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September 27, 2006

Richard Clarke's new site; Space Elevator test; Email addiction; RSS feeds by email

Quick links today:

Richard A. Clarke, senior advisor to three presidents, has launched a substantial Website called Good Harbor Report, with a raft of editors and contributors, bloglike entries and forums.

Space Elevator test:

LiftPort has finished a 60-day test with a 100-metre-long tether held aloft by four helium balloons. The test was designed to see what kinds of problems would crop up if such a platform were used to transmit Wi-Fi signals. The lofty platforms would be especially useful for providing Wi-Fi coverage to rural areas, says company president Michael Laine.

Overall, he says, the test went well, but there were several unexpected encounters with wildlife. More than a dozen insect egg colonies had been laid on the tether, and in the first few days of the test, curious bats flew around the balloons, apparently attracted by the sound made by the tether's vibrations. Late in the test, swallows were also seen swooping down on the balloons, possibly to sip the morning dew on their surfaces.

The late Suzanne Henseler (Suzanne Henseler, trailblazer for women at State House, dies at 63 ) was my babysitter when she was Suzanne McGoldrick and I was the baby. Here's her obit.

Feedmailer: RSS feeds emailed to you in a familiar format:

You set the frequency (how often you wish to receive updates) and our system will notify you when an RSS your subscribed to has been updated with new content!

What's RSS? Its a delivery system for Web content. The acronym stands for Really Simple Syndication, which describes it from the viewpoint of the blogger whose RSS "feed" you subscribe to. Feedmailer offers a BBC description of it from the point of view of the reader:

"RSS allows you to see when sites from all over the internet have added new content. You can get the latest headlines and articles (or even audio files, photographs or video) in one place, as soon as they are published, without having to remember to visit each site every day."

Abu Aardvark blog proprietor Marc Lynch -- political science professor at Williams College and the author of Voices of the New Arab Public -- tried to track down the status of Osama bin Laden (Bin Laden dead?) on the Arabic jihadi blogs.
Yesterday,

Al-Arabiya is reporting that a senior Taliban official has confirmed that bin Laden is still very much alive.

You'll probably have to take his word for it -- the linked page is in Arabic, but contains a photo of a smiling bin Laden.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:16 AM | Permalink