Original source
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes “Phillip Swarts reports in the Washington Times that NASA is completing a $350 million rocket-engine testing tower at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi that it doesn’t want and will never use. ‘Because the Constellation Program was canceled in 2010, the A-3’s unique testing capabilities will not be needed and the stand will be mothballed upon completion (PDF),, said NASA’s inspector general. The A-3 testing tower will stand 300 feet and be able to withstand 1 million pounds of thrust (PDF). The massive steel structure is designed to test how rocket engines operate at altitudes of up to 100,000 feet by creating a vacuum within the testing chamber to simulate the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Although NASA does not expect to use the tower after construction, it’s compelled by legislation from Sen. Roger F. Wicker (R-MS), who says the testing tower will help maintain the research center’s place at the forefront of U.S. space exploration. ‘Stennis Space Center is the nation’s premier rocket engine testing facility,’ says Wicker. ‘It is a magnet for public and private research investment because of infrastructure projects like the A-3 test stand. In 2010,I authored an amendment to require the completion of that particular project, ensuring the Stennis facility is prepared for ever-changing technologies and demands.’ Others disagree, calling the project the ‘Tower of Pork’ and noting that the unused structure will cost taxpayers $840,000 a year to maintain. ‘Current federal spending trends are not sustainable, and if NASA can make a relatively painless contribution to deficit reduction by shutting down an unwanted program, why not let it happen?’ says Pete Sepp, executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union. ‘It’s not rocket science, at least fiscally.'”
In 2013, the men’s peloton rode alongside the Arc de Triomphe on the at the western end of the Champs-Élysées. In 2014, a women’s race will do the same. www.grahamwatson.com (file)
Tour de France owners Amaury Sport Organisation announced Saturday that a women’s race will take place at this year’s Tour de France.
La Course by Le Tour de France will take place on July 27 on the Champs-Elysées in Paris, coinciding with the final stage of the 2014 Tour de France. A few hours before the men’s peloton arrives in Paris, the world’s elite women cyclists will race the circuit in the historic heart of the city before fighting out a final sprint at the finish line on the Champs-Elysées. The race will be broadcast live on France Télévisions and Eurosport International. Further details of the race and its format will be unveiled at an official launch in the spring.
The announcement of the event is a victory forLe Tour Entier, an organization of women racers who launched a campaign for a women’s Tour de France last September, gaining nearly 100,000 online signatures. Le Tour Entier translated means “The Whole Tour.” Their manifesto for women’s cycling can be readhere.
Dutch star Marianne Vos, who took her seventh world cyclocross championship an hour after the announcement, is one of the founders of Le Tour Entier, along with pro cyclists Emma Pooley and Kathyrn Bertine, and retired Ironman triathlon champion Chrissie Wellington.
”I am delighted that ASO has decided to organize a women’s race this year, to accompany the Tour de France,” Vos said. “I am very excited to be taking part, especially with the majestic finish on the Champs-Elysées. The launch of this race is a revolutionary development in our sport. The Tour is the pinnacle of professional cycling, and I have no doubt that La Course by Le Tour identifies a new era for women’s cycling and will significantly contribute to the growth of road racing.”
ASO, which also organizes women’s races such as the Ladies Tour of Qatar and the Flèche Wallonne Femmes, said in a statement, “the desire to add this event is a logical step forward in a discipline that is increasing in maturity and recognition.”
“Making a contribution to the development of all forms of cycling is a vocation for the Tour de France,” said Yann Le Moenner, managing director of ASO. “This is even more so when it is about supporting a discipline that is clearly on the up and has been making its mark in professional sport for many years now. As the event par excellence that attracts enormous crowds and TV viewers, the Tour has decided to welcome a women’s race during one of its outstanding stages.”
Following his successful election as UCI President in September, Brian Cookson created a women’s cycling commission, led by one of Cookson’s vice presidents, Tracey Gaudry, the first woman to be appointed to such a high post within the UCI. Cookson applauded ASO’s decision.
“I am delighted to see this exciting development for women’s cycling,” he said. “The UCI is committed to support the development of women’s cycling, and following my election to the UCI presidency in 2013, we established a Women’s Commission to focus our efforts here. The quality of professional women’s road racing has long deserved a wider audience, and we are very happy that this initiative by ASO will bring the sport to many fans, new and old. Women’s racing on the iconic parcours of the Champs-Elysées is a tremendous step forward, and we are pleased to welcome this addition to the UCI calendar.”
Original source
An anonymous reader sends this story from TechDirt: “You may recall the stories from the past couple years about the so-called ‘snooper’s charter’ in the UK — a system to further legalize the government’s ability to spy on pretty much all communications. It was setting up basically a total surveillance system, even beyond what we’ve since learned is already being done today. Thankfully, that plan was killed off by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. However, Prime Minister David Cameron is back to pushing for the snooper’s charter — and his reasoning is as stupid as it is unbelievable. Apparently, he thinks it’s necessary because the fictional crime dramas he watches on TV show why it’s necessary. Cameron said, ‘I love watching, as I probably should stop telling people, crime dramas on the television. There’s hardly a crime drama where a crime is solved without using the data of a mobile communications device. What we have to explain to people is that… if we don’t modernise the practice and the law, over time we will have the communications data to solve these horrible crimes on a shrinking proportion of the total use of devices and that is a real problem for keeping people safe.'”
Original source
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes “Charles Stross has written a very clever article where he describes the religious metaphor he uses with non-technical folks to explain the relationship between Mac OS X and UNIX. There is one true religion in operating systems says Stross and it is UNIX although there’s also an earlier, older, more arcane religion with far fewer followers, MULTICS, from which UNIX sprang as a stripped-down rules-deficient heresy. If MULTICS is Judaism then UNIX is Christianity. By the mid-1970s there were two main sects: AT&T UNIX, which we may liken unto the Roman Catholic Church, and BSD UNIX, which we may approximate to the Orthodox Churches. In an attempt to control the schisms, the faithful defined a common interoperating subset of the one true religion that all could agree on—the Nicene Creed of UNIX which is probably POSIX. Stross says that today the biggest church in the whole of UNIX is Mac OS X, which rests on the bedrock of Orthodox BSD but “has added an incredible, towering superstructure of fiercely guarded APIs and proprietary user interface stuff that renders it all but unrecognizable to followers of the Catholic AT&T path.” But lo, in the late 1980s, UNIX succumbed to the sins of venality, demanding too much money from the faithful and so, in 1991 Linus Torvalds nailed his famous source code release to the cathedral door and kicked off the Reformation. ‘The Linux wars were brutal and unforgiving and Linux itself splintered into a myriad of fractious Protestant churches, from the Red Hat wearing Lutherans to the Ubuntu Baptists.’ More recently, a deviant faith has sprung from Linux. ‘Android is the Church of Latter Day Saints of UNIX: hard-working, sober, evangelizing the public, and growing at a ferocious rate. There are some strange fundamentalist Mormon Android churches living in walled communities under the banners of Samsung and Amazon, but for the most part the prosperous worship at the Church of Google.’ Stross notes that as with all religion, those sects with most in common are the ones who hold the most vicious grudges against one another. ‘Is that clear?'”
Original source
We’ve been grilling cycling industry insiders to find out what they’re getting most excited about when they think ahead to the new year
Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice.
But the second part of the article’s title is as important as the first:
Over the past 16 years, the blog format has evolved, had social grafted onto it, and mutated into Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest and those new species have now taken over.
The advantages to using Facebook should be brought out onto the web. There should be no real disadvantage to using one platform or another. In fact, there should be an advantage to using your own platform rather than those of a startup that could go out of business at any moment.
If you buy the idea that articles aren’t dying – and anecdotally, I know I read as much as I ever did online – then a blog is simply the delivery mechanism. It’s fine for that to die. Even welcome. In some ways, that death is due to the ease of use of the newer, siloed sites, and makes the way for new, different kinds of content consumption; innovation in delivery.
In any case, let’s not ‘blog’, let’s just write—on our own personal place on the Web.
In fact, Jason’s article was preceded by a lovely post from Jeffrey called simply This is a website:
Me, I regret the day I started calling what I do here “blogging.”
I know how he feels. I still call what I write here my “journal” rather than my “blog”. Call it what you like, publishing
on your own website can be a very powerful move, now more than ever:
Blogging may have been a fad, a semi-comic emblem of a time, like CB Radio and disco dancing, but independent writing and publishing is not. Sharing ideas and passions on the only free medium the world has known is not a fad or joke.
One of the most overused buzzwords of today’s startup scene is the word “disruption”. Young tech upstarts like to proclaim how they’re going to “disrupt” some incumbent industry of the old world and sweep it away in a bright new networked way. But on today’s web of monolithic roach-motel silos like Facebook and Twitter, I can’t imagine a more disruptive act than choosing to publish on your own website.
It’s not a new idea. Far from it. Jeffrey launched a project called Independent’s Day in 2001:
No one is in control of this space. No one can tell you how to design it, how much to design it, when to “dial it down.” No one will hold your hand and structure it for you. No one will create the content for you.
Those words are twelve years old, but they sound pretty damn disruptive to me today.
I’m returning to a
personal site, which flips everything on its head. Rather than teasing things apart into silos, I can fuse together different kinds of content.
So, I’m doubling down on my personal site in 2014.
He is not alone. Many of us are feeling an increasing unease, even disgust, with the sanitised, shrink-wrapped, handholding platforms that make it oh-so-easy to get your thoughts out there …on their terms …for their profit.
Of course independent publishing won’t be easy. Facebook, Pinterest, Medium, Twitter, and Tumblr are all quicker, easier, more seductive. But I take great inspiration from the work being done at Indie Web Camp. Little, simple formats and protocols—like webmentions—can have a powerful effect in aggregate. Small pieces, loosely joined.
Mind you, it’s worth remembering that not everybody
wants to be independent. Tyler Fisher wrote about this on Medium—“because it is easier and hopefully more people will see it”— in a piece called I’m 22 years old and what is this. :
Fighting to get the open web back sounds great. But I don’t know what that means.
If we don’t care about how the web works, how can we understand why it is important to own our data? Why would we try if what we can do now is so easy?
Therein lies the rub. Publishing on your own website is still just too damn geeky. The siren-call of the silos is backed up with genuinely powerful, easy to use, well-designed tools. I don’t know if independent publishing can ever compete with that.
In all likelihood, the independent web will never be able to match the power and reach of the silos. But that won’t stop me (and others) from owning our own words. If nothing else, we can at least demonstrate that the independent path is an option—even if that option requires more effort.
Some folks are adamant that you should own your own words when you publish online. For example, to explain why he doesn’t use services like Quora, Branch, and Google-Plus, Dave Winer says: “I’m not going to put my writing in spaces that I have no control over. I’m tired of playing the hamster.”
As someone who went through puberty with social media, it is hard to relate to this sentiment. I have only ever “leased,” from the likes of LiveJournal (middle school), Myspace (middle school), Facebook (high school), and Twitter (college).
For me, publishing on a platform I have some ownership and control over is a matter of future-proofing my work. If I’m going to spend time making something I really care about on the web—even if it’s a tweet, brevity doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful—I don’t want to do it somewhere that will make it inaccessible after a certain amount of time, or somewhere that might go away, get acquired, or change unrecognizably.
This! This is why owning your own words matters.
I have a horrible feeling that many of the people publishing with the easy-to-use tools of today’s social networks don’t realise how fragile their repository is, not least because everyone keeps repeating the lie that “the internet never forgets.”
We were told — warned, even — that what we put on the internet would be forever; that we should think very carefully about what we commit to the digital page. And a lot of us did. We put thought into it, we put heart into, we wrote our truths. We let our real lives bleed onto the page, onto the internet, onto the blog. We were told, “Once you put this here, it will remain forever.” And we acted accordingly.
Sadly, when you uncover the deceit of that lie, it is usually through bitter experience:
Occasionally I become consumed by the idea that I can somehow find — somehow
restore — all the droppings I’ve left on the internet over the last two decades. I want back the IMed conversations that caused tears to roll from my eyes, I want back the alt girl e-zines I subscribed to, wrote poetry for. I fill out AOL’s Reset Password form and send new passwords to email addresses I don’t own anymore; I use the Way Back Machine to search for the diary I kept in 1999. I am hunting for tracks of my former self so I can take a glimpse or kill it or I don’t know what. The end result is always the same, of course; these things are gone, they have been wiped away, they do not exist.
I’m going to continue to publish here on my own website, journal, blog, or whatever you want to call it. It’s still possible that I might lose everything but I’d rather take the responsibility for that, rather than placing my trust in ”the cloud”someone else’s server. I’m owning my own words.
The problem is …I publish more than words. I publish pictures too, even the occasional video. I have the originals on my hard drive, but I’m very, very uncomfortable with the online home for my photos being in the hands of Yahoo, the same company that felt no compunction about destroying the cultural wealth of GeoCities.
Flickr has been a magnificent shining example of the web done right, but it is in an inevitable downward spiral. There are some good people still left there, but they are in the minority and I fear that they cannot fight off the douchtastic consultants of growth-hacking that have been called in to save the patient by killing it.
I’ve noticed that I’m taking fewer and fewer photos these days. I think that subconsciously, I’ve started the feel that publishing my photos to a third-party site—even one as historically excellent as Flickr—is a fragile, hollow experience.
In 2014, I hope to figure out a straightforward way to publish my own photos to my own website …while still allowing third-party sites to have a copy. It won’t be easy—binary formats are trickier to work with than text—but I want that feeling of independence.
I hope that you too will be publishing on your own website in 2014.
Original source
JoeyRox writes “The recent decline in Facebook’s popularity with teenagers appears to be worsening. A Global Social Media Impact study of 16 to 18 year olds found that many considered the site ‘uncool’ and keep their profiles alive only to keep in touch with older relatives, for whom the site remains popular. Researches say teens have switched to using WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter in place of Facebook.”
Original source
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes “The NYT reports that Milwaukee has begun a pilot program to use cheese brine to keep city roads from freezing, mixing the dairy waste with traditional rock salt as a way to trim costs and ease pollution. ‘You want to use provolone or mozzarella,’ says Jeffrey A. Tews, the fleet operations manager for the public works department, which has spread the cheesy substance in Bay View, a neighborhood on Milwaukee’s south side. ‘Those have the best salt content. You have to do practically nothing to it.’ Local governments across the country have been experimenting with cheaper and environmentally friendly ways of thawing icy thoroughfares, trying everything from sugar beet juice to discarded brewery grain in an attempt to limit the use of road salt, which can spread too thin, wash away and pollute waterways. ‘If you put dry salt on a roadway, you typically lose 30 percent to bounce and traffic,’ says Emil Norby, who works for Polk County and was the first in Wisconsin to come up with the cheese brine idea to help the salt stick. In a state where lawmakers once honored the bacterium in Monterey Jack as the state’s official microbe, residents of Bay View say they have noticed little difference, good or bad, in the smell of their streets, and city officials say they have received no complaints. The mayor of Bay View says it’s an experiment, but one that makes sense. The brine will come from the Dresser Farm in Polk County, where it is already being used on the roads. The only cost will be for transportation and distribution. ‘We thought, ‘Well, let’s give it a shot.’ The investment in this project is $1,474.'”
