This sounds awesome: a nationwide 4G-LTE wireless network that is scheduled to be up and running (covering 92% of the US population) by 2015. There are some minor details — such as AT&T and Verizon are not allow to play on this network! But that FCC clause denying AT&T and Verizon access is aimed at increasing wireless broadband competition. (Will it save Sprint’s business? Create a Google Wireless plan for Android phones? Turn Apple into its own ISP?) I’m thinking this could be a game-changer — or it could fizzle out like “femtocells”…. All depends on how it’s implemented and how much it’ll cost.
This consortium came into existence following the Harbinger Capital Partners investment group’s acquisition of SkyTerra Communications (now LightSquared). SkyTerra will provide the spectrum for this venture. Nokia Siemens will design the network, install equipment, and manage the operation, which consists of about 40,000 cellular base stations.
And the whole shebang will cover over 92 percent of the US population by 2015, the new company pledges.
I’ve always wondered why the detection of cellulose in space hasn’t been studied more. If cellulose actually exists elsewhere in the universe, I’d think that would be pretty good supporting evidence of ET life out there…
This was reported in Nature, in 1978. Tholins have been detected as well (I think by Carl Sagan). There are many unidentified bands in the spectra of stars. Wide bands are produced by some complex molecules in the interstellar space.
The NYTimes has a short video on robotic teachers that all look humanoid… but I’d think that the software to improve human learning is more important than having robots that don’t quite bridge the “uncanny valley.”
I haven’t seen this movie yet, but I was somewhat surprised to discover that it was produced by a company I’d never heard of: Illumination Entertainment. IBM apparently had a hand in rendering the animation, saying:
For “Despicable Me” the animation process generated 142 terabytes of data — an amount roughly equivalent to the traffic generated by over 118 million active MySpace users or 250,000 streams of 25 million songs.
I’m not sure why MySpace traffic is a benchmark for data usage, but I find it fascinating that the movie involved 330 animators/producers/staff and used 6,500 processor cores in a dedicated server farm… taking “12 months of intensive graphics and 3-D animation rendering, amounting to up to 500,000 frames per week.” So that’s 26 million frames for a 95-minute long movie… I gotta look up how many animators it used to take to do those old animated Disney movies by hand (and how many frames they made).
Apparently, you are what you drink. And if you drink bottled water (or bottled drinks in general), the isotope ratios in your favorite beverages can be traced back to where the water came from. So if you drink a lot of Dasani water bottled in Colorado, the isotope signature from that water can end up in your hair… and it’s possible that your drinking habits can be discovered from your hair’s isotope signature. The solution: constantly rotate your beverages and buy bottled water from all over the world….
A solar-powered plane just spent 26hrs in the air, proving that it’s possible for it to fly continuously, day or night. While the group behind it is planning to circle the globe in this solar plane, I think it would be more interesting to see this vehicle as an autonomous solar-powered plane — so that it could be an alternative to launching LEO satellites. If autonomous solar powered planes could “orbit” the Earth, then it would be a lot easier/cheaper to create a global wireless communication network (without the lag time that satellites have). Maybe there would be some real competition with wireless carriers… However, I’m probably vastly discounting the difficulty of making this plane autonomous.
