Potpourri CXIII

Today's little doses of the different:

The U.S. Science & Engineering Festival, the first national science festival, will be happening in Washington, DC, October 23-24, 2010.

From Dar, Data in the Cloud from Dallas to Mars. This article on the blog Shepherd's Pi talks about Microsoft's latest search engine system, which appears to be a sort of hyper-Google, designed both to compete with Google and to do things they can't do, like assign meanings or draw trends from very large sets of data.

From Yohon, a link to a new science/space publisher.

From ABC News, of all places, a report that jobs the Obama administration claims to have saved or created exist in congressional districts that don't even exist. I'm shocked, shocked...

From Doc:

• A link showing what Stormtroopers do on their days off. Fantastic!
• The T-shirt of the week from Cafepress.com

Want to be a Martian? NASA has a web site for that.

From NASAWatch (really?): Help choose the best public service announcement in support of NASA.

If you're interested in the works of an honest-to-gosh Rocket Scientist, check out the web site of Les Johnson, a very smart fellow whom I've had the pleasure of chatting with, reading books by, and participating on a panel at a sci-fi convention with. Les is an excellent writer because he is also an excellent and patient teacher--he takes the time to explain very difficult things in words that illuminate without insulting the reader. These are all good skills to have.

From AIAA:

• Richard Branson, founder and owner of the Virgin family of companies, wants Virgin Galactic to eventually fly tourists around the Moon. Great, if he can do it and I could afford it.
• A UCF professor was profiled in the Chronicle of Higher Education for his efforts to promote zero-gravity experiments on privately built suborbital rockets.

And that'll about do it for now.