This is, perhaps, the most famous photo from the Apollo Moon landing. It was taken by Neil Armstrong, who shot most of the pics taken on the Lunar surface using a Hasselblad 500EL camera outfitted with a Zeiss Biogon f-5.6/60 mm lens and 70mm Kodak film that was “thin-based and thin emulsion double-perforated.” Called the Data Camera, the 500EL used on the Moon was modded with a special silver finish to boost the hardware’s ability to withstand extreme thermal variations (the middle camera pictured here has the silver finish). The Data Camera also featured a glass Reseau plate , which produced a 5×5 grid of little crosses you can still see on the image. NASA used the markings to help account for film distortion and calculate the angular distance(s) between specific points in the image. Pictured above is Buzz Aldrin , who appears in the bulk of the Moon landing pics. In fact, there’s essentially only one photo of Armstrong taken while on the Moon, a blurry close-up of his reflection in Aldrin’s visor. Although a lot of brainpower went into creating the camera taken to the Moon, Aldrin says little planning went into the photography itself, which is why he became the unofficial star of the Moon. From Aldrin’s book Magnificent Desolation : Neil shot most of the photos on the moon, having the camera attached to a fitting on his spacesuit much of the time while I was doing a variety of experiments. I didn’t have such a camera holder on my suit, so it just made sense that Neil should handle the photography. He took some fantastic photographs, too, especially when one considers that there was no viewfinder on the intricate Hasselblad camera. We were basically “pointing and shooting.” Imagine taking such historic photographs and not even being able to tell what image you were getting. Unlike the digital camera era of today, in 1969 we were shooting on film, typically looking through a small optical opening on the back of the camera that corresponded with what the camera’s lens was “seeing.” But with our large space helmets, such a viewfinder would have done little good anyhow. So, similar to cowboys shooting their sixguns from their hips, we aimed the camera in the direction of what we wanted to photograph, and squeezed the trigger. Given that ambiguity, it is even more of a credit to Neil that we brought back such stunning photographs from the moon. if you look more carefully at the reflection in the gold visor on my helmet, you can see the Eagle with its landing pad, my shadow with the sun’s halo effect, several of the experiments we had set up, and even Neil taking the picture. It is a truly astounding shot, and was the result of an entirely serendipitous moment on Neil’s part. Later, pundits and others would wonder why most of the photographs on the moon were of me. It wasn’t because I was the more photogenic of the two helmet-clad guys on the moon. Some even conjectured that it must have been a purposeful attempt on my part to shun Neil in the photos. That, of course, was ridiculous. We had our assigned tasks, and since Neil had the camera most of the time we were on the surface, it simply made sense that he would photograph our activities and the panoramas of the lunar landscape. And since I was the only other person there . . . Ironically, the photography on the moon was one of those things that we had not laid out exactly prior to our launch. NASA’s Public Affairs people didn’t say, “Hey, you’ve got to take a lot of pictures of this or that.” Everyone was interested in the science. So we did the science and the rest of it was sort of gee-whiz. We had not really planned a lot of the gee-whiz stuff that, in retrospect, proved quite important. You can purchase a 16×20 print of the above pic and other Apollo-11 shots from Moonpans.com . photo by Neil Armstrong/NASA via Boston Globe via Todd Lappin

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Moon Landing Pics: "Gee-Whiz" Afterthought

“That’s not going to happen.” In just five words, Buzz Aldrin casually broke my heart. Which is to say, the former astronaut-turned-rapper reminded me that despite the haze of nostalgia surrounding the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing, Aldrin is still very much an engineer, a logician who deals in pragmatic extremes. Not some romantic willing to dive into hyperbole or seemingly-pointless hypotheticals. The question prompting the above response seemed simple enough at the time: “If you could go back for another Moon walk or orbit Mars tomorrow, which would you choose?” A total softball question, I admit, but I’d just spent the last half hour listening to Aldrin mostly ramble and rehash much of what he’s already said about NASA’s failures, China, why we should focus on Mars , and more. Not all that surprising, considering Xeni found Aldrin relatively incoherent when she interviewed him a year ago . However, I had figured a simple question like this might ground us, get the 79-year-old legend reflective &mdash possibly even a little misty-eyed &mdash or at least waxing semi-poetic. After all, Aldrin took part in one of the most glorious spectacles ever captured on film, an event which garnered what was, at the time, the most-watched live TV broadcast ever (some 600 million viewers). Getting to the Moon is still the gold standard to which invention and engineering can frequently be compared &mdash i.e. “We’ve gone to the Moon, but I still can’t get cell phone reception in my home?” All I wanted was for Aldrin to utter something like: “Well, my boy, I’d orbit Mars, because it’s somewhere we’ve never been. And we should never stop pushing the limits of what’s possible.” etc. etc. Find out what he actually said, after the jump, along with more reflections with/of/from the man Snoop Dogg now calls “Doc Ron,” a shortened version of Aldrin’s nickname “Dr. Rendezvous.” photo by NASA via Boston Globe via Todd Lappin “I couldn’t go tomorrow even if I wanted,” Aldrin continued, “First of all there’s training. And we don’t have the capability to get there [Mars] just yet. Also, I’ve already had my turn. There’s a long list of people that deserve to go before me.” I understand his point, especially that last one. It’s a sentiment shared by many, like those involved with the Artemis Project which puts it this way: “12 men have walked on the Moon. When do you get to go?” Aldrin, too, has explored this idea with ShareSpace , a non-profit he founded to support the democratization of space tourism. Yet, at the same time, I didn’t need Aldrin to deconstruct why my question was improbable. I know it’s improbable, which is why I pressed on. “Right,” I replied, “But hypothetically, let’s say Richard Branson calls you up tomorrow and says, ‘I’ve got the tech; you won’t be stepping on anyone’s toes to go; where you travel is your decision…’ Which would you choose?” Alas, no dice. In the slightest. “Branson doesn’t have that technology,” Aldrin answered matter of factly. Then, seemingly realizing our conversation wasn’t going where I’d probably wanted, he added, “Look, I’m pretty literal; that’s all.” To be fair, other reporters have experienced this side of Aldrin. “We didn’t go there to have feelings or thoughts,” he recently told one journalist. “We went there to do things and to report on the things that we did.” Aldrin walking on the Moon. It’s actually a wonder I even got to speak with Aldrin. Never mind it was two days before he was set to embark on his “40th Anniversary Tour” &mdash which his publicist, whose official title is “Mission Control Director,” said was booked solid with interviews from 6am to 6pm. Instead, consider that for a number of years Aldrin was not only completely adverse to giving interviews, but lost in depression and alcoholism. As Susan Faludi recounts in Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man , Aldrin’s rise and fall came rather quickly. On the Apollo publicity tour, he was introduced to the bittersweet nature of celebrity. At myriad public appearances, he and Armstrong faced a seemingly unending barrage of interviews, cameras, microphones and hordes of screaming fans. “People were crawling all over us…,” Aldrin once explained, “I was overcome by nausea and dizziness.”* By the time the decorated moonwalker left NASA in 1971, he’d “sunk in a morass of despair.” Over the years, the state of his career, a failed marriage and what he was going to do with his life all weighed heavily on him. He explores all of this quite candidly in Magnificent Desolation , and today he doesn’t seem to hold back in interviews, including this one. “I was done talking about all this,” he told me. “If I tried public speaking, I’d freeze up. But I’ve met and married a woman who has helped me. Now I’m taking on new challenges that 20 years ago I wouldn’t have. I realize I want to reach the younger generation; that’s why I’ve got a Twitter and a BlackBerry.” Before I even have a chance to ask him about Snoop Dogg, Aldrin wonders, quite proudly, and completely out of nowhere, “Have you seen my video?” He tells me he worked with professional voice coaches in preparation for the stunt. Previously, he appeared alongside Elton John to sing part of “Rocket Man,” a performance Aldrin admitted to me was “embarrassing.” While I appreciate his efforts, I’d be lying if I said Aldrin’s publicity push didn’t strike me as a somewhat transparent attempt to seem hip and, to put it more crassly, sell books. Of course, I’d also be lying if I didn’t give it up that Aldrin is a true renegade, worthy hero and a total badass. He has never shied away from venting that NASA astronauts were forced into early retirement, didn’t receive adequate compensation, and even more interestingly to me, aren’t given their due respect for their service. “Anyone who visits a foreign country on behalf of their government gets called an Ambassador,” he told me, “That’s why I’d like to be known as a Lunar Ambassador, the Honorary Lunar Ambassador… When China gets to the Moon, you don’t think those astronauts are going to be taken care of for life?” Does he sound bitter? A little. Does he deserve to be? I’d argue, yes . After all, despite the above points, the guy cannot escape the daunting estimate that 6% of all Americans still believe the Moonlanding to be a hoax . Considering he risked his life for science and his country, and having talked to him about this, I find that stat more sad and depressing than ever before. On the surface, it can certainly be amusing to watch what happens when his buttons get pushed. Like when Ali G famously asked Aldrin, “What was it like not being the first man on the Moon? Was you ever jealous of Louis Armstrong?” …or when conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel really got to Aldrin in 2002, prompting fisticuffs… “I got to a point where my emotions took over,” Aldrin explained when I asked him whether he regretted punching Sibrel. “There are people who have been misled and it’s not their fault, but they continue to believe otherwise. It’s not a good idea [to react by hitting someone], because there are legal matters that follow, but other people would thank me for doing what I did and taking a stand.” Aldrin’s footprint. Days later, I find myself navigating Aldrin’s web site , staring at snapshots of him through the years: Buzz posing with President Regan. Buzz with Liz Taylor. Buzz holding a bald eagle. As I come to the famous photo Aldrin snapped of his footprint on the Lunar surface (above), I remember his desire to be called the Honorary Lunar Ambassador. At the time, I had told him I’d happily call him whatever he wished &mdash both because I hoped to win favor with him and, well, I really do feel he deserves it. “Thanks,” he said, the realist in him taking over, “But I need the President or Secretary of State to call me that.” *When I spoke to Aldrin, I mentioned the statistic that 50% of all astronauts report feeling a perpetual state of nausea while in space. I asked whether that was his experience. It wasn’t. Ironically, it wasn’t until his return to Earth that that those symptoms became an issue for him.

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Buzz Aldrin: Engineer, Rapper, Heart-Breaking Realist

Using an array of salvaged electronics, Kenyan tinkerer Simon Mwaura turned his cell phone into a remote control that lets him turn on lights, monitor his front door, and even brew tea. [via AfriGadget ]

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Kenyan Builds DIY Smart Home

In 1983, my former professor and friend Howard Rheingold read an article by Alan Kay. Immediately, he wanted to experience the Alto and the future of networked minds. He started calling PARC on a weekly basis. Nothing. Then when he called back to remind HR of his existence, he was given an immediate assignment: write a last-minute speech for a Xerox executive. With that, Howard had landed himself his “dream job” at PARC as an in-house writer. Howard’s gig involved interviewing researchers and scientists about their work with interfaces, LAN, etc. Super cool in retrospect and at the time, I’m sure. He goes into great detail in his book Tools for Thought (pictured), which explores batch processing, the 1960s, time sharing, and more at Xerox PARC. Howard’s insights into the successes and failures of Xerox PARC are well worth a read. Here’s how he framed PARC’s trajectory and missed opportunity in his Wired article from 1994: Personal computers did not spring naturally from the computer industry. They were deliberately realized by a radical fringe, against all the force of the day’s accepted wisdom… These zealous wizards handed Xerox an astounding lead in information technology in the early 1980s, but by the end of the decade, Xerox watched as upstarts like Apple and Microsoft grew wealthy off Xerox’s discoveries. Neither Apple nor Microsoft even existed when the first Altos were designed in the early 1970s; by 1990 either company could have bought Xerox. The tragicomic Xerox saga is recorded in Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander’s Fumbling the Future . Here’s the question he ended his 1994 article with: So how will PARC guarantee that this time they won’t fumble their new future? Three ways, says JSB [ John Seely Brown ]. “One, we are more careful about intellectual property. Two, we are working smart - looking for entrepreneurial partnerships to develop ideas quickly. And three, Xerox has radically repositioned its organization so that its corporate strategy is shaped and informed by PARC and PARC is being shaped and informed by corporate strategy.” And, of course, here’s what eventually happened: By 2002, PARC became in independent research business with the ability to license its own patented tech and discoveries to other companies, institutions, and start-ups, especially the recent wave of alternative energy upstarts. While there are still ties to Xerox, PARC’s profits are entirely its own. What’s more, I’m told revenue is even split up among PARC employees. Lessons learned.

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PARC: Un-fumbling the Future

There are plenty of nifty search engines that don’t begin with “Goo” and end with “gle,” as Wired points out . But one site they forgot to include is MrTaggy , which was created by PARC’s Augmented Social Cognition Area. Unlike other engines, this one doesn’t index the content of web pages. Instead, it uses PARC’s TagSearch algorithm, which aggregates and sorts the user-generated tags added to social bookmarking sites like Delicious . From there, users can give thumbs up or down for each and every result. The goal: be part-search, part-recommendation engine by tapping the wisdom of the crowd. BBG asked the ASCA researchers to connect the dots between PARC’s earlier forays into search and MrTaggy. Here’s what Ed Chi, Manager of ASCA , shared with us: First, one of the most efficient ways of browsing and navigating toward a desired information space was illustrated by the pioneering research on Scatter/Gather , a collaborative project on large-scale document space navigation between amazing researchers such as Doug Cutting (of Lucene, Hadoop fame) and Jan Pedersen (chief scientist at AltaVista, Yahoo, Microsoft for search). The research done in early to mid 90s , showed how a textual clustering algorithm can be used to quickly divide up an information space (scatter step), ask the user to specify which subspaces they’re interested in (gather step). By iterating over this process, one can very quickly narrow down to just the subset of information items they’re interested in. Think of it as playing 20 questions with the computer. Second, also around the mid-90s , an important information access theory was being developed at PARC in our research group called Information Foraging , which showed that you can mathematically model the way people seek information using the same ecological equations used to model how animals forage for food. We noticed that we can use information foraging ideas to model how people used Scatter/Gather to browse for information. It turns out that it was possible to predict how people use the information cues (which we called ‘ information scent ‘) in each cluster to determine whether they were interested in the contents inside the cluster. It turns out that Scatter/Gather can be shown to be a very efficient way to communicate to the user the topic structure of a very large document collection. In other words, people learned the structure of the information space much more efficiently using Scatter/Gather interfaces. I hope it is quite clear that the relevance feedback mechanisms are very much inspired by Scatter/Gather. The related tags communicate the topic structure of what’s available in the collection. Through this process, we designed MrTaggy, hoping that it would be just as efficient as Scatter/Gather in communicating the topic structure of the space. Third, our group had developed Information Scent algorithms and concepts to build real search and recommendation systems. These algorithms build upon earlier work on a human memory model called Spreading Activation . TagSearch algorithm uses similar concepts here. It constructs a kind of Bayesian modeling of the topic space using the tag co-occurrence patterns. TagSearch’s algorithm owes its heart and soul in concepts in Spreading Activation, which helps us find documents that are related to certain tags, and vice versa. So what it’s like to actually use MrTaggy? I started a search with the suggested tags “funny” and “video.” Less than 30 seconds later, I discovered this Bruno-related gem from FunnyorDie that had, until now, somehow escaped my attention. Digg Dialogg with Bruno - watch more funny videos Good find, MrTaggy!

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Mr.Taggy & the History of Search at PARC

Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, LG, Qualcomm, Research in Motion, Samsung, and Texas Instruments have all agreed to accept microUSB as the standard phone charger format starting in 2010. Wonderful, welcome development, and I hope it means we’ll get this by proxy here in North America. Apple playing along has interesting ramifications to not just the iPhone, but to the entire iPod family: Will the long-standing Dock Connector, used by countless third-party accessories, finally be on the way out?

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Europe, meet your new phone charger standard

“When your car moves up the ramp the two towers rise so high that it brings you happiness; their structure is so pure, so resolute, so regular that here, finally, steel architecture seems to laugh.” — Le Corbusier , on the George Washington Bridge

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Bridges: Monuments To Progress

Here’s an Earth Day action I can get behind: Last Year’s Model , which encourages you to buy good gear—and then just use it. It reflects my own preferred method of consumption, which is to spend a little extra to get something that is exactly what I want, then try to use it for as long as possible. (I often fail, but I’m better than I used to be.) I’ve got an HDTV that I bought two years ago that should hold me for years. My Canon Rebel XT DSLR, just back from a cleaning, still has more functionality than I ever use. My Kindle 1 still supports words. My iPhone 3G is doing great until they come out with a new one in June which I will instantly buy. (Moderation!) There’s a panic that I feel when something I own doesn’t quite perform as I’d like it to, which sets off an escalating and enjoyable process of shopping and comparison, fueling daydreams of how wonderful my life will be with my New Thing. I’ve been trying to replace “Purchase” with “Projects”, though, so that I’ve always got a few things that are in a state of repair. My turn signals stopped working in my old BMW yesterday while I was driving back from the hardware store. (I was shopping for a reel mower, which I ended up buying from Amazon after comparing prices in-store with my phone, although I’d needed to go out there anyway for more charcoal and fertilizer.) I caught my brain spinning up, spitting a litany of excuses why I should go buy a new car: I need at least one reliable vehicle; it’s a good time to buy a car, with interest rates very low; the Nissan 370Z exercises the corpus cavernosum . But I’d bought Ruby in part because I knew she’d break down and I wanted to learn car repair. So I pulled into the garage, ran upstairs to spend 30 minutes reading the BMW 2002 FAQ forum, priced turn signal replacement parts on eBay, and went back to pop open the hood. I took out the #6 fuse, wiped it on my pants, and put it back in. The turn signals work just fine now, and I just saved myself $35,000.

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Go Green: Use Last Year’s Model