El Segundo, CA – November 18, 2005 – On Friday, November 25 at 1 p.m. (PDT), the Falcon 1 countdown to launch is expected to reach T-Zero. At that point, the hold-down clamps will release and the Falcon 1 rocket will begin its journey to orbit, accelerating to 17,000 mph (twenty-five times the speed of sound) in less than ten minutes.

Designed from the ground up by SpaceX, Falcon 1 is a two stage rocket powered by liquid oxygen and purified, rocket grade kerosene. On launch day, Falcon 1 will make history for several reasons:

* It will be the first privately developed, liquid fueled rocket to reach orbit and the world's first all new orbital rocket in over a decade.
* The main engine of Falcon 1 (Merlin) will be the first all new American hydrocarbon booster engine to be flown in forty years and only the second new American booster engine of any kind in twenty-five years.
* The Falcon 1 is the only rocket flying 21 st century avionics, which require a small fraction of the power and mass of other systems.
* It will be the world's only semi-reusable orbital rocket apart from the Shuttle (all other launch vehicles are completely expendable).
* Most importantly, Falcon 1, priced at $6.7 million, will provide the lowest cost per flight to orbit of any launch vehicle in the world, despite receiving a design reliability rating equivalent to that of the best launch vehicles currently flying in the United States.

The maiden flight will take place from the Kwajalein Atoll of the Marshall Islands. The customer for this mission is DARPA and the Air Force and the payload will be FalconSat-2, part of the Air Force Academy’s satellite program that will measure space plasma phenomena, which can adversely affect space-based communications, including GPS and other civil and military communications. The target orbit is 400 km X 500 km (just above the International Space Station) at an inclination of 39 degrees.

SpaceX Announces Falcon 1 Launch Date

Headphone amplifiers are standard equipment for the average music loving audiophile. The problem with this is that most quality headphone amplifiers capable of delivering enough juice to power your big bad Cans can become costly. So then comes along some genius named Chu Moy ( www.headwize.com ). Chu created a monster quite some time ago by openly publishing his schematic and circuit diagrams for what became known as the "cMoy" amp. These cMoys spread like fire through the audiophile and audio-tweaker community and with good reason. Chu's creation is based on a simple OP AMP (operational amplifier, the actual chip that drives our creation), they need few other components (a few resistors, switches, pots and caps) and they run happily for a long time on a single 9V battery, not to mention that, assuming its put together correctly, they sound incredible.

Ah yes, the mad headphone science of Mr. Chu Moy.

.: Modfatha.com :.

One of the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the world, Hong Kong has an overall density of nearly 6,700 people per square kilometer. The majority of its citizens live in flats in high-rise buildings. In Architecture of Density, Wolf investigates these vibrant city blocks, finding a mesmerizing abstraction in the buildings' facades.

These may lose something not being the original large-scale images, but they are still compelling. Almost abstract geometries, made more moving by the fact that they represent human living space.

MICHAEL WOLF

New Orb Album!

Okie Dokie It's The Orb On Kompakt

I Really Love Graffiti.

Art Crimes / graffiti.org - The Writing on the Wall

I Love Graffiti

Pictures of Walls

The Comptroller General of the United States, David Walker of the GAO, writes:

The Roman Empire fell for many reasons, but three seem particularly relevant for our times: (1) declining moral and ethical values and political comity at home, (2) overconfidence and overextension abroad, and (3) fiscal irresponsibility by the central government. All these are certainly matters of significant concern today. But it is the third area that is the focus of my responsibility and authority as Comptroller General, the nation's top auditor and chief accountability officer.

Unfortunately, there is no question that both U.S. government spending and tax cuts are spiraling out of control. Recent increases in federal budget deficits have far outpaced the cost of the global war on terrorism and incremental homeland security costs. Although the $319 billion fiscal 2005 deficit was considerably lower than the previous year's, it is still imprudently high -- especially given that federal spending is expected to increase dramatically when the baby boomers begin to retire later this decade.

Recommending this quote from DailyKos because I don't want to link to the registration-required BusinessWeek article.

Comptroller General draws 'Fall of Rome' analogy (from Daily Kos: Open thread)

This post concerns an experimental internal-BBC-only project designed to allow users to collectively describe, segment and annotate audio in a Wikipedia-style fashion. It was developed by the BBC Radio & Music Interactive R&D team - for this project consisting of myself, Tristan Ferne, Chris Bowley, Helen Crowe, Paul Clifford and Bronwyn Van Der Merwe. Although the project is a BBC project, all the speculation and theorising around the edges is my own and does not necessarily represent the opinion of my department or the BBC in general.

On the BBC Annotatable Audio project... (plasticbag.org)

Under the Annotatable Audio project, radio listeners would be able to mark and add descriptive keywords to segments of programming they want to flag for bookmarking or sharing with others. It means they could highlight a specific item within a lengthy bulletin stream and return to that particular point later

Public could help BBC to index archive

Posted on Monday, November 7, 2005. All text is verbatim from senior Bush Administration officials and advisers. In places, tenses have been changed for clarity. Originally from Harper's Magazine, October 2003. By Sam Smith.

Revision Thing (Harpers.org)