Archive for July, 2005

I’m not a huge space shut­tle freak. I think that the cur­rent NASA model of space explo­ration has com­pletely lost its way from what the space pro­gram was orig­i­nally designed to do – beat the crap out of the Rus­sians. That, and EXPLORE SPACE. All the shut­tle seems to be used for now is truckin’ food up to the poor sods on the ISS and fix­ing the Hub­ble. When the hell are we going back to the Moon? When are we finally get­ting off our duff and going to Mars?

Regard­less, the space shut­tle Dis­cov­ery launched the other day and I’m sure you haven’t heard any­thing about it on the news (sar­casm) . I like this pic­ture. It’s some­thing you rarely see – an exter­nal fuel tank hurtling towards Earth.

Watch out, peo­ple! Hurtling fuel tank com­ing your way!

2003 EL61, as it has been cur­rently clas­si­fied, has been dis­cov­ered, and it may be another one of those elu­sive plan­ets that seem to creep up every once in a great while in our solar system.

A new found object in our solar system’s out­skirts may be larger than any known world after Pluto, sci­en­tists said today.

It also has a moon.

Des­ig­nated as 2003 EL61, the main object in the two-body sys­tem is 32 per­cent as mas­sive as Pluto and is esti­mated to be about 70 per­cent of Pluto’s diameter.

Other news reports that the object could be twice as big as Pluto are false, accord­ing to two astronomers who found the object in sep­a­rate stud­ies and another expert who has ana­lyzed the data.

If the mass is only one-third that of Pluto, then the­ory holds that it can’t be larger than Pluto, accord­ing to Brian Mars­den of the Minor Planet Cen­ter, which serves as a clear­ing­house for data on all new­found objects in the solar system.

Mars­den, who was not involved in the dis­cov­ery but has reviewed the data, told SPACE.com that the mass esti­mate is very firm, within 1 or 2 per­cent. “I don’t think it is big­ger than Pluto,” he said.

See the man in the pic to the left? The one with the vaguely girl­ish hair next to the attrac­tive girl in pink?

His name is Hiroshi Ishig­uru. He is a pro­fes­sor at Osaka Uni­ver­sity in Japan. The woman with him is named Repliee Q1, and no, she doesn’t have some cool Dada-esque last name. She’s a FREAKING ROBOT.

She has flex­i­ble sil­i­cone for skin rather than hard plas­tic, and a num­ber of sen­sors and motors to allow her to turn and react in a human-like manner.She can flut­ter her eye­lids and move her hands like a human. She even appears to breathe.

Pro­fes­sor Hiroshi Ishig­uru of Osaka Uni­ver­sity says one day robots could fool us into believ­ing they are human.

Won­der­ful. Now all we need is a Voight-Kampff machine.

For­tu­nately, for us puny humans, we don’t yet have to bow to our robot masters.

She is designed to look human and although she can only sit at present, she has 31 actu­a­tors in her upper body, pow­ered by a nearby air com­pres­sor, pro­grammed to allow her to move like a human.

Great news for us. Just wait – the next thing you know Repliee Q2 will be out and telling us how to erad­i­cated hunger and poverty from the world, cure dis­eases and the aging process and help­ing bring about com­plete nuclear dis­ar­ma­ment, moments before she uses the Army’s Space Peace Plat­form of Death on us and starts the whole Humans vs. Ter­mi­na­tor thing.