This is brilliant and a bit mesmerizing. Launch the page, zoom in on your airport of interest, and watch the flights do their thing. Click on one of the icons and detailed information about that particular flight, along with the path from its origin, will appear in a sidebar. Love this.

This Friday (September 6), NASA will launch its Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft. LADEE will be fitted with a sophisticated laser comm device that will significantly speed up communications with Earth. This is a proof-of-concept mission. The biggest hurdle to overcome is relaying the data almost 240,000 miles to ground telescopes on Earth.

“This pointing challenge is the equivalent of a golfer hitting a ‘hole-in-one’ from a distance of almost five miles… Developers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory have designed a sophisticated system to cancel out the slightest spacecraft vibrations. This is in addition to dealing with other challenges of pointing and tracking the system from such a distance. We are excited about these advancements.”

Interesting stuff.

An article I wrote for Fortune on Apple’s motivation for doing the iTunes Festival.

Nice survey of start-ups in the New York Times. Some I knew, some were new to me. Interesting read.

App cloning is a problem that impacts both large and small developers. In a nutshell, a cloner decrypts an app, then sucks out the binary. Once they have the binary, they modify it and resubmit it to the App Store as their own. A difficult problem for Apple to solve. They’d either need to apply significantly more resources to screening submitted apps, or take more time per app with existing resources, which would slow the review process to a crawl.

The app had only been out three months, and already the creators of A Beautiful Mess were scrambling to deal with a big problem: clones, copycats, and rip-offs, as many as seven of them, crowding the search results in the App Store. The clones appeared to be legitimate, affiliated versions, yet as all the developers knew, they were anything but. The CEO of the company that created the original A Beautiful Mess called them “infuriating.”

And getting rid of a clone is no easy task.

A Beautiful Mess developers tried to have the clones removed. “When we reported an IP infringement through Apple’s system, [Apple] would e-mail the company we were accusing and CC us on it,” said Trey George, the business development manager for A Beautiful Mess, in an e-mail to Ars. George believed that most of the clones originated with two operations, which he believed would feign innocence when confronted in a bid to buy time.

Clones and the like have been around the App Store almost since its inception. But this scourge has now become commonplace.

Android’s lack of strong oversight can lead to an even worse problem. Clymer highlighted the recent case of the game Gentlemen!, which was purchased legitimately 144 times and pirated more than 50,000 times.

Glad to see this problem getting the exposure it needs.

Just a reminder, you can watch live streaming of the iTunes Festival starting at 4p EST today by steering your browser to itunes.com/festival. Jim is there and I am jealous!

Damn.

First up, Lady Gaga. Doors open at approximately 6pm London time (1p EST Sunday afternoon). Lady Gaga should hit the stage around 9p (4p EST) Here’s a link to the festival FAQ.

Can’t wait.

Once every eleven years, the sun’s magnetic fields reset. When this happens, it can play havoc with things like wireless communications. Researchers at Stanford have been studying the underlying process and have cracked some of the secrets behind the mechanism that makes this happen.

The mechanism, known as meridional flow, works something like a conveyor belt. Magnetic plasma migrates north to south on the sun’s surface, from the equator to the poles, and then cycles into the sun’s interior on its way back to the equator.

The rate and depth beneath the surface of the sun at which this process occurs is critical for predicting the sun’s magnetic and flare activity, but has remained largely unknown until now.

Interesting article.

Many thanks to Mighty Deals for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. There are bundles and there are bundles. And then, well, then there are bundles of bundles.

In this Mighty Deal’s case, however, it feels like we have a bundle that consists of bundles of bundles! Confused yet? Don’t be. Just know that this is one of the biggest bundle deals ever! With literally thousands of high-quality elements for creative designers, this Bundle Storm pretty much has it all!

Stock photos! Vector images! Backgrounds! Patterns! Themes! Gradients! Actions! Icons! Buttons! Infographics! Why, there’s even tools to quickly create your own mascot!

You can also check out the Full Smashing Library Deal.

Looks like this lawsuit is finally wrapping up.

According to the letter, with these additional settlements the fund for payments to customers who purchased qualifying ebooks is now $162.25 million. Anyone who purchased ebooks from the iBookstore between April 1, 2010 and May 21, 2012 is eligible to receive a payment from this fund upon court approval of the settlement. That is, almost anyone: because of the complexity of the case and complex mix of the various parties involved in it, only individuals who are residents of the United States (including five territories and the District of Columbia) are eligible for payments; libraries, government agencies, and corporations, among others, are excluded, as well as those who only obtained free books or gifts from the iBookstore. In addition, residents of Minnesota, while included among those who are eligible, are subject to different terms in the settlement.

There’s a pretty comprehensive FAQ on the settlement here.

The NFL reached a tentative settlement on the brain-injury lawsuit filed on behalf of more than 18,000 former NFL players, including the family of Pro Bowl linebacker Junior Seau, who committed suicide last year. Almost coincidentally, Tim Carmody wrote this intriguing post for Kottke.org about football players and the harm that befalls them.

This is all to say that what offensive linemen do in football is not well understood. When the NFL finally started to act on widespread concussions and the resultant uptick in chronic traumatic encephalopathy — if you never have, please read about the life and death of Dave Duerson — they focused on open-field helmet-to-helmet hits and defensive players targeting quarterbacks, running backs, and receivers (so-called “skill positions”). They ignored the constant battering that offensive linemen take, how repeated brain injury poses the greatest risk for long-term problems, how linemen are rewarded for staying on the field and playing through pain, and the ways in which they’re encouraged to both be more aggressive and prioritize someone else’s safety over their own.

Worthwhile read. I hope the money from the settlement reaches the people who need it. At the very least, I hope it provides health care for all 18,000 of those former players.

The last “soft” landing on the moon was by the Soviet Luna 24, which made its unmanned, non-destructive landing on Augsust 18th, 1976 and returned to Earth four days later. That was 37 years ago.

This week the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced that it has finished construction of its first lunar landing module. It is now ready to move Chang’e 3 to the “launch implementation phase,” and fully expects to launch China’s first moon landing mission by the end of the year. This will be an unmanned mission, but given that China only just launched its first lunar orbiter, Chang’e 1, in 2007, the military-led space agency is making remarkably quick progress.

China, Japan, India, Russia, and the US are currently the only countries to have put objects into a stable lunar orbit, and if Chang’e 3 is a success they will be just the third nation ever to achieve a “soft” landing on the moon — meaning that the lander will not be destroyed in the process.

This is a big deal for China, which will become the third nation (after the US and Russia) to make a successful “soft” landing on the moon.

Moore’s Law is foundational to anything and everything to do with technology. In a nutshell, it states that the number of transistors that can fit on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. A more modern definition says that chip performance doubles every 18-24 months. According to Intel’s former chief architect, Moore’s Law is reaching the end of its life. And this has huge implications for the tech industry, which draws its lifeblood from smaller and faster products.

Moore’s law is headed for a cliff. According to Colwell, the maximum extension of the law, in which transistor densities continue doubling every 18-24 months, will be hit in 2020 or 2022, around 7nm or 5nm.

“For planning horizons, I pick 2020 as the earliest date we could call [Moore’s law] dead,” Colwell said. “You could talk me into 2022, but whether it will come at 7 or 5nm, it’s a big deal.”

There are a number of technologies (graphene, III-V semiconductors, carbon nanotubes, etc.) that offer some hope for the continuation of the promise of Moore’s Law, but none has proved practical as of yet.

Interesting comparison on total funds raised:

Indiegogo campaigns were found to have raised far fewer successful dollars than [Kickstarter], with around $98 million total all-time, while Kickstarter had about six times that, or $612 million. Kickstarter has had 40 projects cross the $1 million threshold, with only 3 doing the same on Indiegogo, and Kickstarter’s average success rate is 44 percent, while Indiegogo’s is around 34 percent (which doesn’t take into account the many delisted projects that failed to raise at least $500. Including those delisted efforts, the previously reported 9.3 percent success rate on 142,301 total campaigns matches up nicely.

Much of the data was gathered by scraping the sites, so unsuccessful campaigns that are dropped from the site are not counted, but that shouldn’t make enough of a difference to change the apparent results.

In this issue, Alex Vollmer describes his 20 year obsession with Eddie Van Halen’s famous “Brown Sound” guitar tone; Matt Gemmell reminds us that everything we do online can affect our reputation; Peter Cohen talks about how he got started with the Mac 27 years ago; Steven Aquino is a sports fanatic and technology has made his hobby better; and Dr. Robert Carter tells us how Apple’s commitment to accessibility has changed his life.

You can download The Loop Magazine free on the App Store for iPhone and iPad. You also get a free 7-day trial when you subscribe.

This is clever, though imperfect. The calendar frame slides to properly portray the current month. There are no labels for days of the week (like a watch with no numbers), and every month has 31 days, so you have to say the little rhyme (30 days hath September…) to remind yourself when the next month starts.

Still, very clever.

This is fascinating.

Brain researchers say that for the first time one person has remotely triggered another person’s movement, a flicking finger, through a signal sent to him by thought.

Though this particular experiment is simplistic in nature, the implications are a bit staggering. Imagine someone hacking into the system and controlling people’s actions, all over the net. Yikes!

Everyone knows about Seinfeld. And maybe most people are aware that, more recently, Jerry made a web series called Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. But did you know how incredibly successful that series is?

Comedians’ first season, which featured interviews with Larry David, Carl Reiner and Ricky Gervais, has been streamed 10 million times, and early installments of season two already have clocked more than 4 million streams. More impressive, viewers spend 19 minutes on average watching his interviews, which vary in length (between eight and 17 minutes) and tone (Michael Richards discussed his N-word saga; Chris Rock joked about Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show stint).

If you haven’t seen Comedians in Cars, you might want to take a look before you read the interview. Here’s a link to the David Letterman episode, though I think they are all equally entertaining. Enjoy.

Jeff Bezos made this speech back in 1998. Amazon first opened its doors in 1995, so this was still very early in its life. Still, enough time had passed that a lot of lessons were learned, business strategies evolved.

There’s a lot of discussion on the value of frugality. For example, what do you do when your customer orders one book, but the wholesaler has a 10-book minimum?

The problem was, the wholesalers had 10-book minimum orders. I tried to negotiate with them and said, “Let us just pay a small fee, and you waive the 10-book order,” and so on. But they wouldn’t go for it. So we figured out a loophole. It turned out that you just had to place an order for 10 books; you didn’t actually have to get 10 books. We found an obscure book on lichens that none of our wholesalers actually carried.

So whenever we wanted to order one book, we ordered the book we wanted, and then nine copies of this lichen book. They would deliver the one that we wanted, along with a very sincere apology about not having been able to fulfill the nine copies of the lichen book order. That worked very well for exercising our systems. I’ve since talked and joked at length with the people at these companies about this. They actually think it’s very funny.

And this on the value of honest reviews:

Often, publishers are surprised to find out that we allow negative reviews to appear on our website. You should read the reviews for the book Tenth Justice, which is a new beach book. Our customers have just destroyed that poor book. If you were thinking of buying it and you came to our website, you’d think, “Well, maybe I’ll look for something else.” On the other hand, there’s a book called Endurance; it’s a book about a guy named Shackleton, whose boat, while on an Arctic expedition, got crushed in an ice flow. He had to spend six months with his men, 28 men, hiking out of Antarctica, and they made it. Not a single man was lost.

It’s one of the greatest stories of all time of endurance and human spirit. There are dozens and dozens of customer reviews about it; this is an old book, originally published in 1956. For months, this book has been on the top 100 best-selling books on Amazon.com, strictly fed by these customer reviews. I challenge you to read the customer reviews on that book and see if you can resist buying it.

Terrific read.

When Apple released the original Macintosh in 1984, it was looked at as a triumph of design — one of the more minimalist and user-friendly computer designs to hit the market. Old Macs have long since become obsolete, leading fans to come up with creative ways to hack them into a useful second life (like the MacQuarium), but John Leake took a different approach for his tribute to Apple’s most enduring product. Using Sintra foamboard and a Raspberry Pi, Leake has successfully created a working scale model of the original Mac that’s one-third the size of the original.

Absolutely love this.

Matt Gemmell has some solid tips that you can try the next time you sit down to write. Two tips in particular that I’ve done for a long time are:

I have a habit of adding a bullet-point right after I stop, briefly outlining the very next thing that happens. The following day, I just transform it into a sentence or two, and I feel that I’ve at least started.

I actually do this throughout my stories. As the story evolves, I think of things that need to be added or points that need to be made. The problem is, if I stop and add it in, I lose my momentum and I don’t like that. Sometimes a single word will be enough to jog my memory and by the time I’m finished, all of the relevant points have been made in the article.

Just trust yourself. Something will emerge. Unplanned structure.

For me, it’s not necessarily lack of planning, but lack of putting it on paper. I formulate my ideas in my head—sometimes for days or even weeks—before I ever write anything. When I do sit down to start writing, I have a flow that gets me through the toughest part of the article.