Oh, say it ain’t so.

At TinySci, we pride ourselves in our deep skepticism of practically everything. Some say this leads only to apathy while others wonder how we can then be passionate about anything. Well if you’ve had a chance to read a few of our posts, you’ll realize that neither is the case. Rather, the skepticism helps bring about a solid case of objectivity.

Which is what I’m thinking is lacking for those NASA administrators who believe they can create a viable, let alone interesting, massively multiplayer online (MMO) game targeted to the teens of tomorrow.

It’s true. Today NASA released a request for proposal (warning: PDF) detailing what they’d like to see in a NASA-based MMO. These virtual worlds would help youngsters, “repair expensive equipment” or even, “tinker with chemical reactions in living cells”. Because, as we all know, the computer is a much better substitute for a pair of pliers, a microscope, and a petri dish.

There’s no word yet on how much NASA’s willing to shell out to make this happen.

In reality (not virtual), I hope this succeeds. More so, that it’s a NASA home run. Or, even better, NASA will actually generate income from charging monthly subscription fees. Because I have a feeling it’ll be a long while before NASA comes up with the several billion required to send one us to Mars, but at $9.95 per month, it may happen sooner than you think.

Or not.

Photo Mash Up: World of Warcraft, NASA

One of the major changes is a subtle one for you, but was a major undertaking for us. It involved reconstructing the “interesting pics” page to conform to the content management system in place, rather than be an ordinary static page. You’ll never notice the difference, but it’ll make updating and rotating those pictures a breeze for us.

Also, we’ve added links to the most popular and recent posts. You can dig and find these on your own, but hey, now it’s easier, right?

Finally, to mark the start of a revised look, I dug around for a construction picture in Google. What came up first is what you see. As serendipity would have it, it’s a picture taken during construction of one of the world’s largest synchrotrons.

Don’t worry, I didn’t know what a synchrotron was either.

Turns out a synchrotron is a machine that accelerates electrons at near light-speed, and once there, magnets bend the electrons, producing photons. Or more specifically, ultra-high energy x-rays. In other words, don’t get in the way. Work on this one in the UK, called Diamond was completed last year and a series of interesting scientific discoveries have poured forth.

It seems they have their hand in a variety of science fields, to include virology, biochemistry, engineering, and determining answers to critical unknowns. Like, was Beethoven poisoned?

Hm. Sounds like an interesting topic for a future post.

Source: Diamond

I can’t give you a picture of “Hubble” because this one’s a computer program. But I can give you one of the “black holes” it looks for, because these pertain to the dead spots you probably come across at times while trying to access another computer on the web, say, like TinySci.com.

Hubble in this case is the brainchild of folks at the University of Washington’s Computer Science and Engineering department. It’s been around for just over a year and a half, and has the unenviable job of scouring the Internet for dead spots, sections where the link between any two computers should be active, but for some reason, is not.

The above picture is one from 9:20 PM PST on April 9, 2008. Each marker is a “black hole” where Internet inactivity is mapped and displayed.

How’s this useful? It should help network operators spot areas requiring a fix, or plan for redundant connections for problematic sections. In other words, let’s hope that eventually Hubble puts itself out of a job.

Source: University of Washington 1, 2