtli. As a matter of fact, sun has been worshipped for all of recorded history.
My personal prediction is that the Sun God is about to get quite angry while us mere mortals are thinning the ozone layer which is protecting us from his angry UVB eye.
Posted by api at 11:43 - 1 Comment »
Scientists develop Terminator-style helmets which allow fighter pilots to see through their planes | the Daily Mail
A futuristic helmet which allows fighter pilots to see through the walls and floor of their aircraft has been developed by scientists.
The high-tech head gear is attached to cameras on the outside of the aircraft, which project pictures of the plane’s surroundings onto the inside of the pilot’s visor.
The pilot then has 360 degree vision of the world around the plane, allowing x-ray style vision.
This is for the European F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. It will also impose infra-red imagery on to the visor to allow the pilot to look through the cockpit floor at night and see the world below.
Posted by api at 19:09 - 2 Comments »
Eye-Fi Wireless Card
Eye-Fi uses home wireless networks to eliminate the time-consuming chore of dealing with cables, card readers or software plug-ins associated with uploading photos. Users simply turn on their digital camera and their pictures are wirelessly uploaded. The Eye-Fi Card works with existing and new SD-compatible digital cameras and stores photos like a conventional SD memory card.
How on earth did they manage to cram a 2 GB memory chip and a wi-fi chip the same card? I remember when a 1 GB hard drive used to cost a thousand dollars and wireless networking required great big satellite dishes.
Well, times they have a-changed and now you can pop in a memory card that uploads your photos automatically via wi-fi as you take them. I am curious if you can also upload your photos directly to iPhoto or if you can only upload them to online services. It does seem to support a wide variety of different services including Facebook, Flickr and the open source Gallery software. At $99 it’s not an expensive add-on if you need something like this for real-time coverage of an event for example.
Posted by api at 11:44 - No Comments »
