The keys and navpad are unfit for grown-up human use. The phone’s clunky headphone connector has all the charm of a tumor. The awkward flip panel makes for clumsy, fumbling answers.

Once again proving that form should always follow function (excepting Apple, usually).

Before the iPhone (and before that horrid little Blackberry Pearl I used for all of 6 months) I’d used three different Sony Ericsson candybar phones, and loved every one of them.  It’s sort of sad to see them missing the mark these days.

(via Gruber)

Of course I want one of these.  I don’t have a De Lorean, but it’d be just as great mounted in my silver TT.

(h/t Agent M)

You can see the results of the previous TimeShoot on Flickr here.

(via Thomas Fitzgerald)

Let’s just say that I don’t think season 1 aged very well.  Oh, those 90s clothes and haircuts.  I just can’t get over the horror of them.

Anyway, I think I’m going to start getting more selective, and watch either the mythology arc with all the “Monster of the Week” episodes trimmed out, or do it the other way around.

(via Alex Hillman)

[ Updated 4/29 7:56pm: Ack. Looks like this isn't the real deal - it's just a user-edited thingy that's been floating around for a while now. ]

My office closet is fairly deep, more like a small storage room than a typical “closet”, and the back of it acts as a repository¹ for all sorts of random things.

Yesterday I had to mount an expedition to its farthest reaches, in search of something.  I now forget what, exactly², because I never actually found it.  I got distracted when, at the back of the room, I dug up one of my old messenger bags.  One that I hadn’t seen or touched in almost four years.  I took it out and opened it up, and it still had a good amount junk in it.

I found it odd that it would still have so much flotsam in it, especially writing materials, as that’s the stuff of my work and I usually treat all my bits of paper quite well.  I vaguely remember having bought a new Powerbook around then, so probably in my excitement I stuck the new computer in a fresh new bag, grabbed what I thought I needed from the old one, and then tossed it into the closet.

Nothing I found in the bag was particularly important³, but it’s an interesting snapshot of the moment.  I probably spent a good hour just looking at the stuff and trying to mentally reconstruct what I was working on at the time.  It’s funny how you can find “treasure” like that from just a handful of years ago in your own life.  It was fun.

[ click on the photo for the marked-up version at Flickr, where there's notes on some of the stuff that was in the bag ]

Eighteen years after the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA has released a series of new images of colliding galaxies.  The images are absolutely breathtaking, especially when you consider that none of the billions of stars involved in the process will likely collide with each other, because of the vast distances between them.  It’s both humbling and awe-inspiring.

I live life with few regrets, but I do often wish I had pursued a track in astrophysics.  Don’t get me wrong - I absolutely love what I do, but my lifelong passion for science is always tugging away at me inside.

(via Phil Plait)

The funny thing about formats is that [they] only seem to be considered proprietary if they are unsuccessful. If a format is a success [if] it’s considered a standard. And Sony have contributed more standards over their lifetime than any other company I know of.

That pretty much sums it up.

Sony can be bashed for a lot of things (rootkit, anyone?), but the “Sony proprietary = likely failure” argument is just not one of them.  As Thomas points out in his post, for every unadopted Sony format or technology, there are several industry standards.  That’s not failure; that’s natural selection of the marketplace and of innovation.

2063 A.D. was a book published in 1963 by General Dynamics Astronautics. The book asked politicians, military commanders and scientists to speculate as to where humanity would be, a hundred years hence, in the great push towards space.

What really caught my attention in this book (besides its being a great piece of typography; I’d love to get my hands on an original) are the frequent references to nuclear propulsion of future spacecraft.

By 1963, General Atomics had already been working for several years on an engineering design study called Project Orion, initiated by Ted Taylor, to theorize about and test the plausibility of using controlled nuclear explosions to propel a spacecraft.  (The famous theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson was recruited to work on the project; his son George wrote a good pop-science/history book about it a few years ago.)  The study, while having some success, ultimately ended due mainly to safety concerns over nuclear fallout from the vehicle’s exploding atomic fuel.

However, the interesting part to me is the timing involved.  The 2063 book was published in 1963, the same year that the Partial Test Ban Treaty was signed by the U.S. and the Soviets.  Since the treaty effectively banned any atmospheric nuclear detonations, it was arguably the death knell for Project Orion, and a barrier for any further practical study on the subject.  So why, then, all the predictions of nuclear spaceflight?  I can understand the enthusiasm for such future technology, but here you have politicians and military commanders who had to have a pretty good idea of what was going on politically with such a significant international treaty (i.e. no more nukes in space).  Yet they contribute their wistful notions of the practical uses for a forbidden technology a century hence.

Should we chalk it up to their confidence in the basic good of mankind, and a belief that such treaties would someday not be necessary, freeing atomic “bombs” to be used to better ends?  Or are those predictions simply the visions of steely cold warriors, intent on the American domination of space at any cost?

The full text of the book, made from scans of an original, can be downloaded here.

(via Paleo-Future)