Michel Fournier, the retired French army officer who hoped to fly a giant helium balloon a record 25 miles into the Earth’s atmosphere and parachute down again, failed again Tuesday.

Attempt at 25-Mile Skydive Is Scrapped Again - NYTimes.com

A telescopic camera in orbit around Mars caught a view of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suspended from its parachute during the lander's successful arrival at Mars Sunday evening, May 25.

This is quite a feat!

Camera On NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Snaps Phoenix During Landing | SpaceRef - Space News as it Happens

The first pictures sent back by NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander from the northern arctic plains of Mars show a flat terrain marked by a polygonal pattern of shallow troughs and a few pebbles scattered about.

Mars Lander Transmits Photos of Arctic Terrain - NYTimes.com

Lamest Fetish Items Ever: Gear Lust Gone Bad, 1993 - '95
Research by Nate Ralph Write to the Author
See related story: 15 Years of Wired: A Look Back
05.19.08 | 6:00 PM

15 years of Wired Fetish. That's 442 pages of obsessive gear lust. We were bound to make a few bad selections...

Lamest Fetish Items Ever: Gear Lust Gone Bad, 1993 - '95

Next month, Representative John B. Larson, a Connecticut Democrat, plans to go even further, proposing legislation that would essentially ban over-the-counter trading of energy futures by traders who don’t plan to take physical delivery of the commodity. While Nymex trading would be largely unaffected, billions of other trades could potentially be brought to a halt.

Market Maker - Energy Speculators Draw the Heat - NYTimes.com

The main conclusion of the Nordhaus analysis is that the ambitious proposals, "Stern" and "Gore," are disastrously expensive, the "low-cost backstop" is enormously advantageous if it can be achieved, and the other policies including business-as-usual and Kyoto are only moderately worse than the optimal policy. The practical consequence for global-warming policy is that we should pursue the following objectives in order of priority. (1) Avoid the ambitious proposals. (2) Develop the science and technology for a low-cost backstop. (3) Negotiate an international treaty coming as close as possible to the optimal policy, in case the low-cost backstop fails. (4) Avoid an international treaty making the Kyoto Protocol policy permanent. These objectives are valid for economic reasons, independent of the scientific details of global warming.

The Question of Global Warming

Sure, our summers are cool and foggy, our hills are steep, and our streets are twisty. But SF Googlers think this is the perfect place to work. Earlier this year, our own "Father of the Internet" Vint Cerf launched the office by inspiring the assembled engineers to think about today's challenges at scale, speaking about the challenges of interplanetary IP communication, the future of the Internet, and who's to blame for IPv4's limited address space (Vint says it's him).

I work here now :)

Official Google Blog: San Francisco office rides the wave

The interactions among the myriad participants in a tax system are as impossible to unravel as are those of the molecules in a gas, and the effects of tax policies are speculative and highly contentious. Will increasing tax rates on the rich increase revenues, as Barack Obama hopes, or hold back the economy, as John McCain fears? Or both?

Mr. Hauser uncovered the means to answer these questions definitively. On this page in 1993, he stated that "No matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5% of GDP." What a pity that his discovery has not been more widely disseminated.nullnullnullnullnullnull

You Can't Soak the Rich - WSJ.com

The Vatican's chief astronomer says that believing in aliens does not contradict faith in God.

SPACE.com -- Vatican: It's OK to Believe in Aliens

The cool thing about eBay's support system is it will always answer your question; unfortunately, that answer will always be a form letter on how to reset your password, as Timothy discovered when he tried to figure out how to sell his laptop to someone who wasn't a Nigerian scammer. Timothy has discovered the awful truth behind today's eBay—something many readers here already know—which is that it's become virtually impossible to sell any sort of medium-to-high end electronics there anymore.

Ugh!

Nigerian Scammers: It's Now Completely Impossible To Sell A Laptop On Ebay