Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

So in the week James Cameron makes it to the bottom of the Challenger Deep (repeating the Trieste's feat), more underwater news from another entrepreneur...

Jeff Bezos appears to have found Apollo 11's engines, and is planning on raising at least one from 14,000 feet under the Atlantic Ocean. It's a strange mix of long-lost space technology, and the latest in underwater research. Are we going forwards, or going backwards?

Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration. A year or so ago, I started to wonder, with the right team of undersea pros, could we find and potentially recover the F-1 engines that started mankind's mission to the moon?

I'm excited to report that, using state-of-the-art deep sea sonar, the team has found the Apollo 11 engines lying 14,000 feet below the surface, and we're making plans to attempt to raise one or more of them from the ocean floor. We don't know yet what condition these engines might be in - they hit the ocean at high velocity and have been in salt water for more than 40 years. On the other hand, they're made of tough stuff, so we'll see.

Awesome stuff. More at Jeff Bezos' blog.

I always dreamed of owning a Whole Earth Catalog. Back on Jersey in the 70s and 80s they were the stuff of legend, only noted by reference.

When I found I could subscribe to the Whole Earth Review, thanks to a Bruce Sterling column in one of the first news-stand Interzones, I signed on the dotted line quicker than anything - that email to a WELL address was one of my first ecommerce transactions. I still wanted the catalogues, and I scoured Hay-on-Wye, and got bookseller friends to order me copies of the in-print editions, along with the Sterling-edited Signal, which introduced me to a wider electronic world than the walled garden of JANET. But perhaps the most influential piece of the Whole Earth philosophy was its simple slogan:

"Access to tools and ideas".

Such a simple concept, and such a world changer for someone from an island where 6 miles was a long way, and the single town somewhere you only went when you really really had to (and only then if you were going to be there all day).

So why am I thinking of it today?

There's a line in Cory Doctorow's seasonal email that I'm sure he won't mind me quoting:

"But I just keep on remembering that we live in the best time in the history of the world to have a worst time: the time when collective action is cheaper and easier than ever, the time when more information and better access to tools, ideas and communities are at our fingertips than they’ve ever been."

It made me realise that we're living with the greatest edition of the Whole Earth Catalog ever, and it's constantly being updated.

This blog is just one page in it, along with yours and the many millions of other pieces of content that are added to the ever-growing web every day. The tutorials I write, the articles and the columns are another set of pages, along with photos that document my life and my friends. Then there are the ever-growing wikis, and the search engines that link them together. It's not just in a box in the office, or on a bookshelf - it goes everywhere we go, and fits in our pockets and on our TV screens.

The connections made by the web mean that the world is a smaller one and a better one. It's worth remembering that the connections we make are the ones that will help us through the years to come - whether they're hard or difficult.

What connections will you make, and what tools and ideas will you share with the world in 2009?