Stephen King in NYT Book Review.

The American short story is alive and well.

Do you like the sound of that? Me too. I only wish it were actually true.

The art form is still alive — that I can testify to. As editor of “The Best American Short Stories 2007,” I read hundreds of them, and a great many were good stories. Some were very good. And some seemed to touch greatness.

But “well”? That’s a different story.

What Ails the Short Story

A group of researchers at Sony and the University of Alabama in Huntsville have come up with a wide-angle camera that can image a 10-kilometer-square area from an altitude of 7.5 kilometers with a resolution better than 50 centimeters per pixel.

The trick is to build an array of light sensitive chips - each one recording small parts of a larger image - and place them at the focal plane of a large multiple-lens system. The camera would have gigapixel resolution, and able to record images at a rate of 4 frames per second.

The team suggests that such a camera mounted on an aircraft could provide images of a large city by itself. This would even allow individual vehicles to be monitored without any danger of losing them as they move from one ground level CCTV system to another.

Wide-angled gigapixel satellite surveillance

Professor Stephen Hawking has given many lectures to the general public. Many of these past lectures have been released in his 1993 book, 'Black Holes and Baby Universes, and other essays'. Here are some of the more recent public lectures.

Stephen Hawking's Lectures

It isn’t easy to convey the intricacies of class warfare, housecleaning, immigration, a sci-fi classic, and the lottery in a couple of index cards. But Jessica Hagy, the proprietor of Indexed, has done it.

What Do Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a Border Fence Have in Common?

I rarely find anything of interest on The Corner -- a super-high-volume blog -- but this amusing analysis almost makes it worthwhile.

I've decided I really just don't like Star Trek: Next Generation (ST: TNG) very much. For years, I was its defender against all comers. I liked it a lot when it was still on the air. And I liked it in reruns for awhile. But the more I watch it, the less I find redeeming about it (you might see my influence on this score in this quasi editorial). There are things I still like about it, but it's become increasingly difficult to separate the quadrotriticale from the chaff.

It's Time For A Confession | The Corner, on National Review Online

Justin Quinn does beautiful, mysterious work with text.

Quinn's Moby-Dick series is made up of obsessively detailed prints and graphite drawings composed entirely of the letter E.

Each E corresponds to a letter in a chapter of Melville's book, so each piece is composed of literally thousands of characters.

The effect is almost that of a mosaic or a concrete poem.

"Moby Dick Chapter 55 or 9200 times E"
2004, graphite on hemp paper, 11 x 9"

Justin Quinn

Creep everyone out in your guest bathroom. Each soap is shaped like a little hand!

The soaps range from 1/2” to 2”. You will get at least 10 hands (at least/about 100 grams of soap). This soap is made from goat’s milk and vegetable glycerin with a light scent. Your hands come packaged in a pretty bag ... all ready for gifting to a friend with dirty paws!

Hand Soap

the official line ...

A new Pentagon policy directive for US military intelligence mandates information-sharing with US domestic agencies and foreign partners and recognizes the leading role of the new director of national intelligence.

Although both have been long-standing priorities for the Bush administration, the new directive, drafted in the office of Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. and published last month, is the first time that they have been promulgated in such a high-level policy document at the Pentagon.

And reality on the ground ...

We all get briefed on how important information sharing and collaboration is, but in practice it is actively discouraged. The older generations (everyone in charge) are afraid that someone will steal an idea or publish something before they do and get all the credit.

Yes.

the official line and the reality on the ground

There is a lot of talk about how agility in IT systems is necessary to "out turn" our adversaries in modern conflict.

The reality is that IT systems in the DoD today manifest very little agility. They are slow to build, slow to respond to changing requirements, and are frequently still integrated in a manner that makes for an incredibly brittle enterprise. This may not be the end of the world when your physical assets can still outperform everyone else's, but what about in the cyber domain? Is it ok there?

In cyber warfare, coding is the new maneuver.

Imagine a world where an armored maneuver commander would have to get to Milestone B before he could conduct a "thunder run," or one where an Air Operations Center would have to draft an RFP and obtain approval before it could dispatch a mission package to a deep target. It sounds silly, but a cyber domain commander working under the constraints of our current system for software acquisition might feel similarly constrained.

Yes.

In Cyberwar, Coding is the New Maneuver

Top physicists from several major American universities appeared before a Congressional committee Monday to request $50 billion for a science thing that would further US advancement science-wise and broaden human knowing.

...

Despite apparent inconsistencies, the scientists, in Rep. Gordon's words, appeared "very smart-sounding" and confident that their big spinner would solve some kind of problem they described.

Scientists Ask Congress To Fund $50 Billion Science Thing