Daredevil’s super skydive

A DAREDEVIL ex-SAS soldier is to attempt a record-breaking skydive — from 120,000ft.

Movie stuntman Steve Truglia, 40, will jump from a hot air balloon 24 miles up on the edge of space.

 

Going supersonic … Steve Truglia

 

 

That is three times the cruising altitude of a Jumbo jet. Only a Space Shuttle flies higher, shedding its rocket boosters at 150,000ft.

He will freefall for seven minutes before opening his parachute, and could break the 770mph sound barrier as he hurtles towards the ground. No human has ever travelled at such a speed outside an aircraft — and Steve has no idea how his body will react.

He will need a pressurised space suit in temperatures of -100°C and risks going into an 800 revolutions per second spin.

 

But Steve, of East London, said: “It’s the last great challenge left on Earth. Obviously it will be dangerous. We’re playing with a lot of unknowns. But it’s my job to assess risk and I don’t believe the problems are insurmountable.”

 

Steve is a veteran of 1,200 jumps with 21 SAS Regiment and the Royal Marines. He has since co-ordinated stunts in Bond films.

 

He plans a jump from 52,000ft over Norfolk in May to break the European record — before attempting the world record in the autumn. Meanwhile he is seeking sponsors for a seven-figure sum. The current record of 102,000ft was set by US Air Force officer Joseph Kittinger in 1960.

US to shoot down failed satellite at 10:30pm ET tonight

var digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/space/US_shooting_down_failed_satellite_at_10_30pm_ET_tonight’; Oh boy, tonight’s the night. According to CNN sources, the US Navy plans to shoot down that failed satellite at 2230 ET from a ship west of Hawaii. The idea is to get a shot off as early as possible in case a second or third attempt is required. The $10 million missile fired from the USS Lake Erie will not carry a warhead. Instead, the 22,000mph impact on the school-bus sized satellite combined with the exploding hydrazine fuel tank should blast the satellite into bite-sized chunks expected to burn up in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, the timing of the launch — 5:30pm locally — means that our naked eyes won’t likely be treated to much of a show. That’s what observatories are for.

Make Yourself Stick With These First Impression Tips

When you’re interviewing for a job, one of the keys to success is your first impression. If you’re about to go in for an interview, maybe its time to re-evaluate the first impression you give off. Do you come off as likable? Do you exude professionalism and charm?

The goal of every first impression is to stick to a person’s brain. You want them to instantly like you and to keep thinking about you hours or even days after your first met them. Here are few things we can all do go give a killer first impression.

Dress to impress. You don’t want to walk into an interview looking like a slob. If you look sloppy, people will assume you do sloppy work. Look neat and presentable. Also, dress so you’ll fit in with the people who are interviewing you. For attorneys that means conservative suits, white shirts, and ties. If your job is more creative, say like a graphic designer, dress so it looks like you’re creative. For great clothing tips, watch TLC’s What Not To Wear.

Look fit. People are attracted to people in good physical shape. If you’re out of shape, start heading to the gym everyday for 30 minutes of cardio and strength training. Also, quit eating junk and start eating healthy.

Give an impressive handshake. The first handshake is a key part in giving a good first impression.

Focus on speaking. Speak clearly and at a moderate pace. Work on varying your voice intonation. You don’t want to come off as a monotone bore. Also, speak the language of the person interviewing you. Avoid slang and jargon not associated with the job you’re interviewing for. Use proper grammar and vocab that reflects a higher education. If people can’t understand you, it’s hard for them to like you.

Use the person’s name. Using the interviewer’s name makes the conversation more personable. It also shows that you were paying attention during introductions and that the other person was important enough for you to memorize their name. However, avoid overusing a person’s name. Too much name use is off putting because it sounds fake and a little bit creepy.

Let the person know you’re listening. If it looks like you’re not listening, people will be turned off. Give subtle hints that you’re listening such as looking the person in the eye, nodding, and saying an occasional “I see.” Also , ask questions about what someone had just said. It shows you’ve been paying attention and that you want to know more about what they’re saying. Finally, don’t interrupt.

Shine the spotlight on the other person. The secret to charm is directing attention away from you and on to the other person. Avoid blabbing about yourself and start asking questions about the other person. Great questions to ask in an interview include:

• “How did you end up at (name of company)?”
• “What drew you to (name of company)?
• What do you like most about working at (name of company)?”

You’ll not only get key insights about your potential employer, but the questions also require the interviewer to talk about themselves and people love talking about themselves.

Apple going Blu-Ray? Not this year

Apple analysts are suspecting we’ll soon see Blu-ray support in Mac Pros this year, something we suspect is BS. Why would Apple start adding Blu-Ray when they just announced HD video rentals? They know a good thing when they see it and there’s no reason to add what could be just an external upgrade for most people.

Beyond eschewing industry alliances, Apple’s also never been a company to indulge in feature glut — jamming the latest and greatest technologies into new computer just to say it has them. If anything, the company tends to omit features for the sake of simplicity and uniformity. This is, after all, the same company that released an ultra-slim laptop without an optical drive (which Steve Jobs said no one would miss).

Unique Martian formation reproduced, reveals brief bursts of water

A topographic image shows the experimental fan emerging from the channel and depositing on the crater floor. The experimental mock crater in the image is 1.5 m across. The fan is about 40 cm across. The notches in the fan move down the fan like stair steps. Each distinct step represents an intersection of when the rising shoreline hit the depositing fan surface. Credit: Erin Kraal

Blacksburg, Va. – Researchers from the United States and the Netherlands report that several formations on Mars indicate incidents of rapid release of water from the planet’s interior.

Mars has many basins that contain formations that look like fans. A few of these fans, only about 10, have steps down into the basin. Since scientists first reported this feature three years ago, there has been no clear consensus on how they formed.

So, following an example of a project they had created for high school students, geosciences faculty members at Utrecht University in the Netherlands reproduced the process. “There are no fans with steps on earth, so we had to build one,” said Erin R. Kraal, now a geosciences research scientist at Virginia Tech.

In the article, “Martian stepped-delta formation by rapid water release,” published in the Feb. 21, 2008, issue of Nature, Kraal and her Utrect colleagues, Maurits van Dijk, George Postma, and Maarten G. Kleinhans, describe how they made a stepped fan – and what it says about at least one source of water on Mars.

In a room-sized sediment flume (5 by 12 meters or 16 by 40 feet), the researchers dug a crater in sand, then simulated water flow into the crater. “As the fan and the water level intersected, the steps appeared,” Kraal said. “As the water flows in through a channel, it erodes the sediment. The water fans out and deposits the transported sediment as deltas, building steps down into the basin.”

Once they established what had to happen to make a stepped fan in the lab, the scientists created sediment transport models and studied the morphology of the fans on Mars using satellite images and topographical date from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA). Based on fans of 20 kilometers in basins of 100 kilometers, they calculated the conditions for the creation of a stepped fan.

The researchers report that formation of stepped fans would only take 10s of years – not the hundreds to millions of years estimated for other Mars hydrologic events. But it would require a lot of water. And it would be a one-time event – the basin would not refill.

“Water volumes would be between that of the Mississippi River over the course of 10 years or the Rhine River flowing for 100 years into a 62-mile wide basin,” Kraal said.

But, looking at an image from Mars, the water channel looks nothing like the Mississippi River – being hundreds of times smaller than such a river. “We suggest the water was released internally, such as hydrothermal water suddenly pushed to the surface,” Kraal said.

She said that there are features on Mars that look like they could come from weather, but stepped fans do not.

And that high school project? The Utrecht research team cooperated with the European Geosciences Union to provide information about Mars for an EGU outreach project. Then when the Journal for Young Scientists wanted to create a movie about how fans form, the researchers arranged for the students to be filmed as they built a crater at the Eurotank lab at Utrecht and ran water into it. “At the end of the day, we discovered we had steps,” said Kraal. “The next week we started the official controlled experiments. We tested other ways to make stepped fans but this was the best way.”

Kraal has been at Virginia Tech since August 2007. She is continuing to study fans in general, and in Earth’s extremely arid areas in particular, which are an analog for the conditions on Mars.

Fans are only one aspect of her study of surface process on earth and across all planets. “I find it interesting that we can look at the same processes across planets. For instance, there appears there are fans on Titan, where the fundamental variables – gravity, the type of rock, the atmosphere – are so different,” said Kraal. “It is interesting to change the fundamental variables and look at such processes as landslides or how big scarps retreat. On Earth, vegetation has a tremendous impact on such processes. On Mars, we have purer conditions, without the influence of vegetation, allowing us to look at surfaces without this variable.”

Source: Virginia Tech

Insane pic

What we learn from Video-Games

“We’re better, faster, stronger because we play video games. Everyone knows that. Here’s 61 other things we know because we’ve played video games.”

1. When you’re about to beat someone in a fight, they will rapidly flash between red and their normal skin tone.

2. Getting shot several times in the chest usually isn’t that big of a deal.

3. Tennis is really easy.

4. Hockey is almost entirely about checking and fist-fights.

5. Most people don’t say anything of interest.

6. On any given day, a 16-year old girl can beat up a gigantic bear, or an old man can beat up a robot.

7. The best way to open a container is to destroy it.

8. When you enter a town, the person closest to the entrance will welcome you to the town and tell you its name.

9. When driving, a full 360 flip is routine, provided you land wheels down.

10. Pay attention to shiny things.

11. All ninjas will try to kill you on sight. Unless said ninja is a super badass ninja who refuses to talk. That guy will run away after saying “…” But beware–he’ll be back.

12. Parachutes are standard issue for all soldiers, regardless of what they’re tasked with on the Battlefield.

13. Food heals all wounds.

14. Eating typically takes one or two seconds, and can usually be accomplished by standing on top of food.

15. If you run out of bullets, you die.

16. Everyone, everywhere, at anytime is capable of jumping at least 5 feet straight up.

17. Eating mushrooms can make you grow taller. Eating flowers let you shoot fireballs out of your hand.

18. Female martial artists are either little girls in Japanese school clothes, or scantily clad vixens with ginormous boobies.

19. The Web was basically built for people to play puzzle games and tower defense.

20. Windows sucks.

21. Your thumb is your most powerful weapon.

22. Pokemon, though vicious fighting animals, will only attack other Pokemon. Even the biggest, nastiest Pokemon won’t hurt a human.

23. Princess Peach really needs a security staff.

24. And so does Princess Zelda.

25. Most people don’t mind if you wander into their house unannounced. They also don’t care if you go rifling through their chests and barrels looking for items.

26. A large number of doors and gates are controlled by elaborate pulley systems involving statues and clay tablets.

27. Barrels with radioactive signs on the side will explode if shot.

28. Hemorrhaging head wounds can be healed by standing on top of any box with the red cross symbol on the side.

29. Bad guys and monsters tend to enjoy carrying around the same types of bullets your guns use, even if they themselves are not armed.

30. Big ass boobs are great. 3D big ass boobs with a proper physics engine behind them are even better.

31. Massive boobs do not, in anyway, interfere with physical and athletic performance.

32. Most cities, though appearing large, are composed of small alleys and single streets blocked off at both ends by garbage, fences, cars, or mysterious invisible barriers.

33. 90% of all doors are completely fake. They’re just painted onto the wall.

34. Solid Snake’s co-workers are completely incapable of shutting the f**k up.

5. Turtles come out of their shells if you press down hard on them. Additionally, turtle shells are really slick on the bottom, and thus they slide around on normal surfaces as though they were ice.

36. For the most part, jumping on something’s head will kill it. If it does not, then throwing a dead animal at the thing will do the job.

37. All adventures in life will take you through an “ice world.”

38. If you get poisoned, you won’t die as long as you stay still.

40. Grenades are easy to locate in major metropolitan areas. And in fields. And in suburbs. And in airbases. And in hotels. And on the bus. And in schools. But if you find grenades in a military base, they’re probably fake and don’t really exist.

41. 95% of all computers, desks, tables and chairs are exactly the same.

42. Killing people makes you stronger.

43. When someone dies, their body will decompose within 5 minutes of death.

44. Dead people, after decomposition, tend to leave behind weapons, food, or keys.

45. Bad guys like to build elaborate mazes around their headquarters.

46. The head guy involved in anything is usually trying to destroy the world.

47. Bad guy managers are usually far stronger than any of their underlings, no matter how thin and scrawny they are.

48. If a bad guy is really really big, you’ll have to flip a number of switches in order to damage him. These switches will always reset within 30 seconds of being hit, making Mr. Big Baddy invulnerable again.

49. The more you kill, the better the stuff you get.

50. All store owners will buy any old crap you have in your bag, no matter how much of it you own.

51. If in combat, your enemies will usually stand around and wait patiently as you go through your rucksack looking for your rocket launcher.

52. A knife in the back beats three bullets in the face.

53. When you go to bed at an inn, a 3-second jingle will play before you go to sleep..

54. Hedgehogs do not have blood flowing through their veins, but giant gold rings.

55. The greatest of warriors often communicates in childish aphorisms.

56. Clothing only comes in one size.

57. If you come across a locked door, you have to find the key, even if it’s a brittle piece of wood that a grenade should be able to obliterate.

58. Crafting pretty much anything only takes a few seconds and can be easily learned by skimming through a book.

59. You can always get yourself out of any hole you’ve dug yourself into– it’s just a matter of waiting for the right block.

60. Sadly, abusing a child and locking them in a room won’t make them good at painting or music.

61. The whole world is full of things that want to eat you or kill you– fortunately you have unlimited continues.

Bill Gates says Internet censorship won’t work

Claims efforts by China, other nations to restrict Internet use are doomed to fail

  By Robert McMillan

February 20, 2008 (IDG News Service) Efforts by countries like China to restrict the exchange of information on the Internet are ultimately doomed to failure, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told an audience of Stanford University students Tuesday.”I don’t see any risk in the world at large that someone will restrict free content flow on the Internet,” he said. “You cannot control the Internet.”

China has grappled with the issue of Internet censorship in recent years, and Microsoft Corp., along with several other U.S. companies, has come under fire for aiding in that effort. In late 2005, Microsoft shut down the blog of journalist Zhao Jing, also known as Michael Anti, when he blogged about a newspaper strike in the country.

In the long run, free speech will win out, Gates said.

It will be driven by business requirements. Restrictions on free speech will curtail business activity, and so commercial forces will work against censorship, Gates said. “If your country wants to have a developed economy … you basically have to open up the Internet,” he said.

Gates made the comments following a talk on “software, innovation, entrepreneurship and giving back,” which focused mainly on his two favorite topics: the future of technology and the philanthropic goals he has set for himself following his retirement from day-to-day work at the company he founded in 1975.

Microsoft’s founder will step down from his daily work at the company entirely in July, but he has set some big follow-up goals for himself, including the fight against HIV/AIDS and a campaign to eradicate polio and malaria.

Another ambition is to find new ways to drive innovation that will benefit the world’s poorest countries.

Today, with millions still dying from malaria, 90% of the world’s medical research relates to conditions that occur in the world’s richest countries. “Consider how much money should be spent on baldness vs. malaria,” Gates said.

Fifty times the amount spent on researching malaria goes to finding a cure for baldness, he noted.

“We have this disparity where, as great as our system is, if there’s not a market need, it doesn’t drive innovation,” he explained.

Gates would like to see that change.

“One of the things I’ll be spending time on is reaching out to both universities and companies and encouraging them to get more involved in this,” he said.

The 52-year-old Gates seemed apprehensive about his upcoming career as a philanthropist. Stepping down from Microsoft “could be traumatic for me,” he noted.

“I was 17 years old when I started working full time on Microsoft, and I’ve done it basically every day of work since then,” Gates added. “So who knows what it will be like to make the change.”

Satellite Shoot Down: How It Will Work

The U.S. Navy could shoot down an errant spy satellite as early as Wednesday night. Now a new computer model shows what might happen.

The spy satellite USA-193, also known as NROL-21, was launched aboard a Delta II rocket on Dec. 14, 2006 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Shortly after the satellite reached orbit, ground controllers lost contact with it. Though the satellite’s objective is secret, many believe it is probably a high-resolution radar satellite intended to produce images for the National Reconnaissance Office.

On Feb. 14, senior U.S. government officials at a Pentagon press briefing described a Defense Department plan to try and shoot down the defunct satellite, after becoming convinced that the spacecraft’s toxic hydrazine fuel posed an unacceptable risk to people on the ground. The attempted strike could come Wednesday evening.

With this press information, computer modelers Bob Hall and Tim Carrico at Analytical Graphics, Inc. (AGI) put together a computer-generated simulation of the missile-satellite collision. The model shows a hypothetical deployment of U.S Navy ships in the Northern Pacific Ocean and the firing of a Standard Missile 3 at the failed satellite.

Information the modelers do know:

• The satellite has a mass of about 5,015 pounds (2,275 kilograms).
• The missile would be fired from a ship in the North Pacific Ocean.
• The interception would occur at an altitude of about 149 miles (240 kilometers).
• The satellite and missile would close on one another at a velocity of about 22,783 mph (36,667 kph).

If left alone, the satellite is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere some time between the end of February and early March. About 2,500 pounds (1,134 kilograms) of satellite material would survive re-entry (the rest would burn up), including 1,000 pounds (453 kilograms) of hydrazine, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Defense.

The collision between the fired missile and the satellite would not only break the massive hunk of metal into pieces but would also speed up its tumble through Earth’s atmosphere.

“If you want to bring something down, you slow it down. You apply a force on it which results in it being slowed down and decrease in its orbit,” Carrico told SPACE.com. “Right at that point where they want to engage [the satellite] is at the edge of the atmosphere, so you’re bringing it down faster.”

The plan comes on the heels of the intentional destruction last year of China’s Fengyun-1C weather satellite, which produced a flurry of concern over the hostile-or-not nature of the firing as well as a serious load of shrapnel littering Earth orbit. That debris is still in space, frustrating mission managers and satellite operators forced to dodge the potentially debilitating bits.

USA-193 is already on its way toward Earth and the interception will take place at a much lower altitude than that of the China satellite, presumably meaning that whatever happens, there will not be a fresh load of small junk sent into perpetual orbit.

If more details were made public, the model results could change depending on several factors, including the location of the ships and when the missile is fired.

“How the missile hits the satellite will affect how quickly the debris re-enters and what the velocity is between the objects and how they hit,” Hall said. “Are they attempting to get most of the debris to come down in the Pacific almost immediately? Or … over the course of two or three revolutions, is most of it going to start to fall out? If we had different information about the engagement we could re-run our model.

Information will be free: Wikileaks still up, despte order.

Swiss banks have always taken their privacy seriously, and the Bank Julius Baer is no exception. On Friday, the bank obtained a US temporary restraining order against the site Wikileaks, which currently hosts a clutch of documents alleged to come from inside the bank. In addition, the judge issued a permanent injunction against Dynadot, the registrar for wikileaks.org, demanding that the site’s information be locked and its domain name scoured from the Internet.

Bank Julius Baer calls itself the “leading dedicated wealth manager in Switzerland,” and it’s not good for dedicated wealth managers to be linked with scandal. The bank was unhappy about material hosted on Wikileaks that appears to show corruption in the bank’s Cayman Islands branch. It filed a federal lawsuit against the site in San Francisco and has so far been on a roll in the case.

Julius Baer is no fan
of Wikileaks

On February 15, the bank obtained a permanent injunction against Dynadot that requires the registrar to “lock the wikileaks.org domain name” and to “disable the wikileaks.org domain name and account to prevent access to and any changes from being made to the domain name and account information.” Wikileaks.org does not currently resolve.

The order isn’t particularly effective (the site can be accessed simply by going to wikileaks.be, wikileaks.de, and wikileaks.cx, among others), but the fact that it can happen seems incredible. Rather than just put a hold on the particular documents in question, a judge has attempted instead to remove the entire site from the Internet. Wikileaks was not present at the hearing where the decision was made, saying that it was notified only by e-mail and given just a few hours’ notice. As is common in such situations, the order was essentially written by the bank and then adopted by the judge.

In addition to the Dynadot block, Wikileaks itself is ordered to remove all documents from the bank that “are internal non-public company documents” and to do so “whether or not such documents and information are authentic, semi-altered, semi-fraudulent or forged.”

Based on the correspondence between Wikileaks and a US lawyer representing the bank, the bank appears to be claiming copyright over these internal documents. A lawyer for the bank complained repeatedly about the lack of a designated DMCA agent for Wikileaks and warned the site, “You act at your own peril” and “govern yourselves accordingly.” (Biggest question raised by the letter: real lawyers actually write this sort of stage villain stuff?)

The restraining order against Wikileaks is temporary, and in the order Judge Jeffrey White notes that the group can fight the block during a February 29 hearing. Wikileaks says that it has several lawyers in San Francisco willing to work pro bono on the case.