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The United States celebrates, this week of July 20, 2009, the successful Moon landing of the Apollo 11 mission with its lunar module, the Eagle, four decades ago. A mighty achievement pushed by then President Kennedy seven years earlier.Stephen Colbert (The Colbert Report) invited the Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Maryland, Dr. Robert (Bob) L. Park, as a visitor to his show on the anniversary, just as the White House invited the three astronauts – Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin (the two who stood on the moon’s surface), and Michael Collins (who remained in the orbiting command module) – to congratulate them on their feat. The president also listened, it is reported, to the former astronauts' wishes that manned missions should be restarted: with a trip to Mars.Dr Park was very scornful of manned missions, and I have to agree with him that they seem to be less than purposeful.The sight – from that absolutely dreadful RCA monochrome camera – ...

One of the unexpected pleasures of attending last Month’s X-Prize conference was bumping into Saul Griffith, inventor, MIT LEGO Fellow, and one of the most creative and practical thinkers on global energy issues I’ve had the privilege of meeting. I’d originally met him at the CES Greener Gadgets event where he treated the attendees to his enlightening (and highly entertaining) presentation on the relationship between our personal consumption habits and global climate change (view Saul’s video).  Although his busy schedule at the Greener Gadgets event had thwarted my attempts to engage him in a conversation then, the gravitational field of the well-provisioned coffee bar at the X-Prize affair ended up capturing us at the same time: a happy accident that turned out to be the best 15 minutes of the day.Our brief chat bounced from the design challenges involved with using tethered kites as multi-megawatt wind generators to using the comic book format to teach science and engineering, ...

My infatuation with toys continues. One of the playthings I use to entertain and distract my grandson Charley, especially at the dinner table or at a restaurant, is a simple old-fashioned gyroscope top. You yank a bit of string, and off it goes, spinning and skittering gracefully across the table top or perched atop the end of an inverted pencil.%IMG_left_full_867%Charley is nearing that age when he'll be graduating from his little pedal car to a 3-wheeler bicycle. Once through that transition, a 2-wheeler won't be far off, but that means he’ll have to climb the Band-Aid learning curve. Thus, I was delighted to find that some clever students at Dartmouth College have reinvented the bicycle to use a gyroscope to help avoid falls.Dubbed the Gyrowheel, it stabilizes a bike at low speed. Made by San Francisco-based Gyrobike, the 8-lb. wheel assembly can be retrofitted to the front brackets of almost any conventional 2-wheeler. An internal flywheel is then externally spun up to speed. Once that's accomplishe...

The naysayers claim climate-change advocates are left-wing liberal tree huggers, and that global warming is a hoax. It might come as a surprise to these folks to learn that a number of high-ranking military leaders – people you might otherwise consider conservative thinkers – are concerned about what's happening to the global climate.These leaders have decades of experience in the US military. They've dealt with myriad national security challenges, ranging from nuclear weapons containment to deterrence of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. They now serve as advisors to the Center for Naval Analyses Corporation, a 60 year-old non-profit that conducts in-depth independent research.The BoardJust so it's crystal clear who I am referring to, peruse this list of members of CNA's advisory board. For starters, there's General Gordon Sullivan, who serves as the advisory board's chairman. In his military capacity, Sullivan serves as US Army Chief of Staff.Next is Navy Admiral Frank "Skip" Bowma...

With my daughter’s thirteenth birthday coming up, I’ve been under lots of pressure to come up with another one of the novelty cakes I’ve baked for her since she was three years old. The tradition of giving Anwyn a home-made cake that’s decorated (or architected) to reflect one of her current interests has led to some rather fun experiments over the years (see last year’s iPod cake) and I wanted to make sure she had something fun to celebrate her official entry into teenager-dom. Although I’d already used an equestrian theme for the carousel cake I made for her eleventh birthday, her continued passion for riding left me with no choice other than to find something else clever to do with horses.Since Anwyn’s begun to learn the basics of jumping and dressage, the idea of an edible show ring was a natural choice for this year’s theme. My Mom volunteered to bake the wonderful sour cream chocolate cake upon which I’d build the arena. It’s delicious and...

Regardless of sanguine words of optimism bubbling forth periodically from the Obama administration, the global economy is probably in steeper decline than you might think. There's been a phase-shift lag abroad, but countries such as Germany, France, China, and India are now starting to feel the brunt of the recession. EU automobile production and sales are declining, and consumer confidence is waning across Europe and elsewhere.In the US, we're told the unemployment figures aren't quite as bad as those of the Reagan-era recession of 1983; however, independent findings, as well as the government's own figures, indicate otherwise. In June, payroll jobs fell quite a bit more than expected. According to US Labor Department statistics, 467,000 people lost their jobs in June. That's 122,000 more jobs down the drain than in May.Those in Washington charged with laying down smokescreens cheerfully note these losses are only about half the monthly average for the past six months. "The rate of decline moderated in ...

The golden days of print are in great danger.In these days of short attention spans, the written word in book form still seems to be a stable proposition. So far, at least, despite the electronic devices for reading book content without buying a spine. Not so with newspapers and magazines.Newspapers are having the worst time of it with the bigger ones having the biggest problems. When The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The New York Times are all apparently in big trouble, you have to wonder out loud, “What the heck did they think was going to happen?”I would have said that their behavior is like a bunch of lemmings throwing themselves off a cliff in a mass suicide, but that would be unfair to lemmings who do not, in fact, behave in that manner. So maybe a more suitable new description of mass suicide could be that they are "acting like a lot of print newspapers who had at least ten years to think through their impending doom."Smaller newspapers, even those that are gro...

With the exception of the dozen-odd nights I spend in hotels each year and the year or so when I lived in the condo that my wife Catherine had bought, I’ve lived a cable-free life. My decision to limit the amount of available video in the house to what we could pull off an antenna and rent from the video store (now supplanted by Netflix) has, for the most part, been a good one, even if it has earned us the nickname of The Amish Family in our neighborhood. That’s not to say we live by the light of kerosene lamps here in the wilds of New Jersey. The 10 Mbit/s fiber connection that comes to our house lets us watch lots of interesting Web content on our computers and allows our Roku streaming video box to deliver whatever Netflix has in its Watch Instantly library to the single TV we keep in the family room. This has provided enough entertainment to keep everyone relatively happy but my family is now pressuring me to get a bit more television into the house. I’ve agreed to do it, as long as it d...

I met Michael Jackson (suitable screams of hysteria?) in the BBC’s Dickenson Road Studios at Rusholme in Manchester (a converted church acquired from Mancunian Films, and the BBC’s first TV production studio outside London). This was just after the Jackson Brothers became the Jackson 5, probably in late 1967(?). Michael was a cute little tyke, although there were, even then, family problems which I don’t want to discuss here.Now I have done what every seedy cable channel presenter has done – reduced the degrees of my separation from the Jacksons to zero – although I can thankfully say, no, this Editorial is not about Michael Jackson despite everything on television this past week seeming to have been, ad nauseam. What I want to point to is the fact that the technology infrastructure we have built out seems to be unable to cope with major news events,\ such as his demise. When the news first broke on TMZ, the search engines that handle news (basically Google and the new Micro...