Inventions from Space Exploration

I had an argument recently in a bar. I was asked when Teflon was invented in the Space program. Being a bit of a quiz man and knowing something about NASA. I replied that Teflon was invented in the 1930’s and not in the space program.
However, it got me thinking about what has come from the Space Program and I did some research. All of the following technologies or materials were originally developed for the space program.

The one I like is the pen. The Russians used a pencil! Simpler.

TV Satellite Dish
NASA developed ways to correct errors in the signals coming from the spacecraft. This technology is used to reduce noise (that is, messed up picture or sound) in TV signals coming from satellites.

Medical Imaging
NASA developed ways to process signals from spacecraft to produce clearer images. This technology also makes possible these photo-like images of our insides.

Vision Screening System
Uses techniques developed for processing space pictures to examine eyes of children and find out quickly if they have any vision problems. The child doesn't have to say a word!

Ear Thermometer
Instead of measuring temperature using a column of mercury (which expands as it heats up), this thermometer has a lens like a camera and detects infrared energy, which we feel as heat. The warmer something is (like your body), the more infrared energy it puts out. This technology was originally developed to detect the birth of stars.

Fire Fighter Equipment
Fire fighters wear suits made of fire resistant fabric developed for use in space suits.

Smoke Detector
First used in the Earth orbiting space station called Skylab (launched back in 1973) to help detect any toxic vapors. Now used in most homes and other buildings to warn people of fire.

Sun Tiger Glasses
From research done on materials to protect the eyes of welders working on spacecraft, protective lenses were developed that block almost all the wavelengths of radiation that might harm the eyes, while letting through all the useful wavelengths that let us see.

Automobile Design Tools
A computer program developed by NASA to analyze a spacecraft or airplane design and predict how parts will perform is now used to help design automobiles. This kind of software can save car makers a lot of money by letting them see how well a design will work even before they build a prototype.

Cordless Tools
Portable, self-contained power tools were originally developed to help Apollo astronauts drill for moon samples. This technology has lead to development of such tools as the cordless vacuum cleaner, power drill, shrub trimmers, and grass shears.

Aerodynamic Bicycle Wheel
A special bike wheel uses NASA research in airfoils (wings) and design software developed for the space program. The three spokes on the wheel act like wings, making the bicycle very efficient for racing.

Thermal Gloves and Boots
These gloves and boots have heating elements that run on rechargeable batteries worn on the inside wrist of the gloves or embedded in the sole of the ski boot. This technology was adapted from a spacesuit design for the Apollo astronauts.

Space Pens
The Fisher Space Pen was developed for use in space. Most pens depend on gravity to make the ink flow into the ball point. For this space pen, the ink cartridge contains pressured gas to push the ink toward the ball point. That means, you can lie in bed and write upside down with this pen! Also, it uses a special ink that works in very hot and very cold environments.

Shock Absorbing Helmets
These special football helmets use a padding of Temper Foam, a shock absorbing material first developed for use in aircraft seats. These helmets have three times the shock absorbing ability of previous types.

Ski Boots
These ski boots use accordion-like folds, similar to the design of space suits, to allow the boot to flex without distortion, yet still give support and control for precision skiing.

Failsafe Flashlight
This flashlight uses NASA's concept of system redundancy, which is always having a backup for the parts of the spacecraft with the most important jobs. This flashlight has an extra-bright primary bulb and an independent backup system that has its own separate lithium battery (also a NASA developed technology) and its own bulb.

Invisible Braces
These teeth-straightening braces use brackets that are made of a nearly invisible translucent (almost see-through) ceramic material. This material is a spinoff of NASA's advanced ceramic research to develop new, tough materials for spacecraft and aircraft.

Edible Toothpaste
This is a special foamless toothpaste developed for the astronauts to use in space (where spitting is not a very good idea!) Although this would be a great first toothpaste for small children, it is no longer available.

 Joystick Controllers
Joystick controllers are used for lots of things now, including computer games and vehicles for people with disabilities. These devices evolved from research to develop a controller for the Apollo Lunar Rover, and from other NASA research into how humans actually operate (called "human factors").

Advanced Plastics
Spacecraft and other electronics need very special, low-cost materials as the base for printed circuits (like those inside your computer). Some of these "liquid crystal polymers" have turned out to be very good, low-cost materials for making containers for foods and beverages.

American Football on TVu

The Lady of the Villa is a sports fan of sorts. She has a season ticket with me at Liverpool FC (even though we live in Spain) and will watch some sports on TV.

I, on the other hand, will watch almost anything (not horse racing, no WWW (which is not a sport but Theatre) and no Sumo). So apart from that anything.

Being in Spain and not able to get Sky, I have been missing some of my favourite sports including American Football. Now the Lady of the Villa hates American Football but now I have found an Internet TV site, TVu, which not only shows American Football but a lot of other sports, world news and movies.

A Sunday night has me glued to our large computer screen with head phones on while she watches the TV.

Peace in our time!

Apple iPad wins 'best gadget' award

Apple has trumped Amazon and Sky to win a prestigious best gadget accolade with its iPad.
The iPad beat the Amazon Kindle and Sky 3D to win both the gadget of the year and readers' gadget of the year gongs in the 2010 Stuff Gadget Awards.
I think that it is the best gadget this year, but, it's expensive and functionally limited.  I will wait until the next version appears before deciding to buy one.

Blockbuster to slash debt by $900 million via bankruptcy

Do you remember in you a long time ago your area having a local video store? In the village I lived in we had two a Betamax and a VHS. Both were run ‘part time’, one was in an off licence the other in an ‘open all hours’ store.

Not a fantastic collection but run on a honesty type of operation, if you return a day late it was no bother. As the growth of ownership in video players grew so did their business.

However in the background big brother or Blockbuster came along and shut them down by either buying them up or getting the video makers to only sell to them. The operation was rigid with fines for late return, snooty staff and overpriced popcorn and sweets. Well now its their turn!

Video/DVD rental chain Blockbuster Inc filed for bankruptcy as part of a pre-arranged deal with bondholders that would slash the company's debt by about $900 million. The company's senior debt holders have agreed to support the plan and provide $125 million in "debtor-in-possession" (DIP) financing to help support Blockbuster's operations while it is under bankruptcy.

Internet downloads no doubt taking business away. Lol. What comes around goes around.

Gadgets and Me – The iPad

When the iPad was first announced, I was really excited, but a little bit wary of all the hype. I expected that I wouldn’t need to carry around my small notebook, instead I would have a device that provided almost the same features as my laptop. I nearly began to believe that this cool new device would reduce the number of electronic gadgets people carried around. Nearly. But my years in IT held me back and I looked very hard at the specification of the hardware and software and decided, NO, it did not do the business. Why?

• You can’t easily load Microsoft Office documents on the iPad 
• No access any data via a USB drive.  The iPad has no USB port, and its means of transferring documents—through iTunes—is pathetic.  Apple’s cloud strategy seems to be centered on iTunes. Which I have found to be wanting.
• Apple’s Microsoft Office-like products on the iPad are just cheap imitations. Apple’s Pages looks like a decent word processor, as does Numbers a spreadsheet manager, but these don’t hold a candle to Microsoft Word and Excel.
• You can’t use the excellent cloud-based word processing tools that other people offer like Google Docs. The iPad doesn’t recognize the rich-text format that these applications use, so it doesn’t display a keyboard when you try to type.
• You cant view different applications in multiple screens when using the iPad. I want to have my web browser appear in a split screen next to my text editor, and I want to be able to jump between applications—just as I do on my Mac and in Windows. The IPad allows you to listen to music as you work, but doesn’t do much more.
• You can’t watch Flash presentations that are used on many news sites
• there is no camera. The iPad lets you make Skype calls over Wi-Fi, but there is no chance of a face-to-face call, that’s because there is no camera. 
• Difficult to read in Sunlight
• Shuts down when temp gets to around 35C

I am sure that the iPad 2 will rectify all of the above, if not I will wait until they do.

Boarding Pass to Disappear

As a frequent flyer I was very interested to read this, again from the Internet, but from the Daily Telegraph.

The humble boarding pass is becoming the latest victim of the aviation industry’s drive towards a paperless future. Instead passengers will use their mobile phones to board an aircraft, with the device being read by a scanner at the departure gate.

It will mean that passengers will no longer rummage through every pocket at the departure gate only to find the pass has been used as a bookmark for a paperback bought 20 minutes earlier but now searching for their phones.

British Airways mobile phone boarding pass will make its debut on the iPhone soon Monday, when it will be available on flights on the Heathrow – Edinburgh route. Other airlines, such as Air France, have already introduced the technology, BA has gone further incorporating the pass as part of an all-singing, all-dancing application. The airline believes a mobile phone cannot only carry a boarding pass, but just about anything else a passenger might want.

Its software developers have developed an application which will not only contain the boarding pass, but also flight information, frequent flier points, check-in times and eventually boarding gates and boarding times. BA’s iPhone boarding pass is expected to be ready for all domestic destinations by the end of August and for the bulk of short haul routes within six months with most long-distance destinations are expected be incorporated by the middle of next year and the United States by the end of December 2011.

The key to the introduction of the mobile phone boarding passes is the development of a new generation of scanners which can read different airlines’ codes.

Underpinning the drive for the new technology in the aviation industry is an attempt to simplify the process of going through and airport cutting out the delays which have infuriated passengers across the world. Even saving a couple of seconds on processing an individual passenger can make a dramatic difference to the length of queues.

It is among a series of developments which airline passengers can expect over the next few years, with carriers also looking at putting radio tags on luggage to prevent bags being lost.

The end of e-mail?

Sheryl Sandberg  chief operating officer of the world's biggest social network Facebook, says e-mail is a dying means of communication.

She bases that assertion on the behaviour of the nearly 500 million users who gather on Facebook. Speaking at the Neilsen Consumer  conference in Las Vegas, Ms Sandberg claims: "If you want to know what you'll be doing tomorrow, look at what teens are doing today."
Ms Sandberg, claims that only 11% of teens use e-mail, preferring text messaging and social networks. Even though 90% of e-mail may be spam or other useless twaddle, it is hard to believe it is nearing its sell-by date.
A report by the Radicati Group says that e-mail is still on the rise and projects that e-mail accounts will increase from 2.9 billion today to over 3.8 billion by 2014. At the same time, social networking is predicted to climb from over 2.1 billion accounts in 2010 to over 3.6 billion by 2014.
e-mails, in my opinion are still and will be for the future (10 years ahead), the main means of intra company and company to company communication. Texting is the teens way of communicating, but, commerce will always stick to the written word and not texting. I cant see the end of e-mail, just, as I cant see the end of letters (snail-mail).

Biorhythms

A Biorhythm is a hypothetical cycle in physiological, emotional, or intellectual well-being or prowess. "Bio-" pertains to life and “rhythm” pertains to the flow with regular movement. The theory has no more predictive power than chance, and has been labeled a pseudoscience by skeptics.
Having said all that I have been using biorhythm charts ever since I discovered them in the 1970’s and found them most useful.
The theory of biorhythms claims that one's life is affected by rhythmic biological cycles, and seeks to make predictions regarding these cycles and the personal ease of carrying out tasks related to the cycles. These inherent rhythms are said to be composed of three cyclic rhythms: the physical, (23 day), emotional (28 day) and the intellectual (33 day) cycles.
The three classical cycles of biorhythms are often represented graphically in a sinusoidal waveform. Each cycle oscillates between a positive phase [0%..100%] and a negative phase [-100%..0%], during which biorhythmic activity strengthens and weakens. The waveforms start at the neutral baseline (0%) at the time of birth of each individual. Each day that the waveform again crosses this baseline is dubbed a critical day, which means that tasks in the domain of the cycle are far more erratic than on other non-critical days. The purpose of mapping the biorhythmic cycles is to enable the calculation of critical days for performing or avoiding various activities.
Years ago I used to have a whole year printed out but now thanks to the internet I can see my biorhythms on a daily basis. Here is the site I use http://www.bio-chart.com/.

Google Apps

At the start of this year I decided that I would go into "cloud" processing. This is where all your documents (word, excel, powerpoint etc.) are held not on your hard disk but on a providers data store. I also decided to explore Google Chrome as a browser and start to write a blog.
Those decisions made it only seemed write and proper to use the Google offerings. The experience has been mixed.
Google Chrome - jury is still out. To early to say. Pleased with some features, unsure of others and cant find some I would like to have. Only time will tell

Blogger - this has been a hit as far as I am concerned. Easy to get started. Still finding interesting features. Only complaint is that the "help" function is not as slick as it should be. put in a word search and it does not find it, but, there it is in the index. Strange.

Chrome Apps - this has been an abject failure after just 3 days. Luckily I only started putting my blog entries, in very rough draft on them. After 2 days of adding documents, it would not allow me to update them, just hung waiting with the sand glass showing. By investigating on the net I found that this was a general malaise that Google had not fixed. Lots, but obviously not all people had this fault. There is a fix. When you ask for a document and it hangs you go to the navigation box and change the //http to //https! The "s" means a secure site!. It was to flaky for me so I moved all the files to hard disk and use Office.
I do think this cloud processing is the way forward, however, the applications are a bit new and flaky. I do hope it happens soon as my version of Office is at 2003 and may get unsupported soon and I don't want t pay hundreds for the latest version.
Having said that SUN Microsystems has a "Office" lookalike called StarOffice8 that cost $34.95 as a download price. I may take a look at that in the future.