The recent discovery of water on the moon is one of the most exciting scientific discoveries since humanity began exploration of outer space. It captured headlines around the world with its broad implications but any child of the information age would be anything but shocked to hear that it was all part of an elaborate marketing ploy- maybe a NASA/George Lucas collaboration to hype up the release of a new toy line, or Coca Cola for a new brand of sports water.  It’s not, but I’d be surprised  if anyone read the title of this blog and didn’t think  “Hmph, I should’ve known”.

In the 1960s French social theorist Guy Debord wrote the Society of the Spectacle, in which he essentially tore a strip off of post ww2 western culture as being wholly fixated on a series of spectacles in which any form of reality (in the sense of meaningful discourse over how to live together) is replaced by these glamorous or shocking distractions as spoon fed to us by the media’s talking heads. It is the cheapening of society through totalitarian control of social discourse through media. And even now 40 years later we would rather fixate on Balloon Boy for a week instead of looking to the dark and broken parts of humanity that need the most attention.  Ariana Huffington goes off about this in one of her most recent blogs.  The media coverage of “balloon-boy” is an example of how major news still focuses on the pedantic details of singularly  exploitable and wholly inconsequential stories. Elian Gonzales, Tonya Harding, OJ Simpson, Anna Nicole Smith, Magic Johnson, the list goes on and on of singular stories in which one person creates a spectacle through some ridiculously stupid or careless action they take or statement they make- usually leading to death, deportation, disease or incarceration. Meanwhile the real issues that we should be focused on are made into silhouettes deep in the back of our minds. The spectacle shines too brightly. Often times, like sails catching trade winds, the marketing execs will capitalize on mass fixation. It is a large focus of human mental energy that is hard not to want to tap into.

So even in the spectacle of this Lunar discovery exists the seeds of marketing, maybe even the fresh spring buds of marketing. The Moon is exciting again!  President Obama is reconsidering which direction to take NASA in, so the timing of this discovery couldn’t be better. The Moon, which had been recently considered to be waning in value, was in risk of being supplanted by Mars or the asteroid belt as the new budget would dictate. In this case, the recent spectacle may have served those who have put their life’s work into researching the moon and perhaps justify funding on space research in general.  In essence it markets the value of lunar research to both Obama and to taxpayers. It’s great timing for UBC, the Vancouver university fielded the only Canadian team in  a recent NASA robotics competition focused on lunar excavation. The squad came 6th out of 24 and performed impressively- maybe showing that regardless of what Obama’s NASA budget dictates there will still be scientists and engineers keen to explore the lunar surface.

So  was the rocket splash all a ploy by some in NASA who wanted the agency’s mandate to continue focusing on the Moon?  I don’t honestly think so, but it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t make a strong case for those in the agency keen to continue this lunar research at a time when the future of NASA is being seriously reexamined. If anything it highlights two valuable things about marketing. It’s not just about taking up time and space. Effective marketing happens at the right time in the right place.

Hopefully it won’t take crashing a rocket into the moon to give your business some needed exposure though.

In just a couple of hours, a historical celestial event will take place. And it will be visible to millions and millions of people. Unfortunately for most of us here on Senses, none of the places this event will be visible from are in North America. But, thanks to live, streaming video, we’ll all be able to watch the longest total solar eclipse of the century, as it happens.

If everything goes as planned (and if it doesn’t, it means something has gone terribly, terribly wrong) the eclipse will last six minutes and thirty nine seconds, at its longest duration. The maximum time a total eclipse could ever last is just over seven minutes, so this is a big one. The path of totality (the darkness that falls as the moon completely blocks the sun) travels from northern India, through parts of Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh, then into China, where it will be visible to tens of millions of people, weather dependent. The eclipse’s path will then take it to sea, where it will pass Japan’s Ryukyu Islands before heading out into the Pacific Ocean.

If you’re reading this, odds are you’re not likely to be able to get anywhere near that path in the next couple hours. For those of us on the wrong side of the planet, NASA has kindly provided both an extremely in-depth information page, and some links to sites to sites that will be streaming video of the eclipse from various points along the path of totality. I also did some poking around on my iPhone to see if there’s an app for that. Just search for “Eclipse 2009″ and you’ll find at least one app that offers info on tonight’s eclipse…though there didn’t seem to be any streaming video. So you might be best off heading over to one of those linked webcasts. The action starts in just a couple hours, at 5:30 PST or thereabouts, so it’s almost time to start popping that popcorn.

With all this talk of retiring the NASA space shuttle fleet and Canadian astronauts being propelled into space using this 1960’s to 1980’s technology I thought I’d write about the software that makes the space jalopy work. The coding when compared to commercial software is far superior, being that when your OS encounters a bug at home or you office, chances are good that you’re not flying thousands of Km/h high above the continents with millions of pounds of extremely explosive fuel strapped to you. Therefore, the software used by NASA for these shuttles is as close to perfect as we’ve been able to get…on this planet. But what about these guys?

Software inevitably has errors. Thousands upon thousands, millions upon millions of lines of source code, at times co-authored by several different people is just not likely at this point to be perfect; especially with deadlines and competitive pressure from other firms. And where there may not be bugs there may be logic errors, that slip through the debugging process even if your syntax is correct. See this NY Times article on the development process for Microsoft Windows Vista and you start to get the picture of how screwed up software platforms can become in a clunky and inefficient design environment. To err is human, but these particular kinds of software errors cost the US economy alone up to 60 billion dollars every year

Open-source software has been hailed by some as offering a new programming method that actually decreases the amount of bugs because of the multiple scrutinizing eyes combing over the code as it matures. Google may have had this philosophy in mind when they pre-released Google Wave to scores of developers earlier this year, hoping to avoid MS Windows-like problems. See previous post. But to get back to the soon to be retired space shuttle fleet. In the newest Microsoft operating systems there are tens of millions (about 40 to 50) of lines of code and scores of bugs, perhaps thousands. The software coding for the shuttles has about 420,000 lines, smaller yes, but in the past three versions have only had ONE bug apparently. And the past 11 versions collectively have had only 17 errors total.  So for 4.5 million lines of code we have 17 bugs total. As an Astronaut I like those odds. That means I only have a 1 in 265 thousand chance of being blown to pieces on the job. Still probably a lot lower odds than your average safe desk job.