I’ll keep this short: I decided to give my boring computer background a makeover.
Naturally, this space dork grabbed some of his favorite images of the universe and cut them down to 1920×1200.
Below is a gallery of space things you, too, can use as computer backgrounds for your widescreen monitor.
Enjoy!
CAPE CANAVERAL – While covering the final space shuttle mission, I thought it’d be interesting to show the place where reporting of some incredible history has taken place.
I wanted to post this prior to launch, so it’s a day late (and a few thousand dollars in production value short). Fast-forward to the end for the launch from the press mound.
This is it, folks. The final space shuttle launch is upon us.
The glorified freight truck Atlantis launches Friday, July 8 at 11:26 a.m. EDT, and four lucky astronauts are hitching a ride. Once the crew gets up to a speed of about 17,500 mph — fast enough to keep them in continuous free fall — they’ll tag up with the International Space Station, perform a bread-and-butter mission, and coast back to Earth a couple weeks later.
I’m now a stone’s throw away from Kennedy Space Center* and parachuting into one of the geekiest and longest-lived reporting heritages on Earth, along with a veritable circus of other news media types.
My aim in this is simple: To document the end of a significant and contentious phase of human history. But I want to crowdsource the effort a bit.
I have a camera, a camcorder and my furious writing fingers. What would you have me do with these tools? Sky’s (not) the limit.
Longshot magazine (formerly 48 HR magazine*) screamed onto the internet/magazine/media experimentation scene in May, and went for round two this past weekend. Never heard of it? The magazine’s maxim is as follows: Produce a full, glossy and finished issue in 48 hours or less(!).
The editors pull it off by decreeing a theme, then granting hopeful contributors 24 hours** to submit their text, photos, illustrations and other content. In the following 24 hours, the mag’s staff selects, arranges, generates art, edits, fact-checks, copyedits, designs and posts a final product to an on-demand magazine publisher called MagCloud.
I didn’t make the cut in issue “zero” (as I lament in another post), themed hustle, nor did I make it this time around in issue one, themed comeback.
But I’m not too bummed about it, seeing as there were hundreds of submissions, many by writers I hold immense respect for. I can also see many reasons why my submission wasn’t published — in a way, I’m glad. To name a couple shortcomings, the piece had at least one three errors (fixed in this version), weird structure (not fixed) and lacked enough context/explanation (not fixed).
In my defense, I hope Longshot manages to launch an issue when I:
a) am not moving at a high rate of speed
b) have a reliable (or any) internet connection
and
c) can commit my full, undivided attention for more than a few minutes at a time
Even if that day never arrives, I’ll still crank out content for them in a frenzied, disorderly way. In the meantime, constructive criticism is welcome:
Journalists take a lot of flak these days.
For every article bravely shipped to an editor, journos risk a volley from Joe Audience, Jane Stakeholder and even fellow colleagues. Some criticism is well-deserved and well-put. The rest of it is any combination of uninformed, nonconstructive and downright mean.
I lack the institutional knowledge of my, er, “finely aged” colleagues (by no fault of my baby-faced self), but it seems to me that the anonymity, immediacy and searchability of the ‘net has lubricated the delivery of such criticism. In a not-so-great way.
Thus, it’s with great relief that I recently see not one but two very well-crafted criticisms of journalism. The first is Alexis Madrigal’s artful response to a recent Wired magazine piece, the second a review of “The Seven Deadly Sins Of Science Journalism” by Jonathan Parkinson at Science 2.0.
For this post I’m sticking to the latter piece, since it echoes some of the elements of Madrigal’s critique (e.g. sensationalism, oversimplification, getting it wrong, etc.). Also, some would argue the Wired.com blowup isn’t really about science journalism — and this is a sciencey blog, for crissakes!
If you’re too pressed for time, here’s Parkinson’s cardinal list:
I think it’s an extremely valid set of criticisms. But it’s a little light on constructive guidelines for my tastes.
Hence, therefore, I offer you ten commandments of science journalism! (more…)
Manhattan’s streets are aligned on a wonderfully regular grid, a relief to perfectionist types out there who crave order in their arrangement of asphalt.
But it ain’t perfect, and I’m not talking about downtown’s quagmire of back streets.
As it turns out, New York City’s grid is slightly skewed in a clockwise direction because, well… it makes more sense given the shape and direction of “Mannahatta.”
Cartographers often fool the foolhardy, however, by rotating streets into a more aesthetically pleasing arrangement (to agree with a map’s rectangular shape). Don’t believe me? Look for the compass on MTA’s subway map. It’s hanging out in the Long Island Sound.
Anyway, this regularity that’s a wee bit off creates not one but two golden opportunities — arguably four, if you like seeing half our backyard star — for photography and astronomy nerds.
