The Searchers - Trailer

to catch a comet

to catch a comet
Originally uploaded by Jirrupin.

This photo makes me smile!

Update: UFO Over O'hare Airport in Chicago...Photos?

Nothing as credible as the Chicago Tribune article but an anonymous person or person(s) have posted 2 photos. The photos claim to be the object in question and were posted over at AboveTopSecret.com. Here is an article from Earthfiles.com with some additional details and the 2 photos in question. You be the judge.

And here is a page with links to a number of articles discussing this incident.

Not All Media Needs to be Mindless

Universities are increasingly creating academic podcasts that (in moderation) can make you a more interesting human being. I myself have yet to sample these... which may explain my struggle to be interesting.

Amazon Music Catalog Mashed Up With YouTube

Zontube is a brilliant idea. It makes searching for music you love on YouTube so easy.
Only downside is you quickly lose track of time as you find one gem after another.

Touch Screen Technology On The Big Screen

An intuitive and amazing touch screen interface pioneered by big brain Jeff Han can be seen in the linked new video clip below.

Touch Screen Technology Demonstration Video (A brief commercial runs before the good stuff.)
The Jeff Han Article in the February issue of Fast Company provides more details.

Conspicuous Consumption

An interesting blog post about the mysterious Black American Express card. I assume my invitation for this card is in the mail but in the interim this provides some details.

Lost?

The recent news meme focused on various people getting lost in the wilderness or snowstorms and then getting found is interesting. It makes me wonder how this works. Are we as an audience drawn to these stories for a reason at this particular moment or is it just the news media flavor of the month? Next month will we move on to shark attacks again.

Below The Radar News

It seems that the national conversation about current events is getting increasingly fragmented. This is likely due to a combination of the enormous impact the Iraq conflict is having, combined with the dwindling audience for big tent news media programing. As a consequence, the blogs or websites I read you may have never heard of and the same can be said for the ones you read.

Meanwhile the mainstream press seems only able to keep about 2 or 3 major stories going at a time and other important things are only addressed by the niche media. When the less well followed stories are occasionally covered by the mainstream press, it is usually in a breathless tone with minimal context upon which to evaluate the issue.
Here are a couple of topics that I follow via blogs that seem inadequately covered by the broadcast or cable news networks.

Avian Flu
Net Neutrality
Singularity

An Addictive Flash Game

Spending my time playing the browser-based flash game Towers is probably not the most productive way to spend 30 minutes, but I think I will keep doing it anyway.

Robot Peace Keeping Video

This video is (from a special effects stand point) very well done. It depicts a robot serving as a member of a UN peace keeping force in a third world nation. The potential consequences from something like this ever happening raises a number of questions.

New Mythbusters Episodes Are Coming

The Discovery Channel has a couple of shows that stop me from flipping. Mythbusters was one of the first to catch my eye. It's a show that combines science, gadget lust and a love for harmless explosions in a way that consistently entertains and educates. Please keep the new episodes coming.

Christmas Lights/Decorations Return To Storage

A week after New Year's and as I look out my window I see several houses sparkling with their festive holiday lights. Our lights and tree are still up but unplugged until I find the motivation to return them to their plastic storage totes. It was much easier to motivate myself to hang the decorations than it is to find the energy to put them away.

5 Things To Come in 2007

My completely random predictions for what will come in 2007. (In no particular order.)

1. Apple with their iTV or someone else (possibly Nintendo with their Wii) will finally marry the Internet, TV, movies, music, photos and communication into a family room ready devices with TIVO like ease of use. I know some things are already out there but I believe they lack the "so easy it's fun" quality that enables them to break into the mainstream.
   
2. A growing tide of celebrities/entertainers/musicians will emerge from the realm of Web 2.0 and the old media will over emphasize and/or misinterpret what this means.
3. One of the major US automakers (probably Ford) will be purchased/merge/strategically partner with an Asian automaker.
4. Environmental consumerism will be further fueled and driven by emerging ecoweb portals such as Treehugger. Doing the right thing for the planet gets married to the American love for shopping with the result being increased innovation and profits for forward thinking companies.
   
5. The impact of a multi-year/multi-nation war will start to impact Americans at home in a more tangible way in 2007. The mounting toll (people and treasure) will drive decisions not just in Washington but on Wall Street and Main Street.
   

UFO Spotted At O'Hare Airport

This article in the Chicago Tribune by Jon Hilkevitch dated 1/1/07 seems an interesting way to kick off 2007.

It sounds like a tired joke--but a group of airline employees insist they are in earnest, and they are upset that neither their bosses nor the government will take them seriously.

A flying saucerlike object hovered low over O'Hare International Airport for several minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies, said some United Airlines employees who observed the phenomenon.

The sighting occurred during daylight, about 4:30 p.m., just before sunset.

All the witnesses said the object was dark gray and well defined in the overcast skies. They said the craft, estimated by different accounts to be 6 feet to 24 feet in diameter, did not display any lights.

Some said it looked like a rotating Frisbee, while others said it did not appear to be spinning. All agreed the object made no noise and it was at a fixed position in the sky, just below the 1,900-foot cloud deck, until shooting off into the clouds.

Witnesses shaken by sighting

"I tend to be scientific by nature, and I don't understand why aliens would hover over a busy airport," said a United mechanic who was in the cockpit of a Boeing 777 that he was taxiing to a maintenance hangar when he observed the metallic-looking object above Gate C17.

"But I know that what I saw and what a lot of other people saw stood out very clearly, and it definitely was not an [Earth] aircraft," the mechanic said.

One United employee appeared emotionally shaken by the sighting and "experienced some religious issues" over it, one co-worker said.

A United manager said he ran outside his office in Concourse B after hearing the report about the sighting on an internal airline radio frequency.

"I stood outside in the gate area not knowing what to think, just trying to figure out what it was," he said. "I knew no one would make a false call like that. But if somebody was bouncing a weather balloon or something else over O'Hare, we had to stop it because it was in very close proximity to our flight operations."

Some joke, others research

The databases of various UFO-watching groups are full of accounts filed by pilots about sightings of unknown aircraft and anomalies that affected navigational equipment onboard planes.

Whether any of the UFO incidents are real or merely the result of individual perceptions, some experts say the events pose a potential safety risk to pilots and their passengers.

"There have been documented cases where safety appears to have been implicated, and more and more we are coming to the point of view that we are dealing with an intelligent phenomenon," said Richard Haines, science director at the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, a private agency.

"We must be proactive before an aircraft goes down," said Haines, a former chief of the Space Human Factors Office at NASA's Ames Research Center.

Haines is investigating the O'Hare incident. He said he has determined that no weather balloons were launched in the vicinity of O'Hare on Nov. 7.

"It's absurd that the military would be conducting aerial test flights" near the airport, Haines said.

All the witnesses to the O'Hare event, who included at least several pilots, said they are certain based on the disc's appearance and flight characteristics that it was not an airplane, helicopter, weather balloon or any other craft known to man.

United denies UFO report

They're not sure what was hanging out for several minutes in the restricted airspace, but they are upset that no one in power has taken the matter seriously.

A United spokeswoman said there is no record of the UFO report. She said United officials do not recall discussion of any such incident.

"There's nothing in the duty manager log, which is used to report unusual incidents," said United spokeswoman Megan McCarthy. "I checked around. There's no record of anything."

The pilots of the United plane being directed back from Gate C17 also were notified by United personnel of the sighting, and one of the pilots reportedly opened a windscreen in the cockpit to get a better view of the object estimated to be hovering 1,500 feet above the ground.

The object was seen to suddenly accelerate straight up through the solid overcast skies, which the FAA reported had 1,900-foot cloud ceilings at the time.

"It was like somebody punched a hole in the sky," said one United employee.

Witnesses said they had a hard time visually tracking the object as it streaked through the dense clouds.

It left behind an open hole of clear air in the cloud layer, the witnesses said, adding that the hole disappeared within a few minutes.

The United employees interviewed by the Tribune spoke on condition of anonymity.

Some said they were interviewed by United officials and instructed to write reports and draw pictures of what they observed, and that they were advised by United officials to refrain from speaking about what they saw.

Federal agency backtracks

Like United, the FAA originally told the Tribune that it had no information on the alleged UFO sighting. But the federal agency quickly reversed its position after the newspaper filed a Freedom of Information Act request.

An internal FAA review of air-traffic communications tapes, a step toward complying with the Tribune request, turned up the call by the United supervisor to an FAA manager in the airport tower, Cory said.

Cory said the weather might have factored into what the witnesses thought they saw.

"Our theory on this is that it was a weather phenomenon," she said. "That night was a perfect atmospheric condition in terms of low [cloud] ceiling and a lot of airport lights. When the lights shine up into the clouds, sometimes you can see funny things. That's our take on it."

Here are my thoughts on this article. Disclaimer: This comes from someone who is neither a UFO fanatic nor a reflex dismisser of the subject.

• Dig the uncomfortable distancing tone present in the start of the article. "It sounds like a tired joke..." No easy answer, no expert available to persuasively dismiss, so they opt to reminds us of all the previously dismissed or mocked sightings by inference.
• Note the phrase "some United Airlines employees." Keep reading and you find out that it was a daylight sighting by 12 UAL employees including several pilots. While "some" is accurate it seems calculated to downplay.
• Finally note the date of the sighting 11/7/06 and the date the news breaks 1/1/07. A car crash on any expressway happens and it makes the paper within 12 hours. A dozen credible witnesses see something that raises all kinds of potentially complex questions and you have to wait nearly two months to hear about it.
  

Watchdog journalism at its finest.

New Years Eve with the Wii

Some people head to Times Square but I chose to ring in the new year playing Wii Tennis and Bowling with my in laws in Chicago. It is the night after and my right arm is still sore from playing tennis. I will now spend the first months of 2007 in search of a Wii to call my own.