Thank God for Amygdala!

Amygdala: "Our plans for the new year call for bootstrapping our way into interfacing our system architecture so that we have truly synergistic results. We have taken a strategic decision that we will leverage our restructuring with significant rigor. We are bearish on the actionability of our through-put, which will prevent commoditization of our posts. Amygdala's ability to disambiguate information will allow our best practices to provide a business plan that will serve a disintermediating function for our end-users. We believe our core competencies provide a critical path for our ability to modularize our deliverables. This is mission-critical.

We will acommodate concerns of our readers by, at some juncture, emphasising accountability and the top line, to ensure that we remain right-sized. This will empower our analytic teams to viably drill down to and create value with granularity for our readers. Our competitive analysis informs us that our plans for cost-containment will ensure the success of this decisive action and position us for substantive pro-active responsiveness, even in a weak market. At day's end, we will programmatically ramp up to operationalizing our paradigms with robust and scalable real-time turnkey solutions that will take us to the next level.
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The best corporatespeak I've ever heard... What can you add to that?

Some great news for the science set!

Cassini Mission Status Report

12.24.04


The European Space Agency's Huygens probe successfully detached from NASA's Cassini orbiter today to begin a three-week journey to Saturn's moon Titan. NASA's Deep Space Network tracking stations in Madrid, Spain, and Goldstone, Calif., received the signal at 7:24 p.m. (PST). All systems performed as expected and there were no problems reported with the Cassini spacecraft.

I was actually caught by surprise by a story today that the Cassini craft had a planned main engine firing to adjust course. This course adjustment was to keep the main spacecraft from following the Huygens probe into the atmosphere of Titan.

I have been very closely following the progress of the Cassini mission since its Orbital Insertion maneuver earlier this year. Ijust seemed to think that the Huygens probe seperation was still some time in the future. (I guess it technically still is but it is much closer than I had thought!) At any rate, the day to be watching for is Jan 14th 2005. This will be the time that Huygens falls into the thick atmosphere of the far-away moon Titan. It is expected to take pictures and a large number of detailed scientific readings and send all of the data back to Cassini before it is finally destroyed by the impact on Titan.

I for one am very excited. This mission, one that eschewed the "new NASA" ideal of "Faster Cheaper" relied on good old fashioned precision and fantastic engineering to arrive at Saturn. It has been possibly the most flawless missions in the last 10 years and for that I applaud the teams that have build and programmed the spacecraft. These days we are gettting used to having missions lost and damaged by all types of operational errors. I have been very happy to have so much great data and imagery to look at from this one.

Please take a look for yourselves. JPL Has all of your mission questions answered!

The sadness just keeps coming...

CNN.com - Tsunami death toll tops 80,000 - Dec 29, 2004

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (CNN) -- The latest death toll from the Asian tsunami has increased to more than 80,000 as relief workers and supplies begin to reach some of the most devastated areas.

That number top 100,000 by the time all bodies are recovered, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said Wednesday.

The dramatic rise of the death toll came after officials were finally able to reach remote regions -- like Indonesia's Aceh province, India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands and the Maldives.

More than half of the total deaths so far were in Indonesia, the nearest land mass to Sunday's undersea earthquake that triggered the deadly waves and flooding in about a dozen countries, from Thailand to East Africa.

Four days after the quake, Indonesian authorities said they had found mass destruction in Aceh. The capital of Banda Aceh, which was closest to epicenter of the quake, was described as largely destroyed.


More...

I have been watching this develop for some time now and I am just shocked by the tragedy of it all. I am always humbled by the power of nature and the inability of all of our technology to make us totally safe. I mourn for all of those who have family members or friends in those places affected by this powerful act of nature. My thoughts are with them all.