During the early years of manned spaceflight, NASA found it impossible to arrange life insurance for the astronauts. The solution to this problem was both ingenious and impeccably market-oriented:

The answer was provided by NASA in the form of ‘Insurance Covers’, [...] a number of which were given to every crew member and subsequently signed by every astronaut involved, as close to launch as possible. Its value would instantly be high, but would no doubt sky-rocket (no pun intended) should the astronauts never return; the deceased’s surviving family then at least safe in the knowledge that in future they could cash-in their makeshift insurance policy if required.

By the time of the Columbia disaster in 2003, NASA had come up with a different approach:

The Americans who died aboard the space shuttle Columbia were eligible for the standard life insurance offered to military personnel and federal employees, but NASA carried no special coverage specifically for astronauts, officials say.

[...]

The 12 children of the Columbia astronauts will also be able to receive assistance from the Space Shuttle Children’s Trust Fund. The private, nonprofit fund raised about $1.2 million after the 1986 Challenger explosion to provide for the needs of the astronauts’ children.

[Via The Null Device]

Christopher Nolan’s Implementation:

Leonardo DiCaprio takes a taxi to an insidiously nondescript office building. He rides the glass-walled elevator to the eleventh floor, and as he walks past the receptionist we see only the words “MANAGEMENT CONSULTING” in a thin, sans-serif typeface on the wall behind her. He enters a spacious conference room with a view of a park and sits at a vast, elliptical table across from Ken Watanabe, a white-haired senior director.

“I need you to take on a contract for me,” Watanabe says. “But in this case, instead of coördinating a facilitative approach in the light of the client’s tactical aims, you will take a prescriptive approach in implanting strategic objectives as part of a processual intervention in executive leadership.”

“I’ve done that before, as a junior associate, but it’s dangerous,” DiCaprio says with raspy wistfulness. He has a vision of privatized British hospitals crumbling into a foamy sea. “But the only way to do it is to infiltrate the client’s internal management consulting group to convince the board that it’s their own strategic objectives they’re implementing.” [...]

[Via kottke.org]

I was surprised to find that the late Maury Chaykin was aged just 61 when he died yesterday. He seemed to be one of those character actors who had been in late middle age for about 25 years.

I don’t suppose that he’d be deemed a big enough name to merit a tribute season, but it’d be nice to think that BBC2 might squeeze an episode or two of A Nero Wolfe Mystery into the schedules some time soon.

A cry for funding if ever I heard one:

[...] Writing in IEEE Computer, Professor Noel Sharkey, from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Computer Science, along with former Crimewatch presenter Nick Ross and Senior Interpol Advisor, Marc Goodman, warn of a coming robot crime wave in which military and police robots could be open to abuse from criminals.

[...]

Professor Sharkey urges fellow scientists and engineers working in robotics to be mindful of crime prevention and build in components in the software to assist with forensic analysis. He and his co-authors call for the police to consider building information databases that could track and trace robot crime, similar to our current fingerprint database system.

Professor Sharkey said: “Robots could assist a vast range of crime from drugs vending to assault and murder to voyeurism and burglary. Robots can’t even be detected by the passive IR alarm systems in most of our houses. More pressing though, is the danger that criminals or terrorists will hack into armed military or police robots and pose a threat to life.”

“The new crime wave might be 10 or 20 years away, but we should have no doubt it is coming. Robots will be used for crimes because they offer two elements that have always promoted crime: temptation and opportunity. We must act quickly and decisively to head off a pandemic of robot crime.”

[Via Kevan Davis]

Best. Button label. Ever!

Nice blurb:

“[Jeff] VanderMeer’s FINCH is…well, it’s FAREWELL MY LOVELY if Philip Marlowe worked for the pod – people while snacking on Alice’s Wonderland mushrooms. It’s NAME OF THE ROSE if Sean Connery’s character was a conglomeration of self-aware spores instead of a medieval monk. It’s THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD if all the agents were also testing psychedelic drugs and hung out in a post-apocalyptic Emerald City instead of Eastern Europe. More importantly, FINCH is a really good book – exciting, dark, suspenseful, and wonderfully weird.” – Tad Williams

[Via LRB Blog]

See if you can guess¹ which film this CAP Alert is describing:

As with some other cartoons for kids, the filmmakers had the lead female character [...] drawn as a rather callipygian lady, dress in form-fitting clothes, more than other female characters and often posed her in positions to display ghosting and outlining of her anatomy, once in slow motion. Much the same as Elasti-girl™ in The Incredibles® only slimmer.

[...]

And to fortify my anathema for stealing childhood from children with such sexual imagery and your embracement of what I am telling you, if you watch this show note [...] as she hangs in mid-air with her legs spread out … in slow motion. [1 Ths. 4:7, 1 John 2:16] Granted, this is all animation but it is still suggestive, and suggestion can, at times and for some, especially the young, be more powerful than overt display.

[Via DNye, commenting at MetaFilter]

1. Without peeking at the URL or following the link. ↩

An oldish xkcd cartoon in praise of Desperate Perl Hackers everywhere.

[Via Avi Bryant, commenting at ongoing. Further down the same comment thread at ongoing, there's a link to another good xkcd cartoon, this time on Lisp and Perl.]

This wide field view of part of the Milky Way is simply gorgeous. Deskop wallpaper material, for sure.

Edited to add: this picture reminds me of an anecdote from Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock in the latest Shift Run Stop podcast. She was talking about how Australian aborigines saw the constellations. There’s nothing universal about the concept that a particular group of bright stars forms the shape of a hunter or a big bear or a little bear. When humans look up at the night sky, our mind’s habit of finding patterns in the things we look at can’t help but kick in, so historically different cultures have come up with their own distinctive notions about the names and patterns that form constellations.

The really interesting bit¹ is that according to Dr Aderin-Pocock the aborigines – living under wide open skies with no light pollution to speak of – ended up naming constellations after not the bright stars, but after the even more distinctive patterns of the dust clouds that obscure our view of parts of the Milky Way. I love the notion that aborigines were seeing the night sky so differently from us.²

1. It may well be that this is common knowledge, but I hadn’t heard of the notion of forming constellations based on dust clouds rather than bright stars. Perhaps I just grew up reading the wrong books on astronomy. ↩
2. OK, I know that strictly speaking the southern skies are different from the ones we northern Europeans see – I’ll never get to see the Southern Cross from all the way up here – but I’m not going to let that minor details like that get in the way. ↩

Welcome to the Slacktivist’s Meritocratic Utopia:

I’m proud to report that our team at the Worthiness Bureau has completed the first step toward a more just world. Meritocratic utopia is now just around the corner. We have devised a new, perfect, authoritative metric for human worth: the Human Worthiness Algorithm.

Our formula is, of course, proprietary and thus must be kept as a closely guarded secret. But trust me, we’ve factored in everything and just because no one else is allowed to know the process doesn’t mean anyone should be second-guessing the precision and objective, scientific accuracy of the HWA.

Every human being on earth, every so-called individual, can now be assigned a simple number — their HW score — from .001 to 1.000. (The formula originally assigned scores in whole numbers from 1 to 1,000, but we reconfigured this because, as you know, scores with lots of digits after a decimal point are always much more accurate.) [...]

If you haven’t see Inception yet, do not under any circumstances click on this link to Devin Faraci’s thoughts on The Meaning and Secret of Inception. If you have seen Inception, I think you’ll find Faraci’s idea worth a few minutes of your time.

Having seen the film on Monday night, I’d already decided to go back and see it again as soon as is practical even before I read about this theory about what was really going on. I’m not 100% convinced by Faraci’s argument, but I’m looking forward to viewing Christopher Nolan’s latest with Faraci’s theory in mind.

Courtesy of a post to Risks Digest, comfortably the worst computer-related idea I’ve heard this year:

Mike Scott [...]
Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:52:40 +0100

I don’t mind having electronic documents, well not usually. Today someone sent me an electronic business card (…_Electronic_Business_Card.exe). Yes, that’s right, a full-blown executable just, apparently, to display a pretty facsimile of a business card. [...]

Inspired by yet another controversy over news web sites surreptitiously editing their articles, Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg offers a simple solution, as practised by Wikipedia and computer programmers everywhere:

Versioning should be the model for how we present the evolution of news stories on the Web. In fact, it makes so much sense that, even though right now no one is using it, I’m convinced it will become the norm over the next decade.

Today it might seem like overkill, but that’s how all new Web phenomena present themselves to us. It might sound like a lot of work, but once it’s incorporated into a newsroom’s content management software, it’s probably going to save time presently wasted on posting jerry-rigged correction notices. It can be presented unobtrusively, so that the vast majority of readers who don’t care will never need to see it – but the bloggers, pundits and critics who do care can feast.

Given that the typical newsroom’s content management system probably already does version control for internal use, this sort of thing should be a no-brainer. I’m guessing the barriers to rolling out versioning where the readers can see it is far more cultural than technical. As people who grew up with Wikipedia move up in the hierarchy of the typical newsroom, perhaps this sort of thing will become second nature. Or will it take the widespread adoption of user-accessible version control features in everyone’s weblog content management software to make this approach seem like the right thing to do?

For all that, I suppose that you have to take into account the legal issues that will occasionally come into play – not least in the Libel Capital Of The World. If your newspaper has published a story on their web site and agreed to withdraw or correct the story in the face of a threat of a libel action, what would be the status of the copy of version 1.0 of the story, no longer visible via the site’s default article view but readily available to those who chose to view the story’s earlier version? I am not a lawyer, but I’d imagine that our learned friends would argue that the only acceptable solution would be to completely wipe out the original, offending version of the story, rather than just push it behind a ‘View previous versions’ link.¹

1. Note to self: find out how Wikipedia handles this sort of issue. ↩

Darryl Cunningham’s The Moon Hoax is, in essence, the comics equivalent of Phil Plait’s original Bad Astronomy site. Nice work.

[Via LinkMachineGo!]

The Battle of Britain, Day by Day:

Day 11 – July 20th 1940

Weather: Thunderstorms in the Channel, patchy clouds over Dover.

A large convoy was attacked opposite Dover. In a dogfight above this convoy, 2 Hurricanes were lost and 4 damaged. There was a major dogfight when 50 Me109s and Me110s clashed with some 24 Hurricanes and Spitfires. The RAF lost that day 3 aircraft against 9 German aircraft destroyed which included 5 Me109s. The day’s performance made up for the previous day’s disappointing tally.

PO DH Wissler – Diary, 20 July

It was my evening off and Brigid managed to get a pass so we went out to the “Red Lion” near Duxford and had dinner together in F/L Quinn’s car. A very nice evening.

[Via Ben Hammersley's return to old-fashioned blogging]

Paul Adams’ The Real Life Social Network v2 enumerates, at length and in detail, the number of ways in which the notion of a communicating with a network of ‘friends’ in current social networks fails to fit the way human beings actually interact with their real-life social network.

Adams works for Google: it’ll be interesting to see if they incorporate his insights into whatever product they eventually come up with to take on Facebook.¹

[Via The Null Device]

1. Unless, that is, they end up just buying Facebook. It’s not as if they couldn’t afford it. ↩

The Horse of Sagas.

Kylie’s Badly Placed Mic.

[Via Feeling Listless MiniBlog]

Socotra Island might well be the most alien-looking place on Earth:

Imagine waking up on the Socotra Island and taking a good look around you [...] After a yelp of disbelief, you’d be inclined to think you were transported to another planet – or traveled to another era of Earth’s history.

The second would be closer to the truth for this island, which is part of a group of 4 islands, has been geographically isolated from mainland Africa for the last 6 or 7 million years. Like the Galapagos Islands, this island is teeming with 700 extremely rare species of flora and fauna, a full 1/3 of which are endemic, i.e. found nowhere else on Earth.

[Via FFFFOUND]

The Daily Mail‘s not-all-that-secret editorial formula, interpreted as a Tube map.

Be sure to view the full-size version.

[Via MetaFilter]