We often get caught up with our technology and gadgets and take for granted what they can do. Two MIT students accomplished an amazing feat when they managed to get photos from near-space for $150 worth of items.
Their photos are actually pretty impressive from the inexpensive GPS/Camera equipped cell-phone.
I find it disturbing these days that people will believe almost anything sent to their inbox from a friend or colleague. I recently received the famous e-mail about Mars being closer to the Earth than in anytime in history in August and that this will never happen again in anyone’s lifetime who is alive today. Exciting news to be sure!
The e-mail continued to reveal that Mars would appear almost as big and bright as the moon in the night sky…again, fascinating. However, the truth just isn’t so. I guess implied in the hyperlink in the previous sentence is the trust I’m putting in NASA, the source of the information debunking this hoax. I certainly hope they are telling me the truth, and based on the source, I’m inclined to believe them over an email that arrives from a friend, after being forwarded thousands of times over nearly 6 years since it was originally sent out. No doubt the original author of this fiction must be impressed with the longevity he or she has achieved.
The more I watch the Jon Stewart show (unfortunately one of my favourite sources of “News” and Entertainment these days), I wonder how the eroding trust I feel in the major “News” organizations that report daily on happenings around the world will impact what I believe in the future. How can the average person be expected to determine what is fact and what is fiction with so much information passing through our television sets, inboxes, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I hope that we figure out a way to keep determining mostly what is fact and what isn’t, because with the volume of information we hear on a daily basis, we really do need to watch what we believe…something many of us seem to have forgotten.
After reading the story this week that NASA and Google are working on a way to extend the Internet beyond the confines of our planet was intriguing. Of course I love hearing about anything that has to do with space exploration, and the concept of extending the Internet into space is interesting and strange at the same time. Of course, if that first manned mission to Mars ever does happen, the journey is no doubt going to be a long one (several months at least), being able to browse the Internet would be nice 
.
Now…according to the article in the Ottawa Citizen about this, it will take nearly three minutes for the signal to travel from the earth to the source. I guess instant messaging and real time communication are somehow out of the question.
What was interesting, is that the key technological hurdle needing to be overcome is the ability for a signal to be smart and be able to deal with disruptions and connection problems. The new concept is called “Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN. If a signal is blocked, the server can sense this, can save the content and send it on when the way is clear.” We are constantly building web applications that rely on communication with other systems, sometimes asynchronously. While there are mechanisms that can deal with disruption to a certain extent, this concept is interesting in that one could be sure that a transmission would arrive eventually, even if the system accepting the message isn’t available immediately.
I’ll be interested to see if this is one of those space program advances that actually helps us on earth, or if its just a cool idea that doesn’t yield any practical application.
This post is a commentary on the article that appeared in the Ottawa Citizen on August 16th of this year (a popular source of information for my posts in this blog, and yes the paper was still on my desk at the time I wrote this) in response to Mark Bauerlein’s book “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30″.