“You can create activities for the Rover cameras to take pictures at any target. The Downlink browser helps you plan the placement of each picture by drawing “footprints” over the pictures that we use to plan activities.”

Due to a slashdotting, there don’t seem to be any updates at the moment for data from Mars to look at, but there is an irc channel #maestro on irc.freenode.net where I imagine there will be announcements.

Via #maestro: the JPL planetary photolog for Mars.

^ Spirit’s eye view of Mars landing site. Image credit: NASA/JPL.

Spirit has succeeded where Beagle2 has faltered. Via /. I’ve found Maestro:

“NASA has released Maestro, a public version of the primary software tool used by scientists to operate the Mars Exploration Rovers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Anyone can download Maestro for free from http://mars.telascience.org and use it to follow along with the rovers’ progress during the mission. You can use Maestro to view pictures from Mars in 2D and 3D and create simplified rover activity plans. During the mission, updates will be released for Maestro containing the latest images from Mars.”

Just downloaded it [via bitorrent! cool!], but haven’t played with it yet. Telepresence for the masses is a great idea to get people excited about NASA’s mission again; which of course they pioneered back with Sojourner [Carnegie Mellon Robot hall-of-fame page here, lego version here]. Maybe it’s the beginning of the grid-distributed telemetric exploration of space I mooted in “Why starfleet”.

should hit comet Wild-2 today. I’m hoping its AeroGel (yes, I know I’m obsessed with the stuff) ice-cream scoop reveals some nice surprises. I surmises about those surprises over at DiePunyHumans.

Tom from OK/Cancel on the anthropomorphic tendency I’ve definitely felt towards my Roomba.

“None of this makes sense, yet it makes perfect sense. It feels perfectly natural for me to relate to my little autonomous vacuum cleaner in this way. After all, how else could I talk about it? Our entire language is built around words for emotions, words for folly, words for thoughts and ideas. That’s the raw material we have to work with, but these words refer to properties that machines do not have.”

» OK/Cancel: I, Robot, You Jane.

Alias-fans assemble! Cracking idea from Scott Raymond. Quoting big chunks, but it’s worth it:

“With the addition of RSS, BitTorrent could really be taken to the next level, and I’d be able to forget about the plumbing of TV altogether. I want RSS feeds of BitTorrent files. A script would periodically check the feed for new items, and use them to start the download. Then, I could find a trusted publisher of an Alias RSS feed, and “subscribe” to all new episodes of the show, which would then start downloading automatically — like the “season pass” feature of the TiVo.”

He goes on to pitch it to the media owners:

“Illegitimate uses of this system would obviously abound. But the potential legitimate uses are huge as well. For one, traditional content providers (like the TV networks) could take advantage of the demand for their programming by scooping the copyright infringers. If ABC released Alias on BitTorrent with advertising built in, the file could be delivered to their audience very fast, and would cost them next to nothing in distribution costs. The economics of producing video programming would be upended — each viewer of the program would, in effect, foot the bill for a tiny slice of the distribution overhead, causing a massive component of traditional media company infrastructure to become obsolete.

It would be an audacious move for an advertising-supported channel. The arguments about skipping ads in Tivo is not necessarily avoided. You can imagine if they did do this, then they’d want you to download a handicapped, proprietary player, that was a player only- with no other button that “PLAY”, keyed to a proprietary file format that they’d use for the media itself.

Would I mind? I dunno… if I got to watch what I wanted. When I had my Tivo, I didn’t really care how the shows were encoded, but that was becuase the entire user-experience was so good. If I got stuck with a locked-up file format, and a bad player; then I’d be annoyed that there was no path for innovation or improvement around the experience.

Also, the argument might be made by the media owners, that if they didn’t lock the goods up, then some enterprising soul would edit the episode for ads and re-release it as a torrent.

Scott ends with a rousing paragraph:

“The result: the TV distribution networks are completely end-run by an ad-hoc, decentralized, loosely-coupled network. And in the process, significant opportunities are afforded to independent content producers of audio and video to reach a mass audience with insignificant distribution costs.”

Sounds very sensible to me… especially perhaps for a large public service broadcaster who doesn’t need to worry about those troublesome ad-revenues… The BBC will probably investigate all sorts of content-management and DRM gubbins in the course of it’s investigation of p2p-distribution (as mentioned by BBCi’s chef-du-digital Ashley Highfield previously) – whereas it has the information resources and the talent right now to quickly and (relatively) cheaply do what Scott has outlined.

Dear (Risk-Averse) Auntie: Here is the data. Turn it into RSS, make the links to torrents, let the community of early adopters who are screaming out to help you, help you.

Use these open standards to quickly and cheaply create the loam, and others [cf. Steam] will make great bleeding-edge clients and functionality to navigate your media-commons.

» scottraymondnet: 16 December, 2003 | Broadcatching with BitTorrent

I was obsessed with AeroGel back in the summer. A succinct and surprising summary of it in The Guardian today [my emboldening]:

“One of the most beautiful of modern inventions is aerogel. This eerie stuff is a jelly made with air instead of water. A sheet of it can support 4,000 times its own weight. It is one of the great insulators, as well as a great soundproofer. It is uncannily light. It looks like frozen smoke. And pretty much its only use so far is aboard a spacecraft called Stardust, which is preparing to sail through the tail of a comet and catch its dust with a trap made of the stuff. Aerogel sounds like the last word in materials science, but in reality it has been around since 1933.“

The article itself is focussed on LED technology, which is cool… but not as cool as AeroGel. For instance, here’s some AeroGel art by April Debra Tsui.

Made aware of our Roomba’s military parentage on the weekend, I took a little look around iRobot‘s site. Amongst the slightly-sinister-but-undeniably-cool fishbots, and swarm-deploying mothershipbots I found the Bloodhound.

When Bloodhound arrives at the wounded soldier, it will notify the medic, and the medic will examine the casualty using the robot’s sensors. Bloodhound’s diagnostic sensors include video cameras, an electronic stethoscope, and two-way audio to communicate with a conscious casualty.

After determining the extent of the casualty’s injuries, the medic will be able to treat those injuries using Bloodhound’s medical payloads. Potential payloads include devices to stop bleeding (inflatable bandages, fibrin bandages, liquid fibrin sealants, Factor VII), intramuscular auto-injectors (which can deliver morphine, adrenaline, and nerve agent antidotes), and advanced diagnostic devices. Using these payloads, the medic will be able to stabilize the casualty’s condition until a medic can arrive or the casualty can be evacuated.

Bloodhound is part of a Robotic Rescue Team being developed at iRobot. Other members of this team will include robots for evacuating casualties and robots for shielding casualties from hostile fire.

The bloodhound is semi-autonomous, so a human medic makes the choices for it. However, it is not an enormous leap to think of autonomous battlefield medibots. Would their dispassionate graphite and metal swarms shield and treat the enemy without discrimination?

Would their manufacturer feel obligated to encode in them not only Asimov’s Laws but supplement them with the Hippocratic Oath?

Foe quotes “Spirited Away” on identity theft:

“I can’t believe I forgot my name. She almost took it from me.”

“If you completely forget it, you’ll never find your way home. I’ve tried everything to remember mine.”

Lovely.

Okay.

So, this is a slightly polished version of a rant I had to Marko and Foe about a week ago after a couple of glasses of wine in restaurant Motti.

It’s the 24th century.

Humans have left behind the earth, and their sense of shame in wearing Lycra to boldy go places. They have faster-than-lightspeed transport and communication technology. They’ve also developed immersive virtual realities of amazing sophistication and subtlety.

Some my question is: why go anywhere in spaceships?

Why not fire off sophisticated, autonomous drones that travel to every point of the cosmos at warp-speed; to survey and construct immersive, explorable Holodeck simulations of where they’ve got to and who they’ve met?

Why not stay at home in The Presidio and wander into a holosuite at your leisure to wrestle with a green lizard man – safe in the knowledge that no harm can come to you. Knowing you can wander at home at night to your family – and some great mexican food rather than some galactic-goop brewed up by an irritating stowaway?

Why have ‘authorised’, trained Starfleet officers at all – if the ‘mass-amateurisation of everything’ is starting right now – then where will it be in the 24th century?

Grid-distribute the experiences and associated tasks to the millions of CosmoBloggers or the equivalent telepresent hordes, a la Patrick Farley’s Spiders. Let First Contact be with kids, goat herds and losers rather than uptight French hornblowers, macho Iowans or drippy ex-quantum-leapers.

Why do these people have to construct giant spaceships with detachable saucer sections to pack their kids onto?

It’s just dumb!

And, sure Mr. TV-producer, it be harder to churn out the episodes without having to rely on Jefferies Tubes or reversing the tachyon-converter polarity nonsense – but you’d be able to tell better stories!

Our heroes would just go to incredibly strange places and do incredible strange things, and be heroes without weapons or science or tools of any kind!! I guess there would be a big downside in merchandizing, without nice big books of cut-away transporters and guns, but hey.

And don’t give me the answer I got back in the restaurant, that they need to fly places in spaceships “to be there”. They are there in any way their monkey brains can understand it!

These people have had 400 years to read Baudrillard!!!

Great Philip K. Dick quote found at AllAboutGeorge:

“We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups.

I ask, in my writing, What is real?

Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.

I do not distrust their motives. I distrust their power. It is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind.

I ought to know.

I do the same thing.”

About to go and snuggle up with the lastest PKD-themed Wired.