A hurricane, high crosswinds at the landing site, a nitrogen leak, and two damaged tiles. Watch the shuttle land live on NASA TV.

Space Shuttle, NASA TV, STS-118, space shuttle Endeavour, Endeavour, NASA, landing, manned spaceflight

Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post wonders if PowerPoint is a killing app. She’s not the first to note that NASA administrators make decisions — sometimes fatal decisions — on the basis of PowerPoint presentations that mask or misrepresent details. I wrote about Edward Tufte’s Cognitive Style of PowerPoint essay in a previous post. Marcus doesn’t add to many new points, but the column is a sign that an anti-PowerPoint movement may be growing. Here are three paragraphs:

[T]he insidious influence of PowerPoint goes beyond the way it frustrates scientific analysis. The deeper problem with the PowerPointing of America — the PowerPointing of the planet, actually — is that the program tends to flatten the most complex, subtle, even beautiful, ideas into tedious, bullet-pointed bureaucratese.

The most disturbing development in the world of PowerPoint is its migration to the schools — like sex and drugs, at earlier and earlier ages. Now we have second-graders being tutored in PowerPoint. No matter that students who compose at the keyboard already spend more energy perfecting their fonts than polishing their sentences — PowerPoint dispenses with the need to write any sentences at all. Perhaps the politicians who are so worked up about the ill effects of violent video games should turn their attention to PowerPoint instead.

In the meantime, Tufte, who’s now doing consulting work for NASA, has a modest proposal for its new administrator: Ban the use of PowerPoint. Sounds good to me. After all, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see the perils of PowerPoint.

tags: cognitive style, dyn, edward tufte, insidious, killer app, nasa, nasa administrators, perils, powerpoint presentations, powerpoint sounds, rocket scientist, ruth marcus

From the NASA website:

EIT (Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope) images the solar atmosphere at several wavelengths, and therefore, shows solar material at different temperatures. In the images taken at 304 Angstroms the bright material is at 60,000 to 80,000 degrees Kelvin. In those taken at 171, at 1 million degrees. 195 Angstrom images correspond to about 1.5 million Kelvin. 284 Angstrom, to 2 million degrees. The hotter the temperature, the higher you look in the solar atmosphere.

More images of the sun, and movies too, are at NASA. The movies show coronal mass ejections coming from those bright spots.

tags: 1 million degrees kelvin, blue, bright material, corona, degrees kelvin, extreme ultraviolet imaging, hot, hot air, hot gas, nasa, solar, solar material, solar satellite, sun, the sun, ultraviolet

Google engineers have got the moon on their minds lately. We all got a laugh at their April Fools Day lunar hosting and research center job opening, but they’ve done themselves one better and several points more serious with Google Moon. Sure, it’s in celebration of the first lunar landing 36 years ago today, but if they’re so fixated on the moon, why not sponsor a space competition?

tags: 1969, anniversary, apollo 11, google, landing sites, lunar landing, may 20, may 20 1969, moon, moon landing, moon map, nasa