Weekend Links

• Third Space Shuttle almost lost – The story of STS-27, the second flight after the Challenger catastrophe. Because of NASA negligence with regard to the external tank foam shedding issue, more than 700 heat shield tiles were damaged, and it was pure luck (a matter of inches) that a critical burn-through did not occur during reentry. Further, because the military wouldn't allow normal communications with the shuttle during that flight, the crew couldn't even convince mission control that there was a problem.
• Caravaggio was early 'photographer' – The first photograph was taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826, but the painter Caravaggio was apparently using a temporary form of photography as the basis for some of his paintings more than 200 years earlier.
• Strange particle created; may rewrite how matter's made.
• Neutron tracks revive hopes for cold fusion. Meanwhile, our best hope for power production from fusion remains ITER, which isn't scheduled to produce "first plasma" until 2016. Faced with energy problems that aren't going to go away, should all of our fusion eggs be in one basket? No offense to the ITER people. It just seems to me as though there was never a better time to increase our investment in work toward fusion power.
• Java Development Kit version 6, update 14, will include the "Garbage First" garbage collector, which, according to James Gosling, will bring real-time-like garbage collection to the normal Java VM (as opposed to the real-time VM).
• Bush administration asserted right to suspend 1st amendment, etc.
• Seymour Hersh says Dick Cheney ran "an executive assassination ring."
• The myth of the filibuster.