My friend Walt Holemans started a great little company ... Planetary Systems Corp. -- for all your innovative spacecraft seperation needs. He's got some great ideas, and a well thought out ideas on reliability and testing. And, he's really good at explaining science and making it interesting to non-scientists.
the cryptome has great coverage of cryptography and privacy issues. In the same vein, but more activism than information, is the EFF, a foundation which I believe in.
My sister is involved in Nursing Students Without Borders -- they are doing some incredible work getting just the most basic health care to the residents of San Sebastian, El Salvador. They visit about 3 times a year, bringing much needed medicine and teaching basic health care. They usually have their baggage filled to the brim with donations, and I'm waiting for the day when they all file onto the airplane in crutches and wheelchairs. They were down in the beginning of the year when a serious (7.5) earthquake struck -- it put a hurting on the airport in the capital of San Salvador, but after some hard work they got it reopened it, doubling the usual total number of flights to 4 per day.
My good friend Stacy runs a Breema and dance bodyworking operation in Western Massachusetts called swampdancer -- Breema is a neat hands-on therapy that is like massage, but adds the tools of pressure, stretching, balance, twisting, and relaxation. She's really good. She does individual sessions and also organizes group sessions (For just a little more the price of giving turkeys, you could give an incomparable great company benefit!).
My cousin flew over and took pictures of mysterious Rock Lake (in Wisconsin), a possible atlantis-like underwater city. Neat.
The guys at Highland Aerosports run a great hanggliding instruction and tow park on the Eastern shore of Maryland (about an hour east of Washington, DC) -- it's where I've been taking lessons. They are professional, good teachers, and nice people. Chad, my teacher, just recently set a world record for number of loop-de-loops.
The CiteSeer project links lots of research papers together and links them together through bibliographies, similar content, and similar bibliographies -- it's like a dream come true, if you dream of such sort of things.
Sharon Olds is an incredible poet and an inspiration. There are so many poems to love; I'll have to get together a list for anyone who's adventurous. If you get a quiet moment in a bookstore, curl up with one of her books. And if it seems too serious, simply turn to "the pope's penis". Clang. When I visited California, I drove up the hills above Berkley leading to the research reactors, thinking of the watch-hand painting ladies touching the radium paintbrushes to their lips.
Polaroid Image Transfers are really cool looking and lots of fun. Maggie Knaus can have my kids (in a good way).
Myriad Logic is where I worked before I took my sabbatical. If you're in the market for high-performance data transfer equipment to connect up your radar, camera, or MRI equipment to a data recorder or RAID, then here's the place. I most recently worked on the 1030 (notice the new, improved usability-- finally the LEDs are labeled), 2680, and the up-coming 4020. Our 4xxx series use a similar processor as the Nintendo Gamecube, the IBM 405GP PPC - it's a sweet cold-running processor, with lots of integrated stuff.
POVRAY ray traced graphics I used to be into this and even did a cool 16-second Gemstar satellite animation (2.8 MB) (still from the movie) using 13 networked pentium 60's and brand-spanking-new 90's. This was before beowulf clusters, so it was pretty neat - over 1 GHz of total clock speed. I wrote a multi-processor task dispatcher and a simple animation language (used to generate smooth movements between frames). Eventually they rolled better animation support into POVRAY, and beowulf probably does a better job than my software. FYI: I also worked on STEP-3 and knew the people working on Meteor-1. All of their rockets blew up; the consetoga was the most spectacular. When the rocket costs ten times the value of the payload, the payload is expendable.
The Motley Fool offers good, accessible
financial information. I like the low pressure strategies-- after all,
I've got better things to do than worry about money.
