The final launch of Space
Shuttle Endeavour is now scheduled for early next week. This will be the
next-to-last mission planned for the US Space Shuttle program. As a young nerd, I loved to
watch the progress of the space program. Almost as amazing as the missions themselves was the
fact that I could see it all live on television, even from hundreds of thousands of miles
away.
Endeavour is going to do much better than that. You can go to
www.youtube.com/pbsnewshour and
submit video questions for the crew of Endeavour. The crew will select some of the questions
and answer them live on YouTube. For more details, see the Official
Google Blog.
Much closer to home, and completely unrelated,
Google Chrome got a pretty slick new feature in the stable release this week. You can now use
voice
input with Google Translate in Chrome. In many languages, you can even click Listen
to hear the translation. This feature uses the HTML
speech input API. Now I can practice those languages I never quite mastered on my
last vacation.
For more on what you can develop with HTML5 and other
open web technologies, see the Chrome
Experiments site.
Finally, if you want to know why this Space
Shuttle mission includes squids, read this
page.
