moar funny pictures

One of my clients, The Danish National Space Institute are as their name implies involved in space research, and back in March I made a small application that could generate a real-time view of a current satellite in Google Earth. A lot has happened since then, and my work has been noticed and now they want visitors on their main page to be able to track all their affilliated satellites. So instead of beating a dead horse, I decided to rewrite the app to handle any satellite listed by a 2-line element, which are produced by NORAD. I want to add a bunch of other things as well, like using the time slider in GE to show the satellites at some other time. Also tracking multiple birds and have some overlay graphics showing when it will pass over your location would be nice as well
While doing my preliminary research for all of this, I saw that Google finally has released a browser plug-in, and that kind of changes the game a whole lot! (having elements on a website that demands the user to start another application is always a bad idea…)

Below you can see the current position of the first satellite fully build and funded by Denmark, called Ørsted: (this by the way, is the functionality of the old tracking app)

IBM is going to try and pull off an age-old dream of neural computing. 
Utilising nanotechnology they will try to mimic the way that positive and negative reinforcement works on a neural network, but in a physical sense like a biological brain, not just a software model. This could potentially become very interesting, especially if it turns out to be a route to mimicking real brain behaviour. First of all that would finally verify that we have gotten something right in neurology (a field that seems to be lacking models above everything else) and second, it’s a lot easier to scale a computer then a pack of interconnected fat, hence Raymound Kurzweils dream of man-machine singularity could be one step closer.

In the more pragmatic end of the spectrum this could lead to real-time pattern recognition (or at least very high speed on a more complex system) something that we indeed could use very much at the LHC experiment at CERN, since selecting the “interesting” events out of 10^9 every second is kind of hard already.

Read the interesting article at BBC News