wiredfool

The NYT reports that it appears that the foam insulation’s mechanical properties did have some thermal dependence. The article mentions that when the insulating foam gets very cold (such as in the range of liquid gasses) the foam gets 5-15 times harder and stronger, increasing the damage it could do when breaking off. It turns out that in 1999, NASA had catastrophic failure of the liquid hydrogen tank for an X-33 due to foam peeling off.

This is slightly a diferent dependency than I suspected, but I’d keep watching. I’m now especially curious about the thermal tile toughness vs. temperature relationship. If the tiles are more brittle at low temperatures, that could also increase the damage done by an impact.

I was poking through my collection the other day, and I ran across this:

And I was puzzled. I was looking for the date of the recording, normally availiable from the copyright indication, but investigation of the album showed no signs of a date. Well, there were two copyright dates for the liner notes, but none for the music.

Public Domain. Where were the heirs of the composer, the orchestra, the chorus? What corporate entity owned the recording? Who did CBS pay for this?

Now given that this recording was once in the public domain, what rights do I have to the recording? Am I allowed to rip and post it online? Is it still in the public domain? Have they snatched it back?

As for the composer, I’m not sure he was ever paid for it. There was something of a fight between him and his patrons, as the work was several years late and not exactly what they were expecting.

A few random questions suggested by correlation that may or may not lead anywhere:

• What was the temperature at launch?
• How do the mechanical properties of the foam insulation change with temperature? In particular, is there a glass transition temperature anywhere near freezing. I understand that the inside surface of the insulation is at between 2 and 50 degrees kelvin (-400 to -325 F), but the outside skin is most responsible for structural integrity at speed.
• Do the tiles have any sensitivity to below freezing temperatures?
• Columbia has been reported to have had trouble with heat on re-entry in the past. Is there any correlation with tile damage or launch temperature?
• Insulation has flaked off before. What is the correlation with launch temperature?

I’ve read Tufte’s explanation of the charts and graphs that lead to the Challenger launch decision and his rerendering of all the data. The more complete renderings show a pretty inescapable conclusion that launching was not wise. I’d like to see similar graphs of insulation damage, tile damage, and heat troubles vs. launch temperature. I hope that these graphs don’t show a similar correlation that would lead to a no launch decision. But given that this year has been unseasonably cold in Florida I’m not sure that I can dismiss it.

William Gibson read from Pattern Recognition and answered the usual and unusual fan questions last night at Elliott Bay Books.

I can say with some relief that the book is better than his reading of it. But then, he’s an author, not a speaker. Not to mention getting tossed into the 4th chapter of a book can be somewhat disorienting. Sort of like jet lag with everyone talking at you in a wierd language.

One question threw him: What gender is Case? Neuromancer has a pretty explicit answer in his sex scene. So what’s to answer, other than the reader’s intrepretation is an interesting reading.

I didn’t get to ask him how the current copyright situation affects him. I know some of his work is out there, as I first read Neuromancer as a 500k html doc. One small statistically insignifiant data point.

Of course, Usenet is a solution to a different problem. Usenet is not syndication, and irc isn’t IM. They both have a different hierarchial relationship than their predecessors.

Usenet is a very peer to peer relationship between servers, but once you are within the realm of an ISP, it’s a centralized service. Usenet has an infrastructure and management cost that your ordinary aggregator simply doesn’t require and can’t provide. Aggregators have an ad-hoc nature that lower the barrier between connecting readers and writers. For the readers, type in a url and autodiscovery takes over. For the writers, just summarize, rerender, and point to it.

NNTP solves a different problem of injecting one message somewhere in the network and having it show up in every interested unread list. It’s essentially a perfect cache – one message tranmission from the source for all the readers. Aggregation does not require this level of caching.

Usenet also has the problem of trust. Its design encourages essentially untrusted clients to send a single message to a world wide audience – giving it the effect of a network of open relay mail servers. So usenet in its gigabyte per day full feed glory isn’t the answer.

One of the big topics of discussion at the bloggers dinner (after what weblogging package) was aggregators: favorites, the effect of, and what happens when you don’t have an rss feed. At one end of the table, NetNewsWire, Radio, an aggregator feeding into outlook, one in .net, and amphetadesk (I think) were represented.

I got some interesting looks from asserting that the rss/syndication system is going to end up redoing usenet, badly, as all peer to peer systems seem to end up doing.

Fundamentally, weblogs as rss and many other bulk feeds of data are very similar to usenet. There’s not much focus on formatting, it’s just data. Many feeds, many groups. A little crossposting, a little referrer spam. A link, a title, some description. Recent news is at the top of the spool, anything older than the last scan is quickly moved to archive status.

Usenet and mailing lists have been uneasily merged for 15 years or more. It’s crying out for an interface that allows you to scan lots of news quickly. Witness the rise of rss aggregators that are very similar to email clients, which have in turn been coevolving with news readers since the beginning. And news readers, in my experience, have the best interface for scanning huge numbers of posts in a short time.

Now there’s this: INN + blagg + plugin = News Aggregation via NNTP

What can I say other than there was wifi, many laptops, more cameras, and a killer mirror project shot. Well worth the trip to the other side of the pond. Links to follow…

I’d love to hear some variation of this rant coming from a mayors office or city council chambers:

Look, we built you a damn stadium, gave you millions in tax breaks, and now your fans trash the place. They’re worse than football hooligans. Get out. We’re better off without you. Go back to LA.

Could you imagine a city kicking a sports team out?

There’s at least one music exec with a clue:

“It’s horrible. Anything we can do that’s effective will seriously annoy our customers,” said one industry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“I think we might need to stop fighting fire with fire and figure out something new to do, or we will end up with lots of ex-customers who swap files just out of spite.”

from here

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