This weekend’s round of cool/interesting stuff for your perusal.
Amazon Back Up After Outage
Oops. The Amazon.com site became "unavailable" for millions of users across the U.S., at a potential cost of $31,000 per minute.
Note from Scott: Heard it went down the next day or so after the first big outage.
Electronic Device Stirs Unease at Book Fair
Is the electronic book approaching the tipping point?
That topic both energized and unnerved people attending BookExpo America, the publishing and bookselling industry’s annual trade show, which ended at the convention center here on Sunday.
Much of the talk was focused on the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic reader, which has gained widespread acclaim for its ease of use. Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, spent much of a packed session on Friday evangelizing about the Kindle, which he said already accounts for 6 percent of his company’s unit sales of books that are available in both paper and electronic formats.
Lander returns close-up pictures of Martian dust
The Phoenix lander has returned the highest-resolution pictures ever taken of dust and sand on the surface of another planet as it prepares for its primary mission of searching for signs of life on Mars, NASA scientists said on Thursday.
Military Supercomputer Sets Record
An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.
Note from Scott: Can SkyNet be far behind?
Top Ten Most Realistic Planets in Science Fiction
One of the worst examples of
unrealistic science in movies is the overly simple alien planet. Oftentimes, our heroes will visit the desert planet, or the Irish planet. But the best extraterrestrial worlds in science fiction are the ones with variety and a realistic ecosystem.
Note from Scott: Naboo? Are you kidding me?
Top writers feel heat from publishers' presses
In an age when reading for pleasure is declining, book publishers increasingly are counting on their biggest moneymaking writers to crank out books at a rate of at least one a year, right on schedule, and sometimes faster than that.
Many top-selling writers, such as John Grisham and Mary Higgins Clark, have turned out at least one book annually for years. Now some writers are beginning to grumble about the pressure, and some are refusing to comply.
Terry Pratchett, Lord of Discworld, fights to save his powers
"Do I," says Terry Pratchett suddenly, “have a small yellow moustache at the moment?” He does. His wife Lyn has just given him a turmeric drink.
“There is some evidence from America that it has some effect on Alzheimer’s, slows it down, but anyway I like it. She had me on that from the word go.”
Note from Scott: Sounds like a neat guy. Hope he beats it.
Ray Bradbury Wrong On Future Of Electronic Books
Science-fiction icon Ray Bradbury, who was quoted the other day as saying that e-books will never succeed because they're "not books," is wrong.They're succeeding already, and they are -- pretty much -- books.
If the sentiment had come from the lips of anyone other than Bradbury, an author for the ages who busted the boundaries of his too-often-juvenile genre, they'd be worthless. But attention must be paid, especially when you consider that Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian vision of how far people will go to hang onto the printed word.
Earth and Moon as Seen from Mars
Note from Scott: You just have to see it. Amazing!