An old glass jar inside a beaten up old safe at the bottom of a waste pit may seem an unlikely place to find a pivotal piece of 20th century history. But that’s just where the first bulk batch of weapons-grade plutonium ever made has been found – abandoned at the world’s oldest nuclear processing site.

And this….

Update: Since publication, Jon Schwantes has discovered that a microgram sample of plutonium produced in 1942 by Glen Seaborg’s group at the University of California in Berkeley is also plutonium-239. The sample discovered at Hanford is technically the second oldest sample of plutonium-239, but remains the earliest produced during the Manhattan Project and the first bulk batch anywhere.

This reads like a Simpson’s episode. I can’t help but wonder what else we’ve waylaid, and where. The ocean? A watershed that supplies water to millions of people? The Arctic/Antarctic, where ice caps are receding? Some of the hair-brained schemes they hatched up in the 1950′s to dispose of nuclear waste, it just leaves me wondering where these nuclear easter eggs will pop up next. And what of the Russians? The French?

Other news source:
Old plutonium found in dump
Weapons-grade material discovered at Hanford nuclear site.
Nature | Geoff Brumfiel
Published online 22 January 2009

“It was clear that our hardware-based approach to IT had to change,” said Steve Jenovai, senior systems administrator for the city of Aurora. “We simply can’t afford downtime in our infrastructure, and budgetary realities make it impossible to just throw money at the situation. Thanks to VMware, we’ve been able to consolidate 70 boxes down to five, with each box running close to 20 VMs. It has simplified system management dramatically while eliminating downtime and saving taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Jenovai noted that provisioning of new VMs could be done in minutes, compared to the two weeks that used to be required for ordering, installing and configuring a physical server. This has helped the city become much more responsive to changing demands from residents. Likewise, VMware VMotion technology has been extremely valuable in helping ensure application availability by allowing the IT staff to move VMs during routine maintenance of physical hosts or when problems arise. And, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) helps ensure outstanding performance by dynamically adding or reducing resources for specific applications as demand ebbs and flows.

“We took a long look at all virtual server offerings,” said Jenovai. “It quickly became a very easy decision. VMware provides a true virtualization solution, not just a hypervisor. VMware gives us a mature toolset, centralized manageability, DR capabilities and OS independence. We didn’t find any other virtualization offerings that could match it. And the fact that we could achieve 100-percent ROI in 90 days was phenomenal. And that’s just from hardware savings. We’ve also reduced power consumption and space requirements.”

AirJelly – Festo USA

Bionic Learning Network
Learning from nature…

How can bionics be used to improve the efficiency and productivity of automated motion sequences? Festo searches for innovative answers to this question through a diverse range of projects within our Bionic Learning Network. The latest technology from Festo is used in experimental prototypes, such as integrated mechatronic concepts with options for remote maintenance and diagnostics, and the latest piezoelectric valves and electric drives. Festo’s fluidic muscle, a long established component in manufacturing, is proving to be endlessly versatile in ever more amazing applications. The inspiration for the complex drive forms comes from natural phenomena in air and water, but above all from humanity itself.

The Bionic Learning Network is part of our commitment to basic and further technical training. In cooperation with students, prominent technical universities, institutes and development companies, Festo is promoting ideas and initiatives which go beyond the core business of automation and didactics, and which may well give rise to promising areas of application in the future.

Gorgeous.

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Oh, this is just too rich. Knight Rider, back on NBC, as a Mustang, and he’s still called “KITT”. I heard rumblings, but then I flip channels, and there it is. I have just heard the car talk…..This is too much. The car just made a cell phone call to some woman, and he has attitude, kind of like Hal 9000 hung over. And the first commercial, a Ford Mustang commercial. Shocker.

The Hoff will be making a guest appearance. That alone is worth wasting an hour of my life over as I do laundry.

Super sustainability??

Last week at the NCTA cable show, Comcast executives said they were “very interested” in the idea of charging cable customers $30-$50 to stream a film on the same day that it’s released in theaters. Theater owners aren’t particularly happy about the idea, saying it will erode the “magic” of the movie-going experience (sticky floors, chatty viewers, popcorn that requires a second mortgage?). Comcast has also been working to kill that thirty to forty-five day window that exists between a film’s release on DVD and its release to on demand — with trials currently underway in Pittsburgh and Denver.