Mailund on the Internet

This is a bit of a bummer: Obama space panel says moon return plan is a no go.

WASHINGTON — A White House panel of independent space experts says NASA’s return-to-the-moon plan just won’t fly.

The problem is money. The expert panel estimates it would cost about $3 billion a year beyond NASA’s current $18 billion annual budget.

“Under the budget that was proposed, exploration beyond Earth is not viable,” panel member Edward Crawley, a professor of aeronautics at MIT, told The Associated Press Tuesday.

I was born just after the last Moon landing, and the way things are going, I will probably be dead before the next one.  At least unless someone else than NASA gets going on this.  Maybe the Chinese?  Or the Indians?  Or maybe even some private company, approaching the problem in a completely new way.  The one scenario I find least likely is that NASA’s budget is increased…

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It’s an interesting hypothesis.

See the summary at NY Times: In taming dogs, humans may have sought a meal.

In short, the story is this: based on mitochondrial DNA, it seems like dogs were domesticated once, in China, and, you know, in China they eat dogs.

Not a particular strong argument, all in all, but it could be true.  Most other animals we have domesticated, we are eating, after all.

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I spend a lot of time on the web, but I don’t really have any strong preferences as to which browser to use.

I started using Safari when I switched to OS X but since it doesn’t play well with several web applications I use – including the CMS at work and the editor in my WordPress blog – I kept Firefox around for those sites.

I’ve never really gotten around to trying out Chrome.  First, because I was on Linux when it came out so I couldn’t join in on the fun to begin with, and second because I just didn’t bother when it came out on Mac.

Anyway, this morning – after reading this benchmark – I decided to try it out, and in fact I am writing this post in Chrome.

Installing was no problem and it imported my bookmarks from Safari, so no problem there either.

To see if it was noticeably faster than the other browsers I use on the more interactive pages I wanted to try out Google Docs.  It works okay there, but I cannot say that I notice much difference from Firefox.  Not that I really expected to.

One weird thing, though: when I clicked for “offline” editing it asks me to install Gears.  Ok, I install Gears, restart the browser and do it again.  It just asks me to install Gears again.

What? Doesn’t Chrome play well with Gears?  Or is it just on a Mac?  According to the Gears page it requires Firefox or Safari on a Mac (and there it works like a charm) but I am surprised that it doesn’t work with Chrome.  Especially since it explicitly asks for Gears.

Oh well, I will try running Chrome for a while and see what I think about it.

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