“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”

— Benjamin Franklin

Nearly 15 years ago, I was the software lead on a project called “Visions of Mars,” a digital time capsule of classic SF stories and visualizations about Mars that was sent to the red planet aboard the ambitious Mars-96 spacecraft, launched by Russia.

Produced by astronomical artist and visionary Jon Lomberg for the Planetary Society, the disc contained narration by Patrick Stewart, and audiovisual greetings from the late Carl Sagan, the late Arthur C. Clarke, and the late Judith Merril.

I worked closely with Jon Lomberg, visual designer Steve Johnson and eagle-eye editor Esther Gwynne to realize the original Visions of Mars, developing an enhanced version of the multimedia engine & authoring tool, Idaho, that I had originally designed for Time Warner. Some of the enhancements I developed for Visions of Mars, such as the iptScrae programming language, eventually found their way into my mid-90s Avatar chat system, The Palace.

Unfortunately, the Russian spacecraft never made it to Mars – there was a malfunction and it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific. The original 200 MB mini CD contained in that spacecraft is likely a home for ocean critters now, if it survived the descent at all.

I’m very proud to say that my software, bugs and all, finally made it to Mars last Sunday. A copy of “Visions of Mars” is on the “Messages from Earth” DVD pictured here, mounted on the Phoenix lander. It shares space on the DVD with a quarter million names sent to NASA over the Internet.

Although the disc appears to be exposed to the elements, it is playing side down, and made of more durable silica, rather than polycarbonate. Jon Lomberg says that “Informed estimates of the lifetime seem to offer assured legibility for 500 years and possible legibility for several millennia.”

Let’s hope who ever eventually tries to play it has a copy of Windows 3.1 :)

My ears burn when I see boldface type.

You’ve probably googled yourself before. Being a huge egomaniac with access to power tools, I’ve turned googling yourself into a colossal waste of bandwidth. Pathetic, really… but perhaps you’d like to wallow in your own navel as well?

I use various services to monitor for mentions of my name on blogs, discussion boards and twitter. These services can perform searches on keywords and return the results as an RSS feed.

I’ve collected together a number of these egocentric RSS feeds into my favorite RSS reader, (Vienna), which polls each one every 30 minutes. My ears burn when I see those particular feeds go boldface, indicating that someone is talking about me.

Here are some sites which offer RSS search services for egomanics:

• BLOG SEARCH
  • BlogPulse (and here’s my egocentrism feed)
  • Google Blog Search (my feed)
  • Ice Rocket (my feed)
  • Technorati (my feed)
• TWITTER
  • Summize (my feed)
• DISCUSSION BOARDS
  • BoardReader (my feed)
• PHOTOS
  • Flickr Feeds (my feed)

Found some other good egocentric RSS searches? Let me know and I’ll add ’em to the list.

Engineers who use the phrase “Best Practices” to rationalize doing, or not doing things.

This strikes me as a lazy way to state an opinion, and make it sound more authoritative. If something works, or doesn’t work, explain precisely why. Don’t just invoke the nebulous specter of “Best Practices”.

Via Hacker News, here’s an account by Thinking Machines founder Danny Hillis about the early days of the company that produced the amazing Connection Machine, and their unlikely employee, Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. A fascinating and beautifully written account.

link

The Spinning Oracle is a magic trick derived from my Wheel of Lunch project that wlil give you about 60 seconds of amusement.

The effectiveness of magic is greatly reduced when tricks are performed more than once — so try to resist the temptation to view the trick twice. Instead, share it with a friend!

You may notice in the blog articles below, a little “W” icon next to some of the Wikipedia links, and a little film-strip icon next to some YouTube links. Those are placed by Apture, a blog-annotation service I’m beta-testing that allows you to preview that content without leaving the blog.

I kind of like it, but I’m still not sure if I like it enough to keep it. I like making the Wikipedia references more convenient to see, but I absolutely despise the “walled garden” approach to viewer retention, and I worry that this veers a little too far in that direction, so I may dismantle it in a few days or weeks.

If you have an opinion, or if it horribly breaks for you, let me know in the comments accompanying this post.

In the meantime, enjoy this movie of the Battle of Kruger and this unrelated article on hedgehogs.

The Computer History Museum in San Francisco has some very cool video of a pristine reproduction of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2 in operation, which you can see on their website.

Although Babbage never completed one of these machines, former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold has had one built for his private collection, and it goes on display at the San Francisco museum (on loan from London’s Science Museum, which has built two of them) on May 10.

You see, this is what happens when giant nerds make a lot of money. I want one!

Here’s a transcript of an interesting lecture by London Curator Doron Swade that has a lot of inside information about the project. Interestingly, Doron disagrees with the commonly repeated notion that Babbage failed to build the Difference Engines because of technological limitations of Victorian tool technology. Instead Doron blames an intricate web of non-technological issues, including personal politics and expense.

Grand Theft Auto IV, released today, is being advertised with an interesting campaign that seems to be using mostly very large surfaces, such as the sides of buildings and the backgrounds of popular websites.

I couldn’t help but notice the huge image they used to take over the background on the Myspace home page. There is an even larger one over at gamespot.com. These graphics exploit the fact that these sites use a conventional (and soon-to-be antiquated) 800 pixel wide design (a hold over from the days of 16 inch monitors), but that most modern computers, especially those used by gamers, use much higher resolutions.

I wonder how much a 1280 x 800 banner ad on the Myspace home page costs these days?

Here are links to the original graphics. If you spot any more, let me know, and I’ll include them here.

MySpace Background

Gamespot Background