Riding the booster with enhanced sound [Video]

Ever wondered what does a rocket going up sound like? This video, created by NASA and sound designed by the amazing folks at Skywalker Sound, lets you rise 150,000 feet on a solid rocket booster, and then, after helping the space shuttle shoot into orbit, you (and the booster) tumble straight back to Earth. Keep those headphones on.

The life of a royal born in the Internet Era [Article]

Charlie Stross writes science fiction – and explains the future that awaits the most recent addition to the UK’s royal family.

What is it going to be like to be the heir to the throne, aged ten and starting at a public school (that is, a very high-end private school) in 2023?

How do good ideas spread? [Article]

Atul Gawande finds out , in the New Yorker, using the different trajectories of anaesthesia & anti-septics, both of which were discovered in the nineteenth century:

In the era of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, we’ve become enamored of ideas that spread as effortlessly as ether. We want frictionless, “turnkey” solutions to the major difficulties of the world—hunger, disease, poverty. We prefer instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic. They introduce, as the engineers put it, uncontrolled variability.

Take the time to read through this thoughtful essay, with real-world examples that will make you pause & ponder.

Everything is rigged, & it ain’t no conspiracy [Article]

Matt Tabibi’s journalistic investigation discovers that the “too-big-to-jail” banks are up to more collusion.

..it’s increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system…

How to value personal data [Article]

Ctrl-Shift has a very good article that explains why data is the currency that is poised to overshadow money, not for the sellers but for consumers.

A huge amount of data today – the data collected by companies’ web sites, Google search terms, Facebook postings etc – are provided by individuals for free.  If something is ‘free’ does that mean it has no economic value?