CS: Freefalling, Hardware at 130,000 feet, Statistics on a cartoon, and a Silicon detector.

Here is a fantastic rendering of what it would look like to fall from Space (for those of you reading this through e-mail or an RSS feed, here is the direct link)



Credit: Kyle Botha.

This reminds me that you don't need a rocket to go up. Stratospheric balloons do that very well as can be seen from the view of a webcam that was on-board the HASP last year.

Credit: CosmoCam

For those of you interested in having some hardware at those altitudes, you may be interested in the new request for proposal by the HASP folks. The deadline is Dec. 19th.

The first cartoon video on CS has reached more than 1000 viewers (950 times being me hitting that replay button). The statistics provided by Youtube provide some insight about when the interest of the reader was the highest. I am not sure how they compute this but the first bump in this video is when CS is connected to underdetermined systems and linear algebra 101.

The video can be viewed here:

Finally, a video on a type of photon detector made out of Silicon that seems to have reached some breakthrough. More pixels, lower cost is our future, how can we integrate this in new types of CS cameras ?