The first pictures sent back by NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander from the northern arctic plains of Mars show a flat terrain marked by a polygonal pattern of shallow troughs and a few pebbles scattered about.

Mars Lander Transmits Photos of Arctic Terrain - NYTimes.com

Lamest Fetish Items Ever: Gear Lust Gone Bad, 1993 - '95
Research by Nate Ralph Write to the Author
See related story: 15 Years of Wired: A Look Back
05.19.08 | 6:00 PM

15 years of Wired Fetish. That's 442 pages of obsessive gear lust. We were bound to make a few bad selections...

Lamest Fetish Items Ever: Gear Lust Gone Bad, 1993 - '95

Next month, Representative John B. Larson, a Connecticut Democrat, plans to go even further, proposing legislation that would essentially ban over-the-counter trading of energy futures by traders who don’t plan to take physical delivery of the commodity. While Nymex trading would be largely unaffected, billions of other trades could potentially be brought to a halt.

Market Maker - Energy Speculators Draw the Heat - NYTimes.com

Sure, our summers are cool and foggy, our hills are steep, and our streets are twisty. But SF Googlers think this is the perfect place to work. Earlier this year, our own "Father of the Internet" Vint Cerf launched the office by inspiring the assembled engineers to think about today's challenges at scale, speaking about the challenges of interplanetary IP communication, the future of the Internet, and who's to blame for IPv4's limited address space (Vint says it's him).

I work here now :)

Official Google Blog: San Francisco office rides the wave

The interactions among the myriad participants in a tax system are as impossible to unravel as are those of the molecules in a gas, and the effects of tax policies are speculative and highly contentious. Will increasing tax rates on the rich increase revenues, as Barack Obama hopes, or hold back the economy, as John McCain fears? Or both?

Mr. Hauser uncovered the means to answer these questions definitively. On this page in 1993, he stated that "No matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5% of GDP." What a pity that his discovery has not been more widely disseminated.nullnullnullnullnullnull

You Can't Soak the Rich - WSJ.com

The Vatican's chief astronomer says that believing in aliens does not contradict faith in God.

SPACE.com -- Vatican: It's OK to Believe in Aliens

The cool thing about eBay's support system is it will always answer your question; unfortunately, that answer will always be a form letter on how to reset your password, as Timothy discovered when he tried to figure out how to sell his laptop to someone who wasn't a Nigerian scammer. Timothy has discovered the awful truth behind today's eBay—something many readers here already know—which is that it's become virtually impossible to sell any sort of medium-to-high end electronics there anymore.

Ugh!

Nigerian Scammers: It's Now Completely Impossible To Sell A Laptop On Ebay

There's only one catch: We need another wealth-generating economic bubble. And that, said Novogratz, must come -- can only come -- from new energy sources and green technology.

Only Greentech Can Save U.S. Economy, Says �ber-Investor | Wired Science from Wired.com

It is also the vision of steampunk, a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines. First appearing in the late 1980s and early ’90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.

Steampunk Moves Between Two Worlds - New York Times

When I was a new NASA employee, my branch chief put together a training class that has been on my mind recently. Among the other things he taught us new employees was that we had to lead our leaders. That has always been good advice. I'd like to share some of those thoughts and expand on them.

First of all, remember that your leaders are not very smart. Once upon a time some of us might have been smart in certain subjects, but that was long ago. Being a manager dulls your technical skills.

Advice from NASA's Wayne Hale: Leading Your Leaders | SpaceRef - Space News as it Happens