In which tech writers forget there's a Rest Of The World

Remarkably narrow-minded article on "Five Useless Gadgets You Should Throw in the Trash" by a writer for Wired. (Of course, Wired) He thinks that printers, scanners, faxes, DVD or CD drives, and regular telephones (landlines, not cell phones) are "useless." He has a few caveats, but not enough to make up for the poor thinking of the rest of the article. This is the kind of thinking I'd liken to socialist central planning--"Why do you need your car? Take a bus everywhere! Why do you need your own house? Just rent an apartment--and there's no grass to mow!" He actually thinks that a printing "service" can replace your printer. I wonder how long their printouts take to get to you. But then, I'm sure you've never printed anything out that you couldn't simply wait a couple of days for, right?

I'm not going to call the author "stupid," as many have (or maybe they just meant the article--there's a decent case for that), but he's amazingly short-sighted.

The comment by "Sean" is priceless.

Mars, Mars, Mars...

I've got three posts on Martian science coming up. The papers have been full of them this week. I say "papers," and in this case, it's websites of actual newspapers. I remember in Clark's 2010 or 2061 (I've forgotten which, but it was one of his sequels to 2001), one old lady is living in EPCOT Center (remember: it was originally designed as a living community, not just a scientific theme park), and she's described as having a newspaper clipping on her wall, from one of the last of the printed editions of the New York TImes.

Back then, I thought Clark was really stretching, because there's no way we'd want to read our newspapers hunched over a computer monitor. For that matter, I still prefer to read on paper, rather than on a screen. But the economics of the thing is catching up to it. Sigh.

The best data recovery I've ever heard of

I see here that a computer hard drive from the space shuttle Columbia has been restored, and 99% of the experimental data on it has been recovered. Wow. This, despite the fact that the outside of the drive was a melted lump of metal and plastic, the seal had broken open, and part of the disk had been pitted with dust-sized debris. But because the computer was running DOS, which stores data in one place at a time, rather than scattering it across the disk, it chanced that the damage was not to the place the experimental data was stored, and 99% of the experiment's results were recovered.

The experiment probed the effect called "shear thinning," which is how substances like canned whipped cream come out like a liquid but then stiffen. They measured shear thinning in xenon near its critical point. NASA's write-up is here (with photos!), and this is a link to the article itself, coming out in Phys. Rev. E.

I think I remember some acquaintances or friends of friends at NASA who had another experiment on Columbia, but I don't know if any of their data were recovered.

TV in a flexible sheet

Here's the video. Looks impressive! I'm still waiting for a notebook computer that has pages like an actual notebook, and where the "pages" are each a flexible screen. TV on one page, computer output on another, use a third for writing with a stylus, like a tablet computer...