“When I became the NASA administrator — or before I became the NASA administrator — he [Obama] charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering.“

– NASA Administrator Charles Bolden

Hmmm… there’s something missing there. Something about – oh yeah, that’s right = SPACE!

Here he is saying that line (and a lot more) on Al Jazeera:

It’s not a matter of bandwidth, or cost, or reliability, or security. Yet. We’ll get to those problems eventually. But first there’s still a usability problem to solve. Life in the browser has come a long way in a short time, but it still has a long way to go. More and more complicated tasks are moving out of the independent desktop application and becoming tabs in a browser.  Office apps, image and music editing, and even video editing are web apps now. When you use these web apps you have to convince yourself that even though the user experience is much worse, somehow this is better. In exchange for access from anywhere (previously attainable with portable media) we trade consistent desktop integration, such as reliable cutting and pasting (something Microsoft still struggles with on the desktop).

So here’s a random stream of thought for you. I’m listening to Marc Maron interview Robin Williams on the WTF Podcast and they start talking about Twitter and stalking. Robin mentions something he saw on the news about it, which I assume was pleaserobme.com. They’re talking about over-sharing, and I start thinking about how I’m always telling people not to post about what they are currently doing – post about what you’ve already done. Don’t say, I’m going grocery shopping, say I just went grocery shopping. But then again, don’t say that because it’s really boring and nobody cares. Plus it’s only marginally better. Talking about the past solves the pleaserobme.com problem, but still leaves the pleaserapeme.com problem. Okay, I’m assuming that’s not really a site, and I’m not going to check. But I think you get the point. All of this would solve it self if people would just post interesting things instead of what kind of sandwich they’re having for lunch. We’ve been watching the first season of Dexter recently, and maybe that plus the Maron/Williams/Twitter/Stalking talk made me think of Twitter Hunting. The idea is you tweet about how you hate to put the PS3 controller down, especially with this brand new 60 inch flat screen, but you’ll have to since you’re going away for the weekend. Then you fake leaving, and shoot the people who come to rob you. This is mostly for sport, but it’s also good for society. You’ll want to do this in a state with strong castle doctrine laws. Then I was trying to figure out how you’d fake leaving, and I thought I’m pretty sure the father did that in Cape Fear. So I IMDB Cape Fear. I knew Robert De Niro (who apparently has 12 projects in the works!) was the bad guy. But I was thinking of the father… what’s his name? I couldn’t come up with the name of the father. I just kept thinking “Indiana Jones, Deckard, Han Solo…” So I had to IMDB Indiana Jones to get Harrison Ford’s name, which wasn’t helpful because he wasn’t in Cape Fear. Nick Nolte was the father in Cape Fear. So that got me thinking maybe it’s not even Cape Fear. There was a scene where they pretended the dad wasn’t in the house but really he got back in by riding underneath the car, or something like that. I could have sworn it was Harrison Ford. Anyway, I decided to read what Cape Fear was about to see if I was thinking of the right movie. IMDB has two summaries. Here’s the first sentence from each: “Sam Bowden is a small-town corporate attorney “Leave It to Beaver”-esque family-man.” And, “Sam Bowden is a womanizing lawyer who has cheated on his burnt out, bitter wife Leigh Bowden.”  WTF indeed.

It occurred to me the other day that I’ve been referring to my cell phone as “my Nexus One.” Nexus One is the model of this phone, which was designed by Google and manufactured by HTC.  What I mean by this is I say it in conversation, like “I’ll send that to you from my Nexus One” or “I can look that up on my Nexus One”. A lot people call it a Droid phone, and in fact seem to be calling all Android-based phones Droids. That’s a nod to the successful marketing by Verizon and Motorola of the actual phone called the Droid.

iPhone users tend to call their phones, “iPhones” as opposed to just “phones” also. I remember this also being that case with the T-Mobile Sidekick. At first I thought this must have started because these devices are so much more than phones. It almost seems insulting call my Nexus One a phone. As phones go, the N1 one is great. It’s an excellent GSM device with a really nifty set of noise canceling microphones. (The fact that the iPhone is generally considered to be a terrible phone may have also contributed to people not referring to it as a phone.) But as with the iPhone and Sidekick, it’s so much more. Calling it a phone would be like calling my house a bed. I have an excellent bed, a Temperpedic, but that hardly sums up the value of my house.

But then I realized that while that may have contributed, that’s probably not how this started. It started with the Blackberry. People have always said, “I saw your email on my Blackberry.” But it’s not because the Blackberry did so much more that make phone calls -  it’s because the Blackberry did not make phone calls at all. For many years – nearly a decade – Blackberry users also carried cell phones. You had to call your Blackberry a Blackberry, because there was nothing else to call it.