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“The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera would
make a great backyard telescope for viewing Mars, and we can also use
it at Mars to view other planets. This is an image of Earth and the
moon, acquired on October 3, 2007, by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter.

At the time the image was taken, Earth
was 142 million kilometers (88 million miles) from Mars, giving the
HiRISE image a scale of 142 kilometers (88 miles) per pixel, an Earth
diameter of about 90 pixels and a moon diameter of 24 pixels. The phase
angle is 98 degrees, which means that less than half of the disk of the
Earth and the disk of the moon have direct illumination. We could image
Earth and moon at full disk illumination only when they are on the
opposite side of the sun from Mars, but then the range would be much
greater and the image would show less detail.

. . .

On
the Earth image we can make out the west coast outline of South America
at lower right, although the clouds are the dominant features. These
clouds are so bright, compared with the moon, that they are saturated
in the HiRISE images. In fact the red-filter image was almost
completely saturated, the Blue-Green image had significant saturation,
and the brightest clouds were saturated in the infrared image. This
color image required a fair amount of processing to make a nice-looking
release. The moon image is unsaturated but brightened relative to Earth
for this composite. The lunar images are useful for calibration of the
camera.”

It may not look like much, but on that one tiny
blue and green orb exists all six billion or so of us – and has
existed, as far as we know, every human being ever
made/created/evolved/whatevered. Everything that we know, and
everything that we ever have known is contained on that little sphere.

Whats
even more amazing is that twelve people from that little blue-green orb
in the bottom left have actually managed to travel through space and
walk on the surface of the moon, all the way on the other side of the
picture. If that isn’t amazing, then I don’t know what is.

Image, caption, and full-size photo from
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/
multimedia/mro20080303earth.html

I present to you a very well done flash animation depicting an epic war between your desktop icons. Granted, it uses some older icons, but really, its a good piece of animation. Hope you all enjoy Icon War

“Flat screens for computers? They will soon be passe if the vision of Queen’s University computing professor Roel Vertegaal takes off outside the lab.

The Ontario school’s Human Media Laboratory is cooking up futuristic
computer screens on Coke cans that can receive RSS feeds and videos (as
seen above) and even on paper (as seen below) that blow away some of the other PC form factor improvements on the market or in the works”

Read more about this technology, and take a look at some photos showing what could be here
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/28371

“Polaroid recently announced it will launch its PoGo portable photo printer later on this summer. First seen
at CES 2008, the printer, whose name is short for Polaroid-on-the-go
according to Polaroid, achieves its compact 4.7- by 2.8- by 0.9-inch
size by not requiring any ink cartridges. Instead, it uses Zero Ink technology and ZINK Photo Paper as its medium.”

http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/06/06/polaroid.pogo.printer/

The printer (Shown above) can spit out a 2×3 color photo in under one minute. The “ZINK” paper gets its color from clear cyan, yellow, and magenta dyes that are activated and turn color by heat (applied inside the printer), which causes the ink to change color. The printers will be available @ Target on July 20, for $149 each. Paper is 10 sheets/ $4, or 30 sheets / $10.

I think its about time we finally saw a new innovation in digital photo printing. I mean, we’ve seen some neat things come around with digital photography, like the ability to email photos, and do our own touch-up and cropping, etc., etc. But nothings really changed in the past year or two. I mean, this new printer isn’t revolutionary. Theres a few odd things about it, like the fact that it does 2×3 prints, and not 4×6, which is pretty much the standard these days. (The small print size may be due to the small size of the printer – 4.7 x 2.8 inches, by only .9 inches thick.) I’d love to see one, and see what the print quality is. It would be neat if you could get pre-done sticker paper, or something like that, so that you could directly print and stick your photos anywhere.

Regardless of what the quality may or may not be, or the price of the paper (33 cents a print isn’t bad, especially realizing theres no hidden ink costs), its nice to finally see a truly portable photo printer.

Check out the Zink website here
http://www.zink.com/

In case you haven’t noticed, Google has changed its favicon, the little box that shows up to the left of the address bar in Firefox and Safari (and somewhere in IE too, but I haven’t used it in so long, I forget where. . . . .).

For many people, this was quite a surprise, simply because Google isn’t in the habit of changing the design or layout of their pages or logos. They just don’t. Okay, so its just the little icon next to the adress bar. Its not that important in the grand scheme of things. So why the change?

From the official Google Blog :

“Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience, and Micheal Lopez, Web Designer

You
may have noticed that Google has a new favicon, the small icon you see
in your browser next to the URL or in your bookmarks list. Some people
have wondered why we changed our favicon — after all, we hadn’t in 8.5
years(!). The reason is that we wanted to develop a set of icons that
would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other
mobile devices. So the new favicon is one of those, but we’ve also
developed a group of logo-based icons that all hang together as a
unified set. Here’s the full set:”

And there it is. What I find really interesting is this block of favicons that didn’t make the cut, or were just ideas that were tried out. It’s no surprise to me how simple the final favicon is; Simple is quite often better, especially with such a small graphic.

Images and quote from the Official Google Blog,
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/one-fish-two-fish-red-fish-blue-fish.html

UPDATE : In some random browsing, I noticed that the Google “G” with the blue background is a lot like the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/) favicon,

.

It was similar enough to make me wonder for a second why the page I was looking at was connected to Google. . . . Maybe Googles new favicon needs some more work after all? I also have to say that I wondered why the Google “g” was done in such a funny lower case font – compare it to the Guardian “g” and its backwards.

What I wonder is how favicons will be used in the future. I mean, on a iPhone screen, I’d think that favicons might soon be integrated in new bookmarks, so that you just look for the favicon instead of reading the text. I’m not sure what you’d do if a page didn’t have a favicon, or how you’d store them on the mobile device, but its a thought.

And now, if you’re still curious, here the Favicon for FLB (the little logo on the left before HTTP:// ) :

Its the small version of our homepage logo,

This little robot searches for things to drum on, drives up to them, and starts playing.

This one has been making the rounds on a few blogs, and it IS pretty cool.

“On May 19, 2005, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this
stunning view as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars.
This Panoramic Camera mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of
the rover’s 489th Martian day, or sol.

Sunset and twilight
images are occasionally acquired by the science team to determine how
high into the atmosphere the Martian dust extends, and to look for dust
or ice clouds. Other images have shown that the twilight glow remains
visible, but increasingly fainter, for up to two hours before sunrise
or after sunset. The long Martian twilight (compared to Earth’s) is
caused by sunlight scattered around to the night side of the planet by
abundant high altitude dust. Similar long twilights or extra-colorful
sunrises and sunsets sometimes occur on Earth when tiny dust grains
that are erupted from powerful volcanoes scatter light high in the
atmosphere.”

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Texas A&M/Cornell”
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_347.html

So, I know theres been quite a few lists of demotivation posters, and I just want to contribute some that I have found to be especially funny or striking. A lot of these came from sites that made flash slideshows, and so here, I provide the actual image file in case you people want to keep a set on your own harddrive
Check it out: Flashladybug Demotivation Poster Collection

You know how NASA sometimes takes their stereo images of Mars and creates 3d anaglyphs from them? Well I have this software that lets you do this easily and so I decided to make some using the latest images from the Phoenix. Here are the two higher quality ones, and there are a few more that you can check out in this gallery.

You can find the original pictures here. (At this point they have actually posted one 3d image on their website)