Valley Proofs

I was looking around our image search site following a launch. Looking for things related to planet Mars, space exploration and the Space Shuttle. But then I stumbled onto this - "The Man From Mars". Click here for a high res version of the above Martian. The source Life Magazine, 1951 has more shots with high resolution detail. Has anyone a clue what's going on here?! Go figure.

A capsule from SpaceX appeared at the Googleplex today. Here's a couple of pictures. Rumor has it that SpaceX founder Elon Musk will show up at Zeitgeist and talk about private initiative and space exploration. Given the company boasts the world's lowest cost flight to orbit he'll likely receive some attention from the audience. The capsule on these pictures is codenamed Dragon. At first glance the hatch hinges and rubber rings seem a bit weak, but this being a prototype, I am sure it'll change eventually. Here are some of the highlights of the capsule: Fully autonomous rendezvous and docking with manual override capability in crewed configuration Pressurized Cargo/Crew capacity of >2500 kg and 14 cubic meters Down-cargo capability (equal to up-cargo) Supports up to 7 passengers in Crew configuration Two-fault tolerant avionics system with extensive heritage Reaction control system with 18 MMH/NTO thrusters designed and built in-house; these thrusters are used for

A compelling way to interact with information available on the Internet was released yesterday by Mozilla developers - Ubiquity . Removing clunkiness is laudable but more than that I hope this further steers developers into leaving the immediate interface issues and starts them on thinking structurally about the information they process or/and publish. I expect plenty of privacy and security concerns to arise soon. It's one thing to email ascii and its another to send rich markup over unencrypted links. http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

If you decide to switch your Gmail preferences to always use https for all connections to Google servers, do not forget to do the same on your mobile devices, with the mobile client. Note: Yes, you should be using https, its a bad idea to let attackers close to your cookies sent unencrypted over your sessions - any sessions - not just Google ones. For the time being things can get out of sync and your mobile client will get server errors when trying to access your account. Here's a read from the Gmail google group. I noticed this after my blackberry stopped sending emails, or performing searches on my Gmail account. After a fresh install it pretty much stopped doing anything. http://groups.google.com/group/google-mobile-help-blackberry/browse_thread/thread/d5f94637cbaf3837/5d00e5d1d54bd680?lnk=raot

I haven't read H.G. Frankfurter's book yet, but I find interesting his assertion that "we" (society?) have no theory of it yet. Stepping away from it's literal meaning, describing feces of a bull, bullshit describes a type of speech and statements correlated with incorrect, false, misleading or made up arguments. A common misperception is that such language is often used and needed in politics and advertising, it is however certainty that bullshit is not confined exclusively to any particular area of human activity. "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions i

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens. This book has many reviews already, there's no point in trying to write one more. Hitchens brings vividly the inconsistencies in religious philosophy forward and he finds these in every major religion of contemporary times. Whereas some reviews compress his writing into a simplified label "radical atheist", his book is much more than so often seen scribblings by barely literate fundamentalists or even worse, in this day and time, the sending of messages by beheading people on poorly taped TV. The book brings facets of the interplay of society and religion, the long history of this relation and some of the sour fruits of it including those of religious power over society. The best word for the book is given by Mr. Hitchens himself, I had the privilege to attend Mr. Hitchen's talk at Google in Mountain View and I am happy we are able to share this talk with the public.

The coming year promises to bring a new face to many web apps, mashing up content from different sources is becoming easier by the day. I am going to test some of these ideas on this blog and file it under Mashups. The idea behind mashups is simple leave the lifting to those who do it best, and concentrate on where you add value to the chain, be it your friends or your customers. Here's an example, the Google Maps team just announced adding 8 new cities to the street view layer on http://www.google.com/maps. What's interesting to me is not the eight new cities but the ability to add the street view snippet into my own, in this case, blog post. So here, today I'll share the street where I work and point visiting friends to it. Note one little but important detail, to get the right html snippet you have to use the http://www.google.com/maps URL to navigate to the right place and not http://maps.google.com, this will change in the future but right now you have to be aware of