Theoretical Ken

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Just over 10 years ago, on October 15, 1997, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a several billion mile trip across the solar system to the planet Saturn.

About seven years later, on July 1, 2004, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft reduced its speed, and entered orbit around Saturn. The spacecraft is now more than half way through its four-year mission to explore the ringed planet.

The mission, called the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan also released a probe that landed on Saturn’s moon Titan on Dec. 25, 2004.

You can see the latest incredible images from the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan at the CICLOPS (Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations) website.

Tags: Data, Science, Tech by T_Ken
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The Compact Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary
Complete Text Reproduced Micrographically (in slipcase with reading glass).

500,000 words, 290,000 main entries, 137,000 pronunciations, 249,300 etymologies, 577,000 cross-references, and over 2,412,000 illustrative quotations in one book. Weighs in at 15.3 pounds.

A direct photoreduction of the entire 20-volume set, with nine pages of the original on every nine-by-twelve inch page.

Painstakingly written by an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters.

Published by Oxford University Press, USA. Available here.

(via cooltools)

Tags: Books, Data, General, Language, Tech by T_Ken
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You may already use the “Find in This Page” feature of the Firefox browser: pressing Command+F on a Mac, or Control+F on a PC brings up a FIND toolbar at the bottom of the browser window, which allows you to search for words or phrases in a web page that you are viewing.

But here are two neat single-key shortcuts to the Quick Find toolbar for finding text on a web page. …read more →

Tags: Computers, Tech by T_Ken
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News headlines, grouped by color-category in a Mondrian-like layout; sized and shaded to illustrate, at-a-glance, the quantity and freshness of a news story across thousands of media sources. Tabs across the top allow a country-by-country comparative view of the proportion of news/story coverage in different countries around the world.

You can see Newsmap in action here.

“Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.”

“Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.” –Newsmap website

Tags: Data, Tech by T_Ken
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Rocky Roberts, long-time guitar technician for Neil Young (and many other fine musicians) has just released his debut album, Rocky Roberts & Friends.

Produced by Rocky Roberts and Canadian musician/producer Chris Brown, Rocky Roberts & Friends features performances by Nils Lofgren, Bill Kirchen, Sarah Harmer, Mickey Rafael, Matt Johnson, Tony Scherr, Anton Fier, Luther Wright, Jane Scarpantoni, Michael Blake, Diane DeWitt, Gary Pigg, Rosie Goodman, Michael Mazor, Ben Rubin, Jason Mercer, Teddy Kumpel, Chris Brown and Kate Fenner.

I am involved in this project in two exciting (and related) ways:

1. My web design company, KPFdigital, has created and built the website for Rocky’s new album. The website’s visual theme, based on the CD artwork, was created by our graphic designer Michael Kroll, and I hand-coded the site (as usual) in nice clean xhtml/css. We are hosting the site on our dedicated server.
2. The Music Store section of Rocky’s site is powered by IndieKazoo, a company that I co-founded with Eric Schwartz of Cactus Media in Austin TX. (Using IndieKazoo, any independent musician or band, with no web skills at all, can create their own full-service music download store just by following some easy instructions; and most importantly, receive 100% of their sales revenue, and receive it the same day. Oh, and it’s totally FREE for the entire first month.)

Check out Rocky’s website at www.rockyroberts.com, where you can be one of the first to purchase the CD directly from Rocky’s personal Music Store — powered by IndieKazoo!

Tags: Music, Tech by T_Ken
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