NASA’s Space Shuttle launch videos are spectacularly incredible, incredibly spectacular

By Vlad Savov, Engadget RSS FeedDecember 12, 2010 at 06:31AM

Did you know that it takes nearly seven and a half million pounds of thrust to get a Space Shuttle off the ground and into the final frontier? NASA opts to generate that power by burning through 1,000 gallons of liquid propellants and 20,000 pounds of solid fuel every second, which as you might surmise, makes for some arresting visuals. Thankfully, there are plenty of practical reasons why NASA would want to film its launches (in slow motion!), and today we get to witness some of that awe-inspiring footage, replete with a silky voiceover explaining the focal lengths of cameras used and other photographic minutiae. It’s the definition of an epic video, clocking in at over 45 minutes, but if you haven’t got all that time, just do it like us and skip around — your brain will be splattered on the wall behind you either way.

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A ‘No Blasters!’ Star Wars Alphabet

By Darice de Cuba, ForeverGeekDecember 10, 2010 at 03:39PM

Living in an apartment and with a baby boy on the way, Brandon and Emma Peat had to get creative with decorating the baby room. Painting the walls is not allowed so they were left with few options, posters and prints. Luckily for them they are both artists, so they decided to create their own illustrations.

They created the Star Wars alphabet, an illustration for each letter representing a character from Star Wars. Only characters from the original trilogy were considered. I’m not a Star Wars expert but apparently the true fans do not like the prequels that much.

Besides the ‘no characters from the prequels’ they had one more requirement, that the illustrations would be kid friendly.

We also tried to keep the illustrations as non-violent as possible (in the words of Wuher, “No blasters!”) for maximum kid-friendliness.

Star Wars Alphabet

Star Wars Alphabet

Star Wars Alphabet

The Luke and Leia illustration is too funny, not to mention Vader’s illustration.

If it wasn’t for copyright restrictions, Brandon and Emma would be very successful at selling the illustrations. I bet these illustration will be hanging for years to come in their kids room.

See the whole Star Wars Alphabet.

Wunderlist for iPhone Is an Elegant, Syncing To-Do Manager [Ios]

By Adam Dachis, LifehackerDecember 10, 2010 at 01:30PM

Wunderlist for iPhone Is an Elegant, Syncing To-Do ManagerWe loved the Wunderlist desktop app for Mac and Windows and the iPhone app makes a perfect companion. With the same simple features, attractive interface, and syncing support, you can now easily manage your Wunderlist from your pocket.

There are a lot of desktop apps that find their way on the iPhone and feel liked dumbed-down versions of the software, but Wunderlist for iPhone pretty much packs every feature of the desktop app (including themes) into its mobile counterpart. If you’re already set up on the desktop, you can just enter your account information into Wunderlist for iPhone and all your tasks will sync right up. If you’re new to Wunderlist, you’ll take to it quickly. It’s not rich with features, but the minimalist approach to managing your tasks makes keeping on top of everything very simple. There are plenty of views to find the tasks you need to concentrate on now, tomorrow, or farther off in the future, and you can star important tasks so you’re sure not to miss them.

Wunderlist is available right now, for free, in the iTunes App Store.

Wunderlist for iPhone Is an Elegant, Syncing To-Do ManagerWunderlist | iTunes App Store

The Tale Of the Littlest Jedi: Bullied Girl Gets Star Wars Love

By John Biggs, TechCrunchDecember 10, 2010 at 08:46AM

Katie Goldman is a cute little first grader who lives in Evanston, Illinois. She’s 7 years old and loves Star Wars. For a while she carried her Star Wars water bottle to school and then, one morning, she asked for the pink one instead. She told her mother that some kids at school had bullied her, telling her that Star Wars was for boys. Heartbroken, she resolved to fix the problem by backing down instead of calling them womp rats.

Read more…

Behold The WikiLeaks Mirror Finder

By Robin Wauters, TechCrunchDecember 10, 2010 at 06:37AM

Want to check out WikiLeaks on one of its thousands of mirrors hosted around the globe? You might have to click around quite a bit to find one that’s available and fully up-to-date.

Opinion site Antiwar.com has now launched a tool that automagically directs visitors of the site wikileaks.antiwar.com to the best WikiLeaks mirror site in his or her area.

It takes the guesswork out of finding a reliable mirror site when you wish to check out tens of thousands of leaked diplomatic cables but you’re actually in too much of a hurry to spend a couple of seconds clicking about.

Or you can just go to WikiLeaks.ch, I guess.

Information provided by CrunchBase

University Of Glasgow Frees Up Research Instead Of Trying To Sell It All

By Mike Masnick, Techdirt.December 10, 2010 at 12:44AM

We’ve pointed out how badly many universities have fallen for the myth of magical profits from tech transfer efforts. In the last 30 years or so, there’s been this massive effort for some universities to try to profit off of “commercializing” their research. What they did was set up expensive “tech transfer” offices that were in charge of taking university research, patenting it, and then trying to find buyers. The theory, then, was that the university would make lots of money and companies would get access to all this great university research. The reality is that this hasn’t worked out at all. First of all, that whole theory skipped over the part that prior to locking up all that research, companies already had access to it — and were able to actually make use of it quickly because they didn’t have to go through a crazy and expensive licensing process.

The other problem is that, since these tech transfer offices are focused on making money, and all they have to sell is patents, they started to overvalue the patents themselves, making them prohibitively expensive, which actually decreased the ability to get those ideas out to the commercial sector and to turn that research into big money. And, did we mention how expensive it is to set up and run some of these tech transfer offices? A study from a few years back found that the majority of tech transfer offices lost money, with only a tiny handful (somewhere around a dozen) actually making money.

Oh, and on top of all that, this focus on putting up locks for the sake of charging has actually made basic research much harder as well, since much of it is based on freely sharing ideas — which is made more difficult when you want to hoard the idea in order to get a patent.

At some point, you would think universities would recognize this. They’re losing money, harming their own research and going against their basic principles as institutions for disseminating knowledge. Thankfully, some are finally starting to get the message. James Boyle points us to the news that the University of Glasgow has announced that it will be offering up most of its research under a free license. It is still reserving a few “key” bits of research for fee-based licensing, but it appears the default will now be free, which seems like it should be a good thing in terms of actually commercializing the research out of the university.

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