What some other people were doing on August 9 (mainly in the US):

  • In a move reminiscent of one made just a few days ago, NASA astronaut Steve Robinson released what NASA is now touting as the first ever podcast from outer space. It’s pretty cool, even if it lacks a RSS feed. [mp3]
  • Americans are heaving a sigh of relief that the space shuttle Discovery has made a successful return trip to Earth. After a near-brush with death when a chunk of insulation foam fell out of the shuttle during take-off, eerily mirroring the events leading up to the Challenger disaster of 1986, NASA grounds its fleet yet again for more safety checks.
  • Soon after the landing, venture company Space Adventures of Arlington, VA., began offering $100m trips around the moon. Browsing through the company website revealed that it was already offering zero-g suborbital flights to various large corporations.
  • American immigration officials began testing of RFID-impregnated visas at Mexican and Canadian ports of entry, marking the beginning of a new phase in the implementation of a nationwide alien tracking database. (No extraterrestrials have been issued RFID chips so far.) This comes in the midst of a pilot trial (punintended) by 300 United airlines employees who have been toting around RFID-implanted US passports to various destinations in the Anglosphere.
  • Canadians living in the western provinces were polled and found to have substantial support for separatism. Slightly over one-third of the Canucks surveyed from Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia were in favor.
  • WorldTribune.com reported that North Koreans are warming to karaoke. North Koreans entertained by the capitalist trappings of KTV lounges have proven themselves willing to spend a month’s pay for an hour of singing in a karaoke room. Unsurprisingly, pop songs from capitalist South Korea are widely forbidden.
  • One Mr. Lee of Taegu, South Korea, dropped dead after a 50-hour marathon of playing computer games at a cybercafé. Lee recently quit his job to focus on his l33t sk1ll5.
  • Yahoo! boasted that its search index is now twice as large as that of rival Google’s. Yahoo! now indexed over 20 billion online resources. Looks like the honeymoon is over for Google, who also got hit with a class-action lawsuit by advertisers complaining that Google wilfully exceeded their ad budgets and overcharged them. The link to itchy-fingered blog owners and supporters has yet to be established.