*michael parekh on IT*

ON STAR TREK MUSICAL "MALARKEY"

REMEMBERING

Like millions around the world, I've been a life-long fan of all things Star Trek ever since the original series launched on TV in the 1960s.  So this sad weekend development deserves to be noted and remembered in my book.  Here's the headline item from CNN.com:

"LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Alexander "Sandy" Courage, an Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated arranEdit Post | Post | *michael parekh on IT* | Your Weblogs | TypePadger, orchestrator and composer who created the otherworldly theme for the classic "Star Trek" TV show, has died. He was 88."

Don't remember the original Star Trek music theme?  Let me help you with this one minute clip from YouTube:

Now Mr. Courage obviously accomplished a great deal more in his life than just this iconic theme that went onto the be the basis of every Star Trek music piece over the last four decades.  But this piece of course is what he'll be most remembered for in the mainstream consciousness.

Of course, how the piece got developed is an interesting story in itself.  Here's an account from the Washington Post:

"His fanfare-style introduction to "Star Trek," eight notes played by the brass section, followed by the wordless melody with a prominent soprano voice won him enduring recognition among generations of "Trekkies" and even casual viewers of the science fiction show.

"Star Trek" originally aired on NBC from 1966 to 1969 and has been in perennial syndication.

He told an interviewer that he never was a science-fiction fan. "I think it's just marvelous malarkey," he said. "So you write some marvelous malarkey music that goes with it."

Apparently, the show's creator, the legendary Gene Roddenberry, didn't want any modern electronic music.  So Mr. Courage had to look elsewhere for inspiration.

"To write the "Star Trek" theme, Mr. Courage thought back to a pop song from his childhood that conjured images of going into the far distance. He came up with "Beyond the Blue Horizon," popularized by Jeanette MacDonald, and featuring a fast, train-like rhythm pulsating beneath the soaring melody.

Mr. Courage adapted the idea to the "Star Trek" job, which he completed in a week. His vision of the music included a soprano singer (Loulie Jean Norman), a flute, an organ and maybe a vibraphone. But he said the show's producer, Gene Roddenberry, wanted to accentuate the female voice. When Roddenberry was done, he said, the music "sounded like a soprano solo."

And like most great show biz stories, there's an interesting twist about money, as the Washington Post piece goes on to explain:

"Burlingame, author of "TV's Biggest Hits," said Roddenberry went further to annoy Mr. Courage by adding words to the instrumental theme. The lyrics begin: "Beyond the rim of the star-light/My love is wand'ring in star flight."

"It was horrible," Burlingame said. "Courage was never consulted, but Roddenbury from that point on was entitled to take 50 percent of royalties. . . . This upset Courage, understandably, not that he wrote a lyric, but that he wrote a lousy lyric that would never be sung anywhere."

Exploiting that loop-hole, Gene Roddenberry managed to get a 50% discount on the theme for a long, long time.  Given that this is the music business, it's not anywhere that others have not gone before.

ON REAL SUPER-HERO FLYING

FINALLY

Every boy from 2 from to a 100 (and a bit more), is going to like this story titled "Rocket man flies on jet-powered wings", as told by MSNBC:

"Former fighter pilot Yves Rossy, 48, accelerated to 186 miles an hour May 14, 2008, over the Swiss Alps during his first public flight while strapped to his self-made, jet-powered wings."

The piece goes into the actual experience (and has a video to boot):

"Steering only with his body, Rossy dived, turned and soared again, flying what appeared to be effortless loops from one side of the Rhone valley to the other. At times he rose 2,600 feet  before descending again with a trail of special-effects smoke in his wake.

"It's like a second skin," he later told reporters. "If I turn to the left, I fly left. If I nudge to the right, I go right."

And Rossy's next challenge:

"He said he is ready now for a bigger challenge: crossing the English Channel later this year. The stunt, which will be shown on live television, will test his flying machine to the limit. Rossy said he plans to practice the 22-mile trip by flying between two hot-air balloons."

Forget joy-rides into outer-space for folks willing to pay the freight.  This is the ride most of us boys (and I suspect quite a few girls), would happily sign up for, as and when available for mere mortals.

ON A TRUE FLIGHT OF FANCY

NO LIGHT TASK

The third and last full day of TED 2008 was full of memorable talks and ideas.  See both Bruno Giussani and Ethan Zuckerman's blogs for a fuller flavor of the highlights.

You can get some of my impressions from my Twitter blogging on the day here.

I think the one image that stays with me most from yesterday, was this photo of Stephen Hawking enjoying his first Zero-Gravity moment, thanks to a concerted effort by a core group of his ardent fans.  Ethan Zuckerman's post on this is an excellent summary:

"Peter Diamandis shares a wonderful, brief story with us, and a terrific photo. He runs a business that allows people to experience weightlessness via parabolic flight.

He was able to give professor Stephen Hawking the chance to experience weightlessness - they brought a large medical team, expecting that Hawking might have physiological problems in space. He had such fun, the team ended up taking him through eight different parabolas.

It’s pretty unmistakable that that’s joy on his face."

 

Yes, it is, and thanks to Peter Diamandis and his team's efforts, a whole new example of "Yes, we can". 

ON A BRAIN BUSTING KICKOFF TO TED 2008

MIND TRAVELS

TED 2008 kicked off it's five-day conference strong in Monterey, CA and Aspen, CO yesterday, with presentations by folks like Stephen Hawking and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (the spiritual leader, not Ravi Shankar, the musician. and father of Norah Jones).

You can get a good sense of the proceedings from the TED blog here, the Twitter feeds by many attendees here, and this terrific rundown by Bruno Giussani here.

One of the most powerful presentations of the afternoon for me was the one by Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist who gave an incredible, personal account over an 18 minute presentation of her own stroke almost a decade ago, and the long path to fully recovery. 

Like so many others, I have a loved one (my mom), who experienced a stroke a few years ago, and have struggled trying to understand what something like that really involves since then.

Bruno describes Jill's presentation well with this passage, along with a picture of the real human brain she used to explain what was going on where:

"Jill Bolte Taylor is incredible: she's a neuroanatomist (brain scientist) who has suffered a stroke and studied it "from inside", as it happened, while her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness.
It took her eight years to recover, and to become a spokesperson for the possibility to come back.

"I studied the brain because I have a brother who's been diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia. What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals diagnosed as "normal" and those diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder?
On the morning of December 10 1996, I got my own mental illness: in the course of four hours I watched by brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process information. I could not walk, talk, think.

If you've ever seen a human brain (she shown a real human brain -- picture above): it has two hemispheres.

The right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while the left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. So they process information differently, they think about different things, they care about different things, and I would say that they have very different personalities. Our right  hemisphere is all about this very moment, right here right now. It thinks in pictures, Information in the form of energy sterams in simultaneously through all of our sensory system and then  it explodes into what this present moment feels like. I'm an energy being connected to the energy alla around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. And through that we are all connected. And in this moment we are perfect, whole, and beautiful.

Our left hemisphere is a very different place. It thinks linearly and methodically. It's all about the past and about the future. It's designed to take that collage of the present moment, and pick out details after details, categorize them, associate them with all of what we have learned in the past, and project into our future possibilities. It thinks in languages. It's the internal chatter that connects us to the external world. It's the calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. And most important it's the voice that tells me "I am". And as soon it says that, I become separate from you. That's the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke.

On that morning I woke up to a pounding pain on the back of my eye. It just gripped me, then released me, then gripped me, then released me. I got up trying to perform my usual routine, jumping on my exercise machine, and I realize that my hands look like claws. It's like as if my consciousness had shifted away.

I got off the machine and walked and realized that my body had slowed down, every step was very rigid. I stood in my bathroom ready to go into the shower and looked down at my arm and realized I could no longer define the boundaries of my body, of where I begin and where I end, the molecules of my arm were like blended with those of the wall, am all I could detect was energy flowing.

Then the chatter in my brain went silent. For a moment I was shocked to be in the total silent. Then in an instant my left hemisphere came back online, and I realized that I needed help; then I drifted out again, into "la-la-land"; then in again. I was walking around my apartment, telling to myself: I have to get to work. Then I realize: I'm having a stroke. And my left hemisphere tells me: wow, this is so cool, how many brain scientists have the chance to study that from the inside?

But I need to get help. I get to my office, I pick up a card, I can't figure out what's on it, my brain is back in la-la-land. Then I have a wave of clarity. Drifting in and out. (She goes on describing the difficulties of dialing a phone number and communicating to get help, unable to read the number, "because the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background"), and then I would wait for a wave of clarity. It took me  45 minutes to find the right number.

I'm in an ambulance towards the hospital and I realize that I'm no longer the choreographer of my life. Maybe the doctors will give me a second chance, maybe not. And right there, I just feel my spirit surrender -- I say goodbye to my life.
When I awoke, I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. My life was now suspended between two strains of reality: information streaming in but I could not pick voices out from the background noise. Sounds were so loud and chaotic. I just wanted to escape because I could not identify the position of my body in space. I felt enormous and expansive, and my spirit soaring.

I found nirvana. I remember thinking: there is no way that I can squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside my tiny body. But then I realized: I am still alive. And if I found nirvana, then anyone who's alive can find nirvana. And I pictured a world full with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate people who knew that they can come to this space at any time. What a gift a stroke can be to the way we live our lives. That motivated me to try to recover.

Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in and removed a blood clot the size of a tennis ball. It took me eight years to completely recover. So who are we?

We are the life horsepower of the universe, and we have the power to choose moment by moment who we want to be in the world, we can choose the consciousnesses of our right hemisphere or that of our left hemisphere.

These are the "we" inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe the more time we spend choosing the peace of our right hemisphere, the most peace we will project into the world and more peaceful our planet will be."

I've excerpted the full presentation from Bruno's post to try and convey the emotional impact of a presentation like this.

It was a riveting presentation, and I'll put up a video link from TED when available.  It really is a big step towards not taking one's brain for granted.

By the way, I'll be twittering (aka Twitter blogging) a fair bit from TED most of this week, joining in the conversation by many other TED attendees who're also twittering the conference.  This list by Austin Hill is a good place to keep track of these tweets.  My twittering of the conference can be accessed at my Twitter link here.

More to come.

ON MERCURY RISING

RETURN JOURNEY

For the record, I'm a big fan of unmanned space missions, especially inter-planetary spacecraft.  So it's with great interest I read today's New York Times article on NASA's latest probe reaching Mercury, the innermost planet in the solar system.  Here's what the spacecraft, called the Messenger, is expected to do on it's half a billion dollar, multi-year mission:

"The robot spacecraft, the first to visit the planet in more than three decades, was to pass about 124 miles above Mercury’s cratered surface at 2:04 p.m. Eastern time before continuing off on a path that is to bring it back three more times in the next three years before settling into orbit."

Mercury is a fascinating planet, particularly for it's extremes in temperature:

"It also has the most extreme temperature swings of any planet, with heat approaching 800 degrees Fahrenheit in the sunlight while the night side can reach 350 degrees below zero. Yet, radar readings from Earth suggest possible deposits of water ice in permanently shaded craters near the poles."

Reminds you of the planet in Pitch Black, the terrific sci-fi movie from 2000, starring Vin Diesel.

ON A HOLE IN THE UNIVERSE

SOMETHING OLD BUT NEW

Hope everyone's having a great Thanksgiving holiday with family and friends.

This bit from New Scientist is one mind-bender for me this evening, especially as I, like so many others, deal with a two-day Thanksgiving food coma:

"The void: Imprint of another universe?

IN AUGUST, radio astronomers announced that they had found an enormous hole in the universe. Nearly a billion light years across, the void lies in the constellation Eridanus and has far fewer stars, gas and galaxies than usual.

It is bigger than anyone imagined possible and is beyond the present understanding of cosmology. What could cause such a gaping hole? One team of physicists has a breathtaking explanation: "It is the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own," says Laura Mersini-Houghton of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

It is a staggering claim. If Mersini-Houghton's team is right, the giant void is the first experimental evidence for another universe. It would also vindicate string theory, our most promising understanding of how the universe works at its most fundamental level."

Going to have to keep track of this, as the experts try and get their minds around this.
Happy Thanksgiving weekend, all.

 

ON CHINA AND INDIA IN SPACE

FUTURE SHOCK

This Bloomberg article titled "China Launches Lunar Probe, Aims to Land Man on Moon" caught my eye today:

"Oct. 24 (Bloomberg) -- China launched its first lunar probe today, marking the start of a three-phase space program to land an astronaut on the moon by 2020.

The Chang'e I probe, named after a mythical Chinese deity who lives on the moon with her pet rabbit, lifted off on board a Long March 3A rocket from the Xichang satellite center in southern China."

India has similar ambitions over the next few decades, and they'll likely follow the Chinese lead a decade or so later.

Most Americans reading the Chinese story are likely to have the following reaction first, "How nice...they're following our lead, taking over half a century to do in 2020, what we did back in 1969". 

After all, Captain James T. Kirk, "future son" of Riverside, Iowa, started taking the starship Enterprise for a spin around the galaxy, in his Star Trek back in 1966, over 40 years ago (image source). 

Star Trek of course went on to be wildly popular the world over, shaping our image of ourselves in the distant future.

As I read stories about the space ambitions of countries like China and India, I can't help but think how our image of ourselves in Space is shaped not only by history, but our Science Fiction, which assumes that Americans will be the leading pioneers in space for centuries to come.

Movies like  2010, A Space Odyssey, Star Trek, and Alien, amongst so many others, have shaped a global image of Americans leading the way in space exploration well into the 21st and 22nd centuries.

As an example, here's a Wikipedia synopsis of how the first (1979) Alien movie gets started:

The Nostromo, a towing vessel hauling an enormous ore refinery and 20 million tons of raw ore, with a crew of seven (including Captain Dallas and Warrant Officer Ripley) has set out from the mining colony Solomons on its return to Earth in the year 2122."

That it was an American enterprise in space was in no doubt.  In the terrific sequel Aliens, directed by James Cameron,

"...the Company sends Ripley, a group of United States Colonial Marines, and Carter Burke to investigate LV-426 aboard the vessel Sulaco."

All these movies of course, have a politically correct mix of crew from around the world, but the Captains are always American.

I couldn't help think what the likelihood would be that the first space "towing vessel hauling ore" would be Chinese, 115 years from now in the real world.  Witness how the country is already scouring the planet for it's raw materials and commodies needs today.

What is the likelihood that the real space exploration ships are helm-ed by Chinese and/or Indians with a smattering of crew from around the world, including Americans?

It is said that history is written by the victors, and so is our vision of the future.

This idle musing is not to recommend that we scramble to get our Space act together and re-energize our space program.

After all, our historic multi-billion dollar accomplishment in 1969, driven by JFK's clarion cry after Sputnik, was a result in large part, of our global economic leadership as a nation in the 1960s.  And that despite the expense in blood and treasure of a major war in Vietnam.

Our future accomplishments in Space are really going to be determined by our population and economic leadership in the decades to follow.  That should be priority one and where we should really be scrambling.

Otherwise our future generations are likely to be reveling in the adventures of Captain Jin T. Kiang, exploring space on the starship Qi Ye*.

*  Mandarin for Enterprise.

ON THE OCEANS VIA THE INTERNET

LIVE-SCIENCES

This New York Times article titled "Bringing the Oceans to the World-High Tech", takes a few seconds to sink in with it's importance:

"Thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables are strung across the world’s oceans, connecting continents like so many tin cans in this age of critical global communication. So the fact that about 800 more miles of fiber-optic cable will soon thread the sea floor off the coast of the Pacific Northwest might not seem particularly revolutionary. Until you meet John R. Delaney, part oceanographer, part oracle.

“This is a mission to Planet Ocean,” said Mr. Delaney, a professor at the University of Washington. “This is a NASA-scale mission to basically enter the Inner Space, and to be there perpetually. What we’re doing is bringing the ocean to the world.”

Under a $331 million program long dreamed of by oceanographers and being financed by the National Science Foundation, Professor Delaney and a team of scientists from several other institutions are leading the new Ocean Observatories Initiative, a multifaceted effort to study the ocean — in the ocean — through a combination of Internet-linked cables, buoys atop submerged data collection devices, robots and high-definition cameras. The first equipment is expected to be in place by 2009.

A central goal, say those involved, is to better understand how oceans affect life on land, including their role in storing carbon and in climate change; the causes of tsunamis; the future of fish populations; and the effect of ocean temperature on growing seasons.

Oceanographers also hope to engage other scientists and the public more deeply with ocean issues by making them more immediate. Instead of spending weeks or months on a boat gathering data, then returning to labs to make sense of it, oceanographers say they expect to be able to order up specific requests from their desktops and download the results."

But then it hits you like a ton of bricks...making you think, "Why hasn't this been done already?" 

It's almost trite to say that studying the deep oceans is as important as studying the heavens in terms of learning new, basic things about our environment that we still don't know.  Not as glamorous in a "Right Stuff" kind of way, but potentially far more rewarding to humanity in the form of tangible rewards in the short-term (in the next few decades).

This program seems like a tiny foot-step in the right direction.  And we can watch it happen real-time on the Net.  Hope Google is already on this and thinking "Google Ocean".

ON SIZING THE COSMOS

FRESH LOOK

If you're into astronomy, or just into understanding how everything relates to everything else, check out this innovative way to look at the very small, and the very, very large.

As Webware correctly describes it,

"...Nikon's Universcale web app. It puts the entire universe into proportion, from the smallest particle to the largest measurements of space.

From the femtometer to the light year, Universcale spans 40 magnitudes of measurement into a single cosmic web app. It's really amazing when you zoom all the way out into stars and galaxies and realize that every time you go a magnitude higher, everything you saw before, from the flea to Mount Everest, is contained in this tiny little grid in the lower-left side of the screen. Of course, the Carl Sagan-should-be-narrating-this planetarium music helps."

It's a tw0-dimensional, web version of the famous powers of ten video sponsored by IBM in 1997.  Although that video is not available due on YouTube to a copyright claim, here's a twist on that video from YouTube:

You do get more out of the Universcale application when you spend a little time interacting with it.  But it's pretty rewarding in the end.  Recommended.

ON GOOGLE'S PERKS AND QUIRKS

IS IT A PLANE?

Well, another blow-out quarter, another series of Google-centric articles. 

The Washington Times has an interesting one titled "Building a 'Googley' Workforce".  It starts with Google's automated bidet toilet seats and goes on to explain:

"The toilets reflect Google's general philosophy of work: Generous, quirky perks keep employees happy and thinking in unconventional ways, helping Google innovate as it rapidly expands into new lines of business."

Meanwhile, Michael Arrington breaks another Google scoop, although this one's not as big as the one where Google buys YouTube.

This one has to do with Google acquiring a replica of Burt Rutan's record-breaking SpaceShip One, and moving it into one of the new buildings on it's campus. 

As Michael describes it, Google

"...did acquire a full scale replica of the ship and have indeed installed it in building 43 at Google."

He goes on to add:

"My favorite picture is this one, showing the crane they’ll use to get the replica ship into Google.  Also see here and here."

One can have these perks and quirks after keeping Wall Street happy yet another quarter.

ON SKYSCOUT, THE "KILLER" PRODUCT FROM CES (AGAIN)

BRINGING FRONTIERS DOWN TO EARTH

Robert Scoble is posting that "The Word-of-mouth" killer product of CES is the Celestron Skyscout. 

I was afraid I was premature in jumping up and down about after the first day of CES, proclaiming it the "unexpected innovation" at CES.  But the CES show is over, and it looks like the product reigns.

Robert's apparently had a chance to see the $400 gadget hands-on, and had a chance to speak with the inventor:

"...I asked the inventor, Mike Lemp about it. Here’s a picture of Mike with Shel holding a SkyScout.

Mike and his team has been working on this for five years. It is a revolutionary product. One that you’ll want the first time you play with it. I’m buying one...

You look through this device at the night-time sky and it tells you what you’re looking at. Oh, it doesn’t need to be night, either...

It has GPS, gravity, and magnetic field sensors to detect where it’s going.

But it just gets better from there. You can tell it “show me the cool stuff in the sky right now.” It’ll take you on a tour and show you how to point the device with a series of LED’s in the viewfinder.

But it gets cooler than that. It has an audio guide that tells you what you’re looking at and gives you some facts about it.

Oh, wait, there’s more! You hook it up to your computer via USB and it does even more! (Sorry, Windows only for now).

This is going to revolutionize astronomy. It is simply the coolest thing I’ve seen lately (and I’ve seen some pretty cool stuff walking around CES)."

There you have it...even cooler than I thought when I first posted about it (didn't know about the magnetic sensors).

It's definitely a cool product...I've pre-ordered it, and am calling it a Thriller! product without having tried it yet.

On a separate note, a device that potentially goes well with the SkyScout, is the Jasper Green Laser, which is described on it's web-site as:

"Jasper's bright green beam travels across the sky, further than your eye can see. You'll be able to point out stars, align a telescope, aim a firearm and simply amaze everyone you know!"

I've ordered this as well, and am counting on it be a great addition to the Celestron SkyScout.

Now if only Celestron or someone would come up with a telescope that automatically transmits the visual information directly via Wi-fi to a laptop PC. 

I know there are attachments and hacks to do this, but I've yet to see a telescope vendor to come out with a cool, auto-guided telescope for amateurs that makes it easy to see what the telescope sees via a PC or a laptop WITHOUT having to peek through the viewfinder like an astronomy geek.

And while they're at it, I'd like them to give me a weather proofing option so I can leave the telescope up on the terrace or the balcony and just gaze at the stars via any PC/laptop or plasma TV for that matter, in the comfort of the house/apartment and favorite couch.

There are gadgets that make it easier to view the sky outdoors, as these pictures from Bigha illustrate.

But some people (like me) are inherently lazy in their astronomical pursuits, and would like to to NOT have to lug a telescope and related paraphernalia out and set it up every time we want to gaze at the stars.  We'd rather do it from the great indoors.

Ideally, it should also hook up to my favorite astronomy program, Starry Night Pro, for additional data on what we're seeing on the plasma screen.

Now I know the purists among you will point out that some definition will be lost by going from the viewfinder to a PC/laptop/TV screen, but it's the price I'm willing to pay for the convenience.

After all, we've already made that trade-off with out music, converting billions of perfectly high-definition audio CDs into much less quality MP3 recordings to enjoy on our iPods.

And it's not like it'd be technically hard to do.

Google's already brought satellite images of the earth to mainstream audiences around the world.

And GPS gadgets are already getting affordable and mainstream to guide us around in our cars and out.

Space IS the next frontier to be brought down to mainstream audiences.

It's the next thing to be done, and when it is, it will take astronomy even more into the mainstream.

Now that'd be revolutionary yet again.

ON AN A LA CARTE SATELLITE TV SERVICE?

ALL THE TV, ALL THE TIME

At a time when we're focused on the potential pros, cons  and politics of a la carte cable and telco TV services (via Om Malik...also, see my earlier post), it may be time to also think about a la carte satellite TV.

Zoli Erdos has a great post titled "12 Satellite Dishes, 5000 Channels, and 32 TV sets", that illustrates two people, one with 12 satellite dishes on his porch to pick up over 5000 satellites channels from around the world, and the other with over 32 TV sets in and outside his house.

But it was the first picture that captivated me...the one with Al Jessups' 12 satellite dishes (although my aging eye could only count 11).  Nevertheless, that picture crystallizes one way the satellite companies can potentially compete with the cable and telephone industries that can offer far greater bandwidth into homes via wired connections than with wireless connections. 

See this BusinessWeek article about Rupert Murdoch's "troubles" with DirectTV for more.

But Al Jessup's set-up if of course far from a mainstream reality.  His is a labor of love, not to mention who knows how many hours of hooking up, tinkering and programming his satellite dish farm.

It strikes me that it may be possible for the tech industry to come up with a more "productized" dual-satellite dish contraption, where both dishes are highly maneuverable in an automated way. 

Then a sophisticated box programmed to receive any of the five thousand plus channels from around the world would allow the user to tune into any program he/she wanted.  While the TV is showing one program, the other one would re-orient itself to find the next desired program.  And the box could always be kept up-to-date with programming info on new channels by the satellite company.

Essentially, this box would be an "Open" box, not beholden to any satellite-TV distribution company that currently maintains "walled gardens" around their programming, much like the cable industry.  Additionally, it could even serve as a meta wholesale aggregator and re-seller for an array of satellite programming providers around the world.

And of course, it'd have a cool Web 2.0-style web site, where users from around the world could share their thoughts on the best programming and how to tune into it, tags and all.

It doesn't solve the bigger broadband internet access challenge that satellite has vs. cable and telco competitors, but does start to address the content disparity.

The above-mentioned "dream product" would also have the ability to store, Tivo-style a substantial amount of programming on a home server, AND then direct streams into ANY connected TV and/or PC in the house, both through wired and wireless connections.

As Al Jessup describes the joys of 5,000 plus channels:

“New York, New Hampshire, New Jersey, you name it,” Jessup said. “I get everything but Alaska. But if I pointed something toward Alaska, I’d probably get Alaska.

“... I can scoot one over and see what’s going on in Ohio ... or the U.S. Virgin Islands.”

His Beckley home would likely rival most government communications centers. Not only does he pick up stations from across the country, but across the world as well. He picks up stations from Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Jerusalem and other foreign locations.

“Sometimes they speak English, and sometimes they don’t,” he said. “You never know.

“It’s just interesting to watch stations from far away.”

Having grown up in the middle east, in a country with a VERY controlled two to three channel line-up choice, I remember vividly our family's excitement, whenever my Dad got the TV guy to add additional TV antennas on the roof to pick up additional channels from neighboring countries.

We'd thoroughly enjoy the sometimes very grainy programming coming through these antenna and rabbit-ear jiggling efforts. 

I remember it today as even more fun with it's static and graininess than the best HD channels I can receive through by HDTV subscriptions on the plasma screen today, although I'm sure nostalgia over old memories plays a part there.

Of course, the problem with this fictional product is NOT the technology, but the licensing/content subscription issues, especially when you're talking about grabbing satellite feeds from around the world.

But we're already in  a world where much of this type of programming is already in the air, and available to fans/fanatics like Mr. Al Jessup in the above-mentioned story. 

Furthermore, much of this TV content will increasingly be made available for free and for a fee over the broadband Internet, much like radio programming has moved onto the Net over the past ten years. 

In this context, moving in this a la carte direction may be both a defensive and a good offensive move for the satellite industry.

ON THE SHUTTLE PROGRAM REVISITED

BEWARE THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

(Updated Postcript Below)

Every once in a while you're blown away at the quality of content, analysis and thought in a blog post.  My moment was after reading on this piece titled "A Shuttle to Nowhere" on Idle Words by Macieg Ceglowski (via Kottke). 

It's one of the best things I've read this year on any blog. 

Totally recommended if you have the slightest interest in matters space related, and recommended even if you don't.  An cautionary look at how decision making evolves in a government environment with many masters.

It's really an out of the box look at the history of the shuttle program, with many elements tied together that otherwise would have been missed. 

It's a bit longish, but well worth it.  And don't miss the footnotes!

If after reading all of it, you stil want more, don't miss his link-rich sources page of Delicious tags here.

On a separate note, it starts to show you the value of tags, the subject of yesterday's post.  After seeing the above page, you start to appreciate what the fuss over tags is all about and why we need to make them as easy as surfing the web.

P.S.

If after reading all of the above, you're hankering for more Maciej, take a look at this hilarious post on his first visit to Esther Dyson's PC Forum.  His description of the Dyson clan alone is worth the price of admission.

Bookmark his site...he's one of the favorites on my blogroll.

UPDATE (P.S.)

POSTSCRIPT 1

This piece from BoingBoing offers a counter-argument to why private efforts like Burt Rutan et al have a long way and many dollars to go before being able to do what NASA does (note, not only with the Shuttle)...

It's full of terrific links, so I'm posting it here from BoingBoing in its entirety for reader convenience  (by the way WWBRD stands for "what would Burt Rutan do?":

"WWBRD: one reader's answer        

        In light of challenges facing NASA's Space Shuttle program, BoingBoing recently asked the question, "what would Burt Rutan do?" Many wrote in with possible answers, but the golden jackhammer prize goes to reader Brady Hauth, who says:

Pungent greetings, indefatigable Xeni, Midas of vivacity!

The specific energy required to reach the altitude SpaceShipOne (SS1) reached is this, corresponding to this speed. Orbits are only stable above around 180 km. A 200 km orbit requires a speed of 7.78 km/s, so getting into a 200 km high orbit requires a specific energy of this, corresponding to this speed. That's 7.54159384 times faster! The formula for the speed of a rocket tells us that to go that much faster requires 693.390852 times as much rocket.

 

The exact cost of SS1 isn't public, but was probably between $20 and $50 million - I'll say $30 million here. Scaling this up to a low earth orbit capable rocket, we get $20.8 billion. I'm estimating the payload of SpaceShipOne at 400 kg from the rules. The shuttle launches 24,400 kg - 61 times as much. Scaling costs up to something that size, we get $1.2688 trillion The costs of the shuttle program over its entire life? About $145 billion.

Add in the costs of protecting the craft from re-entry from actual orbit, and things start to look expensive.

 

Now, one can get higher specific impulses than Rutan did, which reduces that number above the e. It makes for more expensive engines, but it doesn't have to cost nearly as much as it costs NASA. (Maybe they're paying people to make presentations like this one from the military?) One can argue that Rutan could make a design that could make orbit cheaply. However, his building SS1 is not good evidence of that. That is a completely different requirement requiring entirely different engineering. A much harder and much more expensive requirement.

Previously on Boing Boing: WWBRD?"

POSTSCRIPT 2:

As Anil Dash puts it after reading Macieg's article:

Even if there's never another mishap with the shuttle, it's doomed, as this article makes abundantly clear.

The debate continues...

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