Overcoming concerns about weather — and a last-minute technical hitch that created a dramatic countdown hold at T-minus 31 seconds, with just minutes remaining in the launch window — the Space Shuttle Atlantis rocketed into space a few minutes ago, a picture-perfect final launch for NASA’s 30-year Shuttle program. [UPDATE: Apparently, liftoff occurred with just 58 seconds left in the… Read more »
An old New York Times article predicting, in broad terms, the rise and impact of the Internet, published on the day Becky was born — June 14, 1982 — is making the rounds on Twitter tonight. The article reports on an NSF-affiliated study that, once you get past the silly names (“teletext and videotex”), is remarkably prescient in many ways…. Read more »
Apple products often look like they are from the future, and Steve Jobs is going to take that same design approach to the design of Apple’s new campus in Cupertino. The massive new building (roughly as large as the pentagon, although only consisting of a single ring) would house up to 13,000 employees in a four story structure featuring curved… Read more »
The wild and deadly tornado season of 2011 rolls on, with Southern New England — my old stomping grounds — the latest target. Check out this incredible video of a tornado crossing the Connecticut River in Springfield, Massachusetts: At least four people are dead in Massachusetts, in what’s being called the state’s worst tornado outbreak in a century. And the… Read more »
This afternoon, eleven months to the day after I got my first iPhone, I broke it: D’OH!!! #PANIC!!! I was listening to a tornado coverage on an Oklahoma radio station, KRMG, via TuneIn Radio, when my earbuds’ cord got caught on something and, when I made a sudden movement, the iPhone went flying out of my hand and landed 2… Read more »
While we were all joking about the Rapture, a real-life calamity of apocalyptic proportions (on a local scale, anyway) struck Joplin, Missouri, which was devastated yesterday by a huge, powerful tornado that is already being blamed for 89 deaths. The photos of the utter destruction are stunning, reminiscent of last month’s Alabama tornadoes. It seems almost certain that the ultimate… Read more »
The second-to-last Space Shuttle launch went off without a hitch this morning. Rep. Gabby Giffords was in attendance as her husband, Mark Kelly, commander of STS-134, and the rest of Endeavour‘s final crew rocketed into orbit. Spaceflight Now has complete coverage. The most amazing view of the launch comes from Stephanie Gordon, a.k.a. @Stafmara, who tweeted this photo and this… Read more »
This video is some of the best footage I’ve seen conveying the extent of the damage in the areas most devastated by the April 27 tornado outbreak in Alabama: Alabama Weather Blog continues to be the go-to source of information about the calamity’s aftermath. And there’s lots of the on-the-ground relief effort information at Toomer’s for Tuscaloosa. Oh, and here’s… Read more »
Very lucky, as this excellent graphic from the front page of the Tuscaloosa News shows. Note the green area labeled “UA” — that’s the campus, and it just avoided a direct hit from the massive tornado that devastated Tuscaloosa: As things stand, life at the university has been tremendously disrupted — power out, nearby buildings destroyed, some student housing damaged,… Read more »
[UPDATE, 2:00 PM MDT: Since I composed this post, the death toll has risen from 247 to 272. So yesterday’s disaster is now #8 on the list below, #6 if you exclude manmade disasters, #4 if you also exclude heat waves, or #3 if you do all of that and you think the listed “Storm of the Century” toll is… Read more »