Inside the machine

How Netflix gets your movies to your mailbox so fast - in secret underground warehouses! Well, okay, they're not underground.

Awesome

Saturn V's were awesome.

It's amazing to go down to the Air and Space Museum here in DC and look at those space capsules. My car is orders of magnitude more advanced than those things. Unbelievable.

Anyway, I've seen a couple of posts wondering why we haven't gone back, and wouldn't it be neat, etc. That's nuts. The only reason we went there in the first place was to put the Rooskies in their place, and that's the only way it ever made monetary sense, if you want to call it that. And as long as we're using rocket technology even remotely close to what we've had for the last 40 years, it still makes little economic sense. Along that line, they're talking about letting the space station fall into the Pacific in a year or two because it too is a giant money pit.

But that bit of anti-manned space exploration vitriol aside, Saturn V's are awesome.

Me and Tivo

Tivo needs to implement about half of these suggestions pronto - the keyboard remote is very good idea. Also, my TiVo needs to stop recording "Best of Nickleback" videos in the suggestions folder. Not cool.

Evolution in progress

"The first working integrated circuit on germanium was
demonstrated by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments in 1958."

2008: Intel Core i7 processor with 758 million transistors.

Here is a rather nice photographic series which follows the progress of Moore's Law over the years.

Solar Towers

Solar Tower Proposal in Namibia

I wonder if the interest in solar will last longer than the one in the eighties - remember all the passive-heating solar house designs?

Nukular

5 Myths About Breaking Our Foreign Oil Habit
By Robert Bryce
Sunday, January 13, 2008; Page B03

With oil prices still flirting with $100 a barrel, everyone is talking about the need for "energy independence." Late last year, President Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007; Sen. John McCain has declared, "We need energy independence"; and Sen. Barack Obama has called for "serious leadership to get us started down the path of energy independence."

This may all be good politics. But the idea that the United States, the world's single largest energy consumer, can be independent of the $5 trillion-per-year energy business -- the world's single biggest industry -- is ludicrous on its face. The push for energy independence is based on a series of false premises.

We're sitting on a huge amount of coal, but the sea-change in green thought about nuclear power is an window to start ramping some of that back up.