Are droids taking our jobs?

Lego Machine: Wow

Thomas goes to space

Where were you when Curiousity landed on Mars?

Of 13 previous attempts to land space probes on the Red Planet over the past four decades, nearly half failed or immediately lost contact. Those odds are enough to make tonight’s scheduled landing of NASA’s new rover, Curiosity, a tense, hold-your-breath moment. But the space agency’s plan to use a hovering, rocket-powered “sky crane” to lower the $2.5 billion, nuclear-powered robot 60 feet or so to the Martian surface almost guarantees it will be a suspenseful night at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Just to complicate things, the rover’s rapid-fire descent and landing is entirely automated. With more than 150 million miles separating Earth and Mars, round-trip communications between Curiosity and its far-off human overseers would take nearly half an hour. “Curiosity is on its own through all this,” says NPR science correspondent Joe Palca, who is monitoring the Mars mission in Pasadena. “Earth is too far away help if things go wrong.” The communications lag is also why we won’t know whether the rover has successfully landed until 1:31 a.m. ET on Monday, even though landfall is actually scheduled for 14 minutes earlier, at 1:17 a.m. ET.

Inforgraphic Software!

Free Technology for Teachers: Three Free Tools for Creating infographics

This afternoon my friend Ken Shelton asked me in a Google+ post about tools for creating infographics. Ken's question prompted this post. I have reviewed a few tools for creating infographics this year and here they are.

infographics from easel.ly on Vimeo.

Thimble: Mozilla's answer to learning CSS/HTML quickly

Mozilla Thimble

Thimble makes it ridiculously simple to create your own web pages. Write and edit HTML and CSS right in your browser. Instantly preview your work. Then host and share your finished pages with a single click. Easy, huh?

Taxing IE Users

Retailer's Tax on IE 7 Users Opens New Front in Browser Wars

What Is an IE Tax?

Russell Kogan, owner of the Kogan.com site, announced the 6.8% surcharge Wednesday for any goods purchased on Kogan.com by users still surfing with IE 7. Kogan’s admonishment was tongue-in-cheek, but his motivation was based on serious economic considerations.