3:05 AM Tue, Jan 06, 2009 | Permalink
By Sheila Lennon  Email this author | Email this entry |
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service photo
Pink coral on the Palmyra Atoll in the Pacific, one of three remote and uninhabited Pacific island chains are being set aside as national monuments to protect them from oil and gas extraction and commercial fishing in what will be the largest marine conservation effort in history. The three areas _ totaling some 195,280 square miles _ include the Mariana Trench and the waters and corals surrounding three uninhabited islands in the Northern Mariana Islands, Rose Atoll in American Samoa and seven islands strung along the equator in the central Pacific Ocean.
Story: Bush to Protect Three Areas in Pacific.
I'd love a channel that streamed video from these lovely hidden places. Fish & Wildlife TV?
Theme feed: twitter.com/inauguration is using the microblogging site as a links blog, following news sites and aggregating links to their stories about the upcoming Presdential inauguration.
Informed reporting: One Hacker's Audacious Plan to Rule the Black Market in Stolen Credit Cards at Wired is a peek into a dark-side cybercrime spree. Max Butler isn't exactly a sympathetic figure.
The story is written by Wired magazine editor Kevin Poulsen, a former hacker who served five years in prison for breaking into FBI computers. Butler refused to be interviewed.
Spaceketeer:
courtesy of Zero-G
Esther Dyson: "I'm flying!"
Doc Searls points briefly and well (Flying higher) to Esther Dyson's current adventure, astronaut school in Russia, where she's training as a backup for another civilian astronaut. She's 57.
From her Flight School blog,
I want to learn everything they can teach me, and understand it. I'm learning about life support systems, pressure variations, radio systems, amperes-volts-and-watts (they're different things?!?), safety parachutes and the like. I'm learning to get in and out of a space suit properly, and I want to be good enough to be a help rather than a hindrance to the crew. I would love to be able to fly on the Soyuz, but even if I don't, I will have a solid understanding of how everything works.
Nonetheless, when it's all over, I want to bite the apple and become an American again, and help create the why-not part, as an investor in private space travel.
As part of this blog, she notes,
I will be focusing this blog on my cosmonaut training over the next few months, recounting my space EDventures as backup to Charles Simonyi, a civilian who will be going into space for the second time next March 25. Space Adventures, a US company, is organizing everything for both of us, and is our primary official interface with the Russian Space Agency. Day by day, of course, we will be living within the Russian system and experiencing it face-to-face, living in the Russian section of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, where NASA's astronauts also train but are housed in a "foreign" section. (On the Space Station, Charles will live in the Russian modules.) So we are either more local than the US astronauts here, or we are double foreigners... Photos at www.flickr.com/photos/edyson, often quicker than I can get the posts up.
Disclosure: I am an investor in and client of Space Adventures, which edits these posts.
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Hello, I'm Esther. I'm 57 and I'm an astronaut.
I think I can remember enough of my military days to muster a salute that would be suitably respectful, in part because she's a woman but also because she's not at all shy about her age or what she's doing with her life. I'm sure she would be a fascinating person to know. But take your vitamins if you're going to keep up!
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