Hans Cathcart’s Homepage

I’ve now been ‘online’ in one way or the other for nearly 20 years, starting the first time I connected to a bulletin board system in Dec. of 1988. I’ve played, chatted, searched, published, expressed options, made friends, argued, campaigned for office, experimented, learned, even entered the truly bizarre world of online dating. What’s it all leading to? Well, if you recall the battle-cry of the Borg on STTNG you’ll already know ‘you will be assimilated.’ We Fell Fine is just about the only proof you’ll ever need. As far as interesting Internet experiments go it’s not completely lame. And I want you to want me is slightly surreal. Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar are sickly creative.

This week could be one for the Space history books…

Atlantis (STS-122) is scheduled to land on Wednesday. There are four possible landing opportunities, two at Kennedy (preferred) and two at Edwards AFB. As you may know NASA likes to avoid landing the Shuttle at Edwards because then they have to load up the orbiter onto the specially-equipped Boeing 747 and haul it back to Kennedy, which looks cool, but delays the next scheduled mission for that Shuttle. Now, typically if the weather at both these locations is unfavorable due to storms or high-winds then NASA will delay the landing and try again the next day. They have enough oxygen and fuel to make it to early Friday if necessary. But, here’s the catch…

Last week President Bush authorized the DoD to attempt to destroy a doomed super-secret spy satellite, designated USA 193, that is expected to tumble uncontrolled from orbit within the next few weeks. The U.S. Navy will try to destroy the satellite prior to its reentry by slamming a ship-fired SM-3 into it.

from Sky and Telescope:
“Apparently, DoD computer models have shown that, if left alone, more than half of USA 193’s roughly 5,000-pound mass would survive the atmospheric plunge and reach the ground. In particular, there’s a 20-inch diameter tank containing about a half ton of the highly toxic propellant hydrazine. So the decision was made to break up the satellite if possible.”

The DoD has determined that Thursday is the first possible day to start letting the Navy begin ‘target-practice’ and let SM-3 ‘meet’ USA 193. And this brings up the interesting question of, do you really want to be launching a kinetic warhead into space to break-up a spy satellite into thousands of little bits the same day 7 relatively un-armed Astronauts are attempting to guide a rather fragile glider back to Earth. Now, admittedly the Earth’s atmosphere and Space are pretty big, but if something were to happen it would look rather… what’s the word… stupid.

NASA is remaining surprisingly mum about the conflict, but I bet NASA really, really, really wants to get out-of-the-way and land Atlantis on Wednesday. And that brings up the interesting possibility of the fifth landing opportunity on Wednesday. That’s right, the fifth. If the weather at both Kennedy and Edwards is unfavorable, then Atlantis can also land at White Sands, NM. The last and only time the Shuttle has landed at White Sands was in 1982 when Columbia (STS-3) landed there during an R&D flight. But as it stands White Sands is now prepping for a possible landing.

Admittedly, this landing of Atlantis is not going to be as exciting as Jerry Bruckheimer could make it, and it will not end in Bruce Willis sacrificing himself to blow up an asteroid, but bringing in a Space Shuttle for a combat landing just before you start shooting at an out-of-control toxic spy satellite is about as exciting as it gets.

Working at a technology company that doesn’t make products like Apple or web services like Monster, but instead helps those companies have faster-performing web sites is sometimes a little hard to explain. Plus most people don’t really care how the Internet really works. But, every so often something happens on the Internet that catches the media’s attention, and when we’re quick Akamai’s marketing team puts some pretty cool info online for everyone to see. Here is a time-lapse depiction of the Middle-east Internet outage that started a couple weeks ago. The thing to realize about this animation is that all the lines are Internet BGP routes that are being advertised as good to use for Internet traffic. However, the latency on those links is so bad as to make using Web applications through those links practically impossible. Yes you heard me right, the Internet does not magically fix itself in real-time.

Today was the Virginia Presidential Primary of 2008. It was a rather historic day, and the first time I’ve really cared much about voting in a primary. Of the two remaining democratic candidates, not one was a white man, opening up the interesting possibility of a woman or African American man becoming President of the United States. The weather today was absolutely frightful with black ice forming everywhere. That kept the Maryland polls open a few hours longer, but by the end of the night Barack Obama had managed to over-take Hillary Clinton in the delegate count by winning decisively in Virginia, DC and Maryland. At this point it’s looking like neither one will win enough delegates to be the definitive candidate for the democratic party.

Earlier today I was watching NASA TV and Ihappened to catch Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, give a talk at one of NASA’s 50th Anniversary events. While I was watching, it struck me what a natural and gifted speaker Schmidt is, especially when compared with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder. While looking around YouTube I found this video of a much younger Schmidt giving a talk to a Public Speaking class. I guess you really can learn to become a better speaker.

From time to time my brain wanders and I think about Pay It Forward, the Catherine Ryan Hyde novel which was turned into a film staring Haley Joel Osment. The story left an indelible impression on me, no doubt because of Osment’s remarkable performance. So when I stumbled upon Tom Kyzivat’s Helium animation on Adobe’s Flash On showcase site, the story reminded me of the novel again. Tom is a remarkably talented young artist, and I’m sure we’ll see much of him as his career develops. Helium is sweet and fabulous, and SnowMitch vs SlushMel has a pretty amusing commentary on movie fight scenes.

I’m finally back in the Bay Area again for a well-deserved vacation, and am looking forward to catching up with all my good friends. I already almost shot Fiid out of the sky, but he managed to maneuver his plane out of the path of my missiles. While over at Jamie and Kim’s place I got into deep philosophical discussions again about technology and the world in general. Kim turned me onto this remarkable book called “Material World: A Global Family Portrait” which contrasts the life-styles of peoples from around the world. Captivating book.

Principal photography has begun on my ADIZ video project. This weekend Justin and I flew up to Frederick and Martinsburg and took the video footage we wanted for the project. Justin also took some great photographs of the trip which he’s posted on Flickr. At one point we flew over Harpers Ferry National Park, which has definitely sparked my interest in visiting it from the ground some day.

Update: May 2008, I have finally posted our documentary on YouTube ( Part 1 | Part 2 )

If you could, what superhero power would you like to have? Given my proclivity towards aviation you can probably guess may answer. But, after reading Daniel Gilbert’s “Stumbling on Happiness” and listening to his talk at TED, I wouldn’t choose flying any longer. I’d choose something no superhero or normal person has ever asked for, but after considering the facts you might choose “being able to better control what you think about” yourself. I’ve lost you haven’t I. Gilbert, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, together with another colleague conveys some really interesting thoughts on what our brains are doing when we’re doing nothing or when we’re thinking about the future. I just finished reading Gilbert’s book and it really does add an interesting spin on a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about over the past two years. If you had already read the book you’d be saying to yourself that you should really trust my advice over your own.

I find the term Web 2.0 so painful I honestly don’t use it in conversation. I’ve been a huge fan of the Web and hypertext in particular since I first saw it. Mwesh created a pretty neat YouTube video “The Machine is Us/ing Us” which is a bit of a history lesson about the Web. CoreyTheRaven created a video expressing his thoughts on paper, which perhaps has the highest bit to content ratio I’ve ever seen.