From today’s New York Times:

Google is unveiling within Google Earth today a new service called Sky that will allow users to view the skies as seen from Earth. Like Google Earth, Sky will let users fly around and zoom in, exposing increasingly detailed imagery of some 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies.

“You will be able to browse into the sky like never before,” said Carol Christian, an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute, a nonprofit academic consortium that supports the Hubble Space Telescope.

While other programs allow users to explore the skies, they typically combine a mix of representations of stars and galaxies that are overlaid with photographs, Ms. Christian said. “These are really the images of the sky. Everything is real.”

The Sky imagery was stitched together from more than one million photographs from scientific and academic sources, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Palomar Observatory at the California Institute of Technology and the NASA-financed Hubble.

The Sky service features different layers showing the various constellations, a user’s guide to the galaxies, as well as the future position of planets and the moon. There is even a “backyard astronomy” layer which highlights stars, galaxies and nebulae that are visible to the naked eye, with binoculars or with small telescopes.

Here is a video of Sky in action:

(Video length: 1:05)

Chinook is the world’s first unbeatable checkers program.

The scientists at the University of Alberta who developed the program report that they have rigorously proved that Chinook, in a slightly improved version, cannot ever lose. Any opponent, human or computer, no matter how skilled, can at best achieve a draw.

In essence, that reduces checkers to the level of tic-tac-toe, for which the ideal game-playing strategy has been codified into an immutable strategy. But checkers — or draughts, as it is known in Britain — is the most complex game that has been solved to date, with some 500 billion billion possible board positions, compared with the 765 possibilities in tic-tac-toe.

If you enjoy losing, you can actually play a game against Chinook here.

Are you a cycling fan? Check out the Tour de France Live Tracker 2007. Using GPS and other technology, this site tracks the exact position and additional data (heart rate, cadence, speed, power) of the racing cyclists on an interactive map.

HT: Lifehacker

Here are two great recent photos of the International Space Station (ISS). The first was taken by the STS-117 Shuttle Crew while in space. The second was taken by astronomers at a Boston-area high school from the ground.

Explanation: The developing International Space Station (ISS) has changed its appearance again. During the past week, the Space Shuttle Atlantis visited the ISS and added pieces of the Integrated Truss Structure that mirrored those added in September 2006, including a second impressively long array of solar panels. The entire array of expansive solar panels are visible at the edges of the above image taken by the Shuttle Atlantis Crew after leaving the ISS to return to Earth. The world’s foremost space outpost can be seen developing over the past several years by comparing the above image to past images. Also visible above are many different types of modules, a robotic arm, another impressive set of solar panels, and a supply ship. Construction began on the ISS in 1998.

Explanation: This remarkable image of the space shuttle orbiter Atlantis docked with the International Space Station (ISS) was taken at a range of 190 nautical miles. To record the fast moving pair, last week astronomers at Clay Center Observatory, near Boston, Massachusetts, planet Earth, used a satellite tracking system and 25-inch diameter telescope in combination with a digital video camera. In the sharp picture, Atlantis is below and left of center. The aft view shows three main engines just below its vertical tail glinting in the sunlight. With the Sun shining from below, the body of the orbiter casts a long shadow across the ISS itself and impressive details of the ISS solar arrays used for power generation are easily visible. The large set of solar arrays installed at the lower right was delivered during this visit from Atlantis.

Recommended Books on the Space Station:

Well, it’s not quite the Holodeck, but it still sounds pretty interesting. Has anyone ever heard about the Visualization Portal at UCLA before? I came across this in some reading this weekend.

A 40-seat theater with up-to-date virtual reality technologies located on the 5th floor of the Math Science Building, the facility is literally a portal into other times, places, and experiences. The Portal is used for both instruction and research, and has particular foci on Historical Architectural Monuments, Scientific Visualizations and Digital Technologies for the Performance Arts …

The historical architectural models shown in the Portal are an experiment in using virtual reality to recreate a place and time that no longer exist. Used both for research and instruction, there are currently 42 models under development to improve the understanding of the original historical site and to develop new applications that will ultimately heighten the research and instruction experiences.

Rhett Smith shares about his experience touring the Second Temple in the Visualizaton Portal. (The Second Temple was the reconstructed Temple in Jerusalem which stood between 516 BC and 70 AD. Solomon’s Temple, also known as the First Temple, was destroyed in 586 BC.)

Bel Air Presbyterian attender and UCLA Chair for the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Bill Schniedewind was our host, as he walked us through the Second Temple. In just that short time the Bible was brought to life for me in ways that I could not have imagined. I have been to Israel, Syria and Jordan before, but even being there in person didn’t compare to walking through the Second Temple in practical “virtual reality.” Dr. Schniedewind also walked us through Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls which was also very, very fascinating.

You can view a sample video of the Portal here. The video takes you on a brief virtual reality tour of the Second Temple, the Coliseum, Port Royal, the Roman Forum, and of course a virtual UCLA campus. The video also includes samples from some of the scientific visualizations such as simulations of the creation of the universe, weather models, antibodies, etc. This sounds like a fascinating project and well worth a visit if you are ever in the area.

For those of you who enjoyed last week’s post on the Air Car, you may also find this article interesting. Retired TV station owner and broadcast engineer, John Kanzius, has discovered how to burn saltwater as fuel.

Kanzius was actually working on a way to treat cancer with radio-waves, when he discovered that his radio frequency generator could release the oxygen and hydrogen from saltwater, creating a high temperature flame. The heat generated is sufficient to run a car engine.

You can see the video of John’s invention being tested out by engineers at the APV Company Laboratory in Akron here. If this works, I guess there would no longer be a need to drill under the ocean for fuel.

HT: Instapundit

Click here for related post: The Air Car – A Car that Runs on Compressed Air

In the search for a viable alternative to gasoline-only driven cars, research has so far focused on ethanol, electricity, hybrids, and hydrogen. Now you can add yet another alternative to the mix. Check out the Air Car, the world’s first car that uses compressed air to push its engine’s pistons and produces zero, that’s right, zero emissions.

The Air Car has a range of 125 miles and can go up to speeds of 68 mph. Not bad considering you can fill up the tank in minutes with compressed air for only $2. Or you can plug your car in overnight and let the car’s built-in air compressors refill the tank in about 4 hours.

The Air Car was developed by ex-Formula One engineer Guy Nègre for Luxembourg-based MDI. It is currently in production and 6000 units should be availabe in India by next summer.

HT: Instapundit

Click here for related post: How Would You Like to Run Your Car on Saltwater?

I ran across a couple of articles discussing children over the weekend. First up, an article from The Australian reporting on a paper from the Optimum Population Trust arguing that children are bad for the environment. The OPT paper suggests that “having large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanour in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a big car and failing to reuse plastic bags.” According to John Guillebaud, co-chairman of OPT and emeritus professor of family planning at University College London,

The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights. The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child.

Meanwhile, Josh Sowin at Fire and Knowledge excerpts some paragraphs from Bill McKibben’s book, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age. McKibben warns that genetic engineering in the future could cause some parents to begin viewing their children as products rather than people.

[Genetically engineered] children will, in effect, be assigned a goal by their programmers: “intelligence,” “even temper,” “athleticism.”

… Now two possibilities arise. Perhaps the programming doesn’t work very well, and your kid spells poorly, or turns moody, or can’t hit the inside fastball. In the present world, you just tell yourself that’s who he is. But in the coming world, he’ll be, in essence, a defective product. Do you still accept him unconditionally? …

The other outcome—that the genetic engineering works just as you had hoped—seems at least as bad. Now your child is a product … And what can she take pride in? Her good grades? She may have worked hard, but she’ll always know that she was specced for good grades. Her kindness to others? Well, yes, it’s good to be kind—but perhaps it’s not much of an accomplishment once the various genes with some link to sociability have been catalogued and manipulated.

I like God’s perspective on all this so much better. According to the Bible, children are neither pollutants to be controlled nor products to be evaluated; rather, children are a blessing from the Lord to be loved, cared for and raised to know God.

Sons are a heritage from the LORD, children a reward from him. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. (Psalm 127:3,5)

Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” (Matthew 19:14)

Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. (Ephesians 6:4)

“Email is for old people” – so says the younger generation (ages 13-24). They still use email when they need to, but it is no longer their primary means of written communication. For the younger generation, email has largely been replaced by text messaging (SMS), instant messaging (IM), and social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

So why is email dying out? Stephen Wellman offers the following three reasons why today’s young people prefer these other means of communication:

1. Control. The advantage of text messaging, IM, and social network sites, compared with e-mail, is that these systems are controlled by users’ buddy lists. While spamming inside these modes of communications does happen, it’s still much harder and more expensive to spam people through IM, text, and social networks than it is through e-mail.
2. Immediacy. IM is instant and so, too, is SMS. Social networks are immediate, too. E-mail is slower. Users have to wait for a response and e-mail communication isn’t, in most cases, a real-time dialogue.
3. Personalization. E-mail is a cold medium. It’s not as personal as social networking, where message updates and friend connections extend users’ online personas through their communications. Cell phones are, almost by definition, highly personal devices and, likewise, younger users see text messages as more intimate.

So, what do you think? Is email really on its way out? How about some of the younger readers of this blog? Is email “just so twentieth-century?”

HT: Jim Martin, at A Place for the God Hungry

Vanishing bees. In the United States tens of billions of bees have gone missing (more than a quarter of the country’s bee population), and scientists don’t know why. Although conspiracy theorists are blaming everything from cell phones to Osama Bin Laden, scientists are exploring more likely suspects such as a virus, a fungus or a pesticide.

Strait Track. Russia wants to build a railway link under the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska. The 63-mile (102-kilometer) tunnel would be the longest in the world, twice as long as the Channel Tunnel connecting France to the United Kingdom. If completed, you could conceivably ride from New York to London by train, three-quarters of the way around the world. The plans for the tunnel include a high-speed train line, oil and gas pipelines, and a fiber-optic cable network.

Chitty-chitty-bang-bang, we love you. Popular Mechanics has a neat article on the history and future of flying cars, including the nifty 1956 Aerocar that was able to “leap from the highway at 55 mph and cruise up to 100 mph at around 12,000 ft. with a range of up to 300 mi.”

NASA has jumped into the action with a 15-year plan to launch three successive models.

The first, scheduled for 2008, will resemble a compact Cessna with folding wings that converts to road use (it shouldn’t cost any more than a Mercedes-Benz). The second, with a rollout planned for 2015, will be a two-person pod with small wings and a rear-mounted propeller. The third will rise straight up like a mini-Harrier jet and should be on the market by 2020.

And what about the danger of mid-air collissions?

Personal air vehicles will use GPS and cell phone technology to automatically broadcast information about location and speed to ground-based towers. From the ground, an automated computer system will update the flight path of every sky vehicle and provide instant directions—automatically avoiding collisions and minimizing flight time. Meanwhile, on-board sensors will detect nearby trees, buildings and power lines and avoid collisions.

Move over George Jetson – the future is coming.

Have you ever come across a place name while reading your Bible and wondered where it was? OpenBible.info has plotted the locations of every identifable place mentioned in the Bible and coordinated the information with Google Earth to give you satellite images of Bible place names sorted by book and chapter. The process is called Bible Geocoding.

This could be a helpful site to have open while reading or studying a particular book of the Bible to keep track of each place on the map. But I am not very creative when it comes to these things. Let’s hear it from all our Google Earth techies out there. How else could you utilize this cool Bible Geocoding data site? What are the possibilities?

OpenBible.info is a website that is working on “collecting basic biblical data—such as the locations of all the places in the Bible—into an accessible format. The goal of this site is to make this useful but uncollected data available for you to use and remix however you want.”

HT: Between Two Worlds: Geocoding the Bible