And there will be further ones from their decision to attach themselves to a failing internet advertising company.
Buffeted by an ongoing advertising recession, The New York Times Company and the Gannett Company announced yesterday that their first-quarter profits declined while the Tribune Company reported a loss. The disappointing results underscored the increasingly tough economic times faced by the industry as advertisers continued to shift their focus away from print to the Internet. In particular, areas like real estate and classified, previously rich revenue generators for newspapers, continued to be weak.
2007-08-10: NYT revenue drops by >50%, 50% of employees get fired, and the company still loses money. EBITDA would have dropped from $118M to -$64M. Which means that management would just be getting ready to fire a few 100 more people. 2007-09-01: Good riddance to lazy newspapers who add the same amount of value with their wire service articles as real estate agents: 0.
This is potentially explosive, I think. Whenever I search for a news story in Google News, I get 100s of identical versions of that story from newspapers that picked it up from Associated Press — and I may even click through to the first newspaper that has a copy. But if I can see the story from the wire service itself, before it was edited or shortened or changed, I would probably prefer that.
Dying Newspaper Trend Buys 3 More Weeks. It’s nice to see that the printed word is still, at least for now, the most powerful medium for reporting on the death of the printed word.
The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them. The pragmatists were pointing out that the real world was looking like the unthinkable scenario. The people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
2012-05-10: The reason newspapers are dying is because they are cutting their face to spite their nose. Like making digital only subscriptions more expensive than bundles. Same reason why everyone downloads Game of Thrones: It is impossible to pay for it if you don’t want to burden yourself with cable. You are making your piracy bed, now you have to lie in it.
This makes for an ideal partnership between GML and KML. GML is not about geographic visualization, but about geographic content description. Where KML is “place centric”, GML is “feature centric”. Where KML deals with the presentation of geographic things, GML seeks only to describe them in formal terms, quite apart from their presentation. Of course this means that it is natural to talk about styling GML data, meaning to apply interpretation rules, in order to generate a KML visualization.
Computer simulations and visualizations are performing the thought experiments of the 21st century and pushing the limits of human vision and imagination.
Microsoft is still a leader. They rule the OS space, they rule the corporate desktop. They remain influential in many areas. They may not rule the web, but at least they remain leaders in very profitable spaces. And they have $40b in the bank. Where is Yahoo’s leadership? What are they leading in? If they are leading, are their leadership positions profitable? Is their trajectory up or down? Their revenues are relatively flat, growth is flat, it’s all flat. You can stand to be flat for awhile when you are way ahead, but when you’re #2 and flat you’re not in a good place.
If we don’t do something, sooner or later Earth will be hit by an asteroid large enough to kill all or most of us. That includes the plants and animals, not just people. Maybe this won’t happen for millions of years. Maybe in 15 minutes. We don’t know. For example, on 23 March 1989 asteroid 1989FC with the potential impact energy of over 1000 megatons missed Earth by 6 hours. We first saw this fellow after closest approach. If 1989FC had come in 6 hours later most of us would have been killed with 0 warning.
The total number of known NEAs was 2165 at the end of 2002 and 4647 in April 2007. That trend is not looking good at all.
In 2029, we have an opportunity to smash a small spacecraft into an asteroid so it misses an area of space just 600m across, and won’t come back in 2036 to unleash the energies of 65000 nuclear bombs on earth. If we succeed, we won’t have to call on bruce willis to save the day. We should totally do this: kg for kg, probably the most valuable space mission ever. even if this is a no-op, how cool is that?
Instead of worrying about nonsense like terrrrrrrists, can we start worrying about extinction risk instead? There are 1.5m civilization-ending asteroids in the solar system. Diamandis and musk are doing more for the survival of the human race than all the assholes sucking at the teat of the security theater complex combined.
Asteroid Impacts over Russia – Another Larger Rock Passing Very Close to Earth
As you may know, I’m the co-Founder and co-Chairman of an asteroid company called Planetary Resources that is backed by a group of 8 billionaires to implement the bold mission of extracting resources from near-Earth asteroids. Given my personal interest in asteroids, today is an EPIC day. If you’re interested in more info on this, I urge you to join our mission at Planetary by signing up for the regular updates on our website, PlanetaryResources.com.
In the meantime, I want to fill you in on 2 breaking stories: First: At 9:30 local time, a large meteor exploded in the skies over Chelyabinsk, a city in Russia just east of the Ural mountains, and ~1500 kilometers east of Moscow. The fireball was incredibly bright, rivaling the Sun! There was a pretty big sonic boom from the fireball, which set off car alarms and shattered windows. Reports are coming in that up to 1000 individuals have been injured (mostly by shattered glass blown out by the shock wave).
Second: This comes exactly at the same time that another asteroid — 2012-DA14, a 45 meter asteroid — is whizzing by the Earth a hair’s breadth from the surface. It’s missing us by only 22k km, well within the 36k km orbit of the geostationary satellites that orbit around the Earth’s equator. I wanted to put this in perspective for you with some of the chilling and fascinating facts:
– This asteroid 2012-DA14 is the same size as the asteroid that hit the Earth in Russia in Siberia (the “Tunguska Event”) on June 30th 1908.
– That impact was equivalent to 1000 Hiroshima nuclear bombs and knocked down 80M trees down over an area covering 2150 km2.
– Had it hit near a population center it would have killed millions of people.
Today, there are ~610k asteroids that are actively tracked in our solar system. This number represents less than 1% of the more than 60M asteroids that orbit the Sun. Of these asteroids, about 1.5M are larger than 1 kilometer in size and are what might be described as “extinction-level/dinosaur-killing asteroids.”
Scientists are closely tracking 434 asteroids that are large enough and come close enough to the Earth to be of potential future concern, and while none of these pose any significant risk today, increased surveillance is required.
While the primary business of Planetary Resources is to ultimately prospect and mine the most select of these for fuels and precious metals, the company views that this economically driven activities will assist humanity in the arena of planetary protection in 2 critical ways.
First, the Arkyd-100 Space Telescopes that the company is currently designing and building will assist in the detection and characterization of these small, potentially hazardous, yet undetected asteroids.
Second, as the company ultimately develops the capability and infrastructure for intercepting and mining asteroids, Planetary Resources expects to be able to help in the (slight) redirection of these rocks to keep the Earth safe.
Mining asteroids will ultimately benefit humanity on and off the Earth in a multitude of ways. First, by providing us access to the fuels to accelerate human exploration of space. Second, by expanding humanity’s economic access to platinum group metals important for our rapidly growing high-technology industries; and third, by giving us the infrastructure to routinely and swiftly interact with and redirect asteroids, like 2012 DA14, which could someday pose a threat to Earth.
On the production floor of Planetary Resources Inc, we also now have full-scale mechanical prototypes of the Arkyd-100 Series, which is the first line in its family of deep-space prospecting spacecraft. “The Arkyd-100 Series will be the most advanced spacecraft per kilogram that has ever been built. The system will be highly capable and cost-effective, which will allow for a constellation of them to be launched. That efficiency will not only fast-track our asteroid prospecting effort, but will also lend a hand in scientific discovery and planetary defense.”
8 hiroshima impacts since 2000. It’s amazing to watch the globe spin as 20 of the 26 hit oceans, without human witnesses. 1 hit the Australian outback, 2 hit Northwest Africa, and only 3 others hit land, including Chelyabinsk.
The conclusion of this research: “Near-Earth object impacts could be ~10x more common than we thought they were.”
The Asteroid Grand Challenge Series will be comprised of a series of topcoder challenges to get more people from around the planet involved in finding all asteroid threats to human populations and figuring out what to do about them. NASA recognizes the value of the public as a partner in addressing some of the country’s most pressing challenges.
there’s also
the 100x Declaration, urging a 100-fold increase in the detection and monitoring of asteroids. With the Sentinel Mission, you would know the trajectories 50+ years into the future, and with enough years to play with, a small delta-v imparted early on (easily achieved by just rear-ending the asteroid), alters the course of the solar system ever so slightly to preserve life on Earth.
and as of 2021, things look more promising
Over the long march of biological and now technological evolution, we have finally reached a survival gate — we have enough computational power to model the trajectory all Near-Earth Objects (NEO’s) that could threaten life on Earth. This was not possible in the year 2000, or any time over the prior millennia. We have made a million-fold improvement in computation in just the past 20 years. So, we can see the future and predict decades in advance of an impact event and then give the NEO a nudge such that it misses Earth entirely.
B612 Foundation announced the discovery of more than 100 asteroids.
That by itself is unremarkable. New asteroids are reported all the time by skywatchers around the world. That includes amateurs with backyard telescopes and robotic surveys systematically scanning the night skies.
What is remarkable is that B612 did not build a new telescope or even make new observations with existing telescopes. Instead, researchers financed by B612 applied cutting-edge computational might to 412k years-old images to sift asteroids out of the images. Of the estimated 25k near-Earth asteroids at least 140m in diameter, only 40% have been found. A single point of light that is not a star or a galaxy is a starting point for the algorithm, which they named Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery, or THOR. THOR constructs a test orbit that corresponds to the observed point of light, assuming a certain distance and velocity. It then calculates where the asteroid would be on subsequent and previous nights. If a point of light shows up in the data, that could be the same asteroid. If the algorithm can link together 5 observations across a few weeks, that is a promising candidate for an asteroid discovery. The NOIRLab archive contains 7 years of data, suggesting that there are 10s of 1000s of asteroids waiting to be found.
The algorithm is currently configured to only find main belt asteroids, those with orbits between Mars and Jupiter, and not near-Earth asteroids, the ones that could collide with our planet. Identifying near-Earth asteroids is more difficult because they move faster. Different observations of the same asteroid can be separated farther in time and distance, and the algorithm needs to perform more number crunching to make the connections.
“It’ll definitely work. There’s no reason why it can’t. I just really haven’t had a chance to try it.”
2023-03-06: A visualization of the NEO risk. Unclear how they know how many are left to be discovered beyond some vague orbital mechanics reason.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 