4,000 MPH Commercial Travel Speed

SFO to JFK in less than an hour? It could happen

Barring snafus, an X-51 WaveRider “Scramjet” could hit speeds of nearly 4,000 mph in a test flight on Tuesday. Such hypersonic flight, if proven viable, would cut the time of a cross-country trip from five hours plus to a mere 46 minutes..... promising Paris-to-Tokyo journeys of under 3 hours. .... Supersonic flight is not unprecedented. The Concorde aircraft flown by Air France and British Airways hit speeds of up to 2 mach or about 1,350 mph, but were notoriously inefficient and expensive. The program was not economically sustainable. And that will be a factor for commercial airlines evaluating hypersonic flight. .... at that clip, who cares about airline food or if the Wi-Fi works?

And check out this gravity train.



And if the world is not enough.



And if Mars is not enough, how about the future?

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This Is Now

Daiane Conterato modeling for Huis Clos, Fall 2008 Sao Paolo Fashion Week (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Instagram is a mobile app, true. But there is so much it has to offer the web.

'This Is Now': Watch the world in real time via Instagram photos

A new service called This is Now lets you see the world through Instagram's eyes. All you have to do is pick one of five major cities (New York, Sao Paolo, London, Tokyo, or Sydney), and you're instantly immersed in a beautiful real-time visualization of Instagram photos from those locations. Once you start watching, it's hard to pull yourself away..... uses the Instagram API to access Instagram's photos. .... The tool streams photos instantly as soon as they are uploaded on Instagram and captures a city's movement, in a fluid story

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• This is Now Shows Real-Time Instagram Uploads
• See the World Through the Eyes of Instagram
• This Is Now shows you exactly what's going on in the world through Instagram photos
• Spy on Instagram All Around the World in Realtime [Instagram]
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• Spy on Instagram All Around the World in Realtime

60 Milli Seconds

Bathymetric/topographic map of the Arctic Ocean and the surrounding islands (Photo credit: Wikipedia)The ocean route might make sense for inter-continental destinations, but I think air is still the best option for dense cities.

ExtremeTech: $1.5 billion: The cost of cutting London-Toyko latency by 60ms

the first ever trans-Arctic Ocean submarine fiber optic cables ...... a smattering of branches that will provide high-speed internet access to a handful of Arctic Circle communities ....... All three cables are being laid for the same reasons: Redundancy and speed. As it stands, it takes roughly 230 milliseconds for a packet to go from London to Tokyo; the new cables will reduce this by 30% to 170ms. This speed-up will be gained by virtue of a much shorter run: Currently, packets from the UK to Japan either have to traverse Europe, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean, or the Atlantic, US, and Pacific, both routes racking up around 15,000 miles in the process. It’s only 10,000 miles (16,000km) across the Arctic Ocean, and you don’t have to mess around with any land crossings, either. ...... The massive drop in latency is expected to supercharge algorithmic stock market trading, where a difference of a few milliseconds can gain (or lose) millions of dollars. It is for this reason that a new cable is currently being laid between the UK and US — it will cost $300 million and shave “just” six milliseconds off the fastest link currently available. The lower latency will also be a boon to other technologies that hinge heavily on the internet, such as telemedicine (and teleconferencing) and education. Telephone calls and live news coverage would also enjoy the significantly lower latency. Each of the fiber optic cables will have a capacity in the terabits-per-second range ..... Currently, almost every cable that lands in Asia goes through a choke point in the Middle East or the Luzon Strait between the Philippine and South China seas. If a ship were to drag an anchor across the wrong patch of seabed, billions of people could wake up to find themselves either completely disconnected from the internet or surfing with dial-up-like speeds. The three new cables will all come down from the north of Japan, through the relatively-empty Bering Sea — and the Arctic Ocean, where each of the cables will run for more than 5,000 miles, is one of the least-trafficked parts of the world. That said, the cables will still have to be laid hundreds of meters below the surface to avoid the tails of roving icebergs

New Scientist: Fibre optics to connect Japan to the UK – via the Arctic

In mid-August, construction should start on the first submarine fibre-optic cables to cross the Arctic Ocean ....... The longest of these links will become the world's longest single stretch of optical fibre. ....... the biggest threats to cables in warmer waters: fishing trawlers and ships' anchors ........ Reduced transmission time will be a boon for high-frequency traders who will gain crucial milliseconds on each automated trade. Optical amplifiers will boost signal strength every 50 to 100 kilometres. The firm also plans to drill a tunnel 40 metres deep to take a shortcut through the Boothia isthmus in the Canadian Arctic ....... Isolated Arctic communities will also be connected by extra sections of cable that branch off from the main one. ........ "choke points" such as the Luzon strait near Taiwan, the strait of Malacca between Indonesia and Malaysia, and the crowded and politically unsettled Middle East. ....... Ships must be built to withstand the pounding of ice as well as waves. ...... Icebergs can plough more than a metre into the ocean floor, endangering cables. Greenland's icebergs extend to depths as great as 170 metres below the sea surface, so Arctic Fibre will lay cable at least 600 metres deep in the Davis strait, where icebergs are most likely. The underside of sea ice also has ridges, or "bummocks", that reach depths of 18 metres, so Arctic Fibre aims to stay at least 50 metres down.

Ars Technica: Europe moving 60 ms closer to Japan with new undersea cables

The climate change-induced retreat of Arctic ice has had one positive effect. The Arctic Ocean is now sufficiently navigable that cable-laying ships will be able to plant undersea cables directly linking London with Tokyo. ...... 6 pairs of fibers with a 1.6 Tbit/s capacity per pair will be laid, and minimum latency between London and Tokyo will be 76.58 milliseconds.

Domo: The Pandora of People?

Only the other day I said for me I wanted a FoodSpotting for people. FoodSpotting says it is the Pandora for food. And looks like I have come across an app that is the Pandora for people. But I'd not call it the FoodSpotting for people. I have a feeling that will have to be a Hashable feature. Domo's dipping into Facebook is cool, but it should also allow for the kind of people you end up meeting. An ideal app would let you meet people and rate them. That might start a few fights, at least some hurt feelings, but nothing that a tight privacy setting can not solve.