What a brilliant idea – the kind I love!

What to do with an old space suit you have in the International Space Station? Take it back to earth and dispose of it? How mundane.

Why not put some instruments in it shove it out the airlock, then monitor the data it generates to see how well the suit works as it orbits the planet? Further, why not allow anyone to tune in to it? See SuitSat details for details on how you can.


And in other news...

We test-drove the Honda CR-V Monday night. Looks like it's our baby. If only it came in red....

Ah, but it does. However, the dealer says there are no manual red ones in the state. Only a few blue, way up north. He has a silver one he can give us a good deal on though...

Of course he can.

He fed us some lines about how Honda thinks that most stick drivers are men, and therefore make most sticks in silver or black (which men apparently prefer), not so many in colors like red or blue (which women prefer). That may be true. Or not. Maybe he just wants to unload the silver. If we're spending $20K on a new car, though, dammit, I want it in color, not black and white.

So it looks like we may have to wait. Or try our luck in Las Vegas.

Sigh. Why does car shopping have to be so hard (we're not even to the price negotiation yet)?

I used cars.com and other similar sites to request quotes from various dealers in the area. Got some back. Got FAR more phone calls too, which I hate. Of those incoming messages, many ignored the specs I listed (i.e., manual transmission, all-wheel-drive) and requested I call them back (I took none of the calls in person!) which obviates the whole Internet process in the first place.

This morning I wrote back to all of them asking specifically what colors they have. Those who responded all said they had or could get silver. Oh well. I'll write back again and ask them how long to get a red or blue.



In other, other news...

Google has decided to publish different web search results for China, based on whether a person uses the U.S. site or the new Google China web page (located in China). An aquaintence sent me links that point out the drastic differences the two sites produce, this example showing images of Tiananmen Square:

Google U.S. (one person facing down a tank, bodies)

Google China (happy images)

Makes me sad too, especially for the people in China who might think they're getting objective non-censored information from the world's top search engine company, and have no way to know they're not.