Author: m1k3y

NASA remains an agency driven by its human spaceflight division. If NASA has an original sin, it is that the agency was spawned by the Cold War and its early exploration activities were a technological battle against the Soviets for high-ground superiority; science was essentially a fringe benefit of this quasi-military enterprise.

To go boldly (and on budget)

Yuuuuup

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Fuel is running low on Cassini, but there’s enough for another four years of maneuvering. Technicians at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., have mastered the art of using Titan’s gravity to steer Cassini into new, interesting orbits. NASA hopes to send the spacecraft diving inside the majestic rings of Saturn to study their composition. The extended mission would cost about $60 million a year. But that money has not materialized in the NASA budget. If there is no funding, NASA will have to end the Cassini mission next year. For robotic spacecraft, the greatest hazard in the solar system turns out to be the NASA budget.

To go boldly (and on budget)

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the-science-llama:

Artist’s logarithmic scale conception of the observable universe with the Solar System at the center, inner and outer planets, Kuiper belt, Oort cloud, Alpha Centauri, Perseus Arm, Milky Way galaxy, Andromeda galaxy, nearby galaxies, Cosmic Web, Cosmic microwave radiation and Big Bang’s invisible plasma on the edge. [Huge Version]

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whatthezeitgeistwants:

Palantir Technologies, where they put the Bro in Big Brother.

Palantir is a big data start-up co-founded by Peter Thiel and backed by the CIA that just raised $58 million at a $9 billion pre-money valuation to help them scale up their massive surveillance tools.

They still let you wear flip flops to work, so it’s cool.

The hedgehog in the conference room symbolizes the convenient, ethically liberating truism that American management teaches the corporate rank and file: focus on your hyper-specialized task, and don’t worry about other stuff.  It will make you a more productive worker—and keep you from looking at the big picture.

The fusion of the pseudo-liberation of 90s start-up culture with big data mass surveillance on behalf of monolithic government agencies devoted to post-GWOT order and control is sinister and hilarious all at the same time.  

You are being watched over by twentysomething computer handlers who can be bought with foosball, free sodas and easily approved car loans.  

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whatthezeitgeistwants:

This is a surveillance photo from Second Life, included in the NSA/GCHQ manual regarding techniques for spying inside virtual worlds.  

Just when you thought the Snowden revelations couldn’t get any weirdly self-parodic, you learn that American and British spies have created avatars to conduct surveillance of suspicious activity inside World of Warcraft and Second Life.

Apparently a  CTO of Second Life (now developing mobile applications at Facebook) is a former Navy officer and NSA employee who helped them get their start.  Not long after his brown bag at NSA in 2007, the UK’s GCHQ has conducted its “first operational deployment into Second Life.”  

Can virtual marketplaces for magical D&D weapons really be used for laundering real-world cash from criminal enterprises?

What avatar would J. Edgar Hoover create?

What are the in-game consequences when your elven fellow traveler gets outed as a narc?

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