NASA engineers Thursday successfully completed the first series of tests in the early development of the J-2X engine (link to artists rendition of the final engine) that will power the upper stages of the Ares I and Ares V rockets, key components of NASA’s Constellation Program. Ares I will launch the Orion spacecraft that will take astronauts to the International Space Station and then to the moon by 2020. The Ares V will carry cargo and components into orbit for trips to the moon and later to Mars.

NASA conducted nine tests of heritage J-2 engine components from December to May as part of a series designed to verify heritage J-2 performance data and explore performance boundaries. Engineers at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Miss., conducted the tests on a heritage J-2 “powerpack,” which, in a fully assembled engine, pumps liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the engine’s main combustion chamber to produce thrust. The test hardware consisted of J-2 components used from the Apollo program in the1960s through the X-33 program of the 1990s.

Watch NASA’s Ares Quarterly Video Update: May 2008 (pops WMP)

The NY Times has a guest opinion piece about the analysis experiment one man and his daughter performed on their local weather forecaster’s predictions of temperature and precip in the nightly news.

Not surprisingly they found a monkey could probably make better predictions outside of a 3 day forecast, beyond that you might as well throw dice to make the predictions for you; and you might be accurate just as often.

The results were quite enlightening, as were some of the comments of the local meteorologists and their station managers. Here a few of the quotes we received:

“We have no idea what’s going to happen [in the weather] beyond three days out.”

“There’s not an evaluation of accuracy in hiring meteorologists. Presentation takes precedence over accuracy.”

“All that viewers care about is the next day. Accuracy is not a big deal to viewers.”

Here’s a recreation of TRS-80 computer system. The simulator is based on TRS-80 Level I BASIC which debuted back in 1977. It is not an emulator but rather a recreation of Level I BASIC that runs entirely within a browser.

The author has included a library of programs for you to experiment with as well, like a variant of the Lunar Lander or Trek III.

Brings back fond memories, it has everything but the cassette tape drives and the keybounce problem.

Hackers Find a New Place to Hide Rootkits…your processor.

It appears to just be proof-of-concept code thus far by a security firm but will be demonstrated publicly for the first time at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas this August.

I ran across a great mermaid costume online that does well in keeping to the original cartoon movie The Little Mermaid. What do you think?

The original is from a contest at this site.