A retired French army colonel, named Michel Fournier,  is soon to make mankind’s biggest jump with a 25 mile (131,233 feet) free fall from the edge of space, that will take him through the sound barrier before he opens his parachute 9,000 feet above the Earth.

Fournier has 8,300 jumps under his belt, and during this one will pass through temperatures as low as minus 115C and reach a top speed of Mach 1.68 (1,680kph at that height) after stepping out of a specially designed balloon-borne capsule above the plains of Saskatchewan, Canada, in September. He will be wearing a pressurised spacesuit and an astronaut’s helmet.

The free fall will involve 200 scientific experiments in the stratosphere and the troposphere, some of them linked to the possibility of parachute escapes from stranded space shuttles. If he is successful, he will break a 42-year-old record set by an American colonel, Joe Kittinger, who jumped from 102,798 feet (19 miles) over Florida in August 1960.

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AT&T has put out the call for temps for a “mystery” marketing campaign in June.  Hmmm, wonder what they might have going in June…

A call has been put out through the Kelly Services temp agency that will see workers join AT&T’s wireless division as greeters for a project known only as “Summer Project Pro.”

No information about what the position entails but the request is very similar to AT&T’s efforts for the iPhone launch last year and hints that the company expects a repeat sales rush for a next-generation product this year.

In June of 2007, AT&T hired short-term temp workers for what ultimately amounted to crowd control. The new hires steered customers quickly through retail stores to ensure that all buyers, iPhone or otherwise, were well-treated regardless of the added store traffic.

Like the earlier plan, the latest recruiting drive also provides a familiar two-month work span for successful candidates. Work would begin on June 16th and end almost exactly three months later, on August 16th.

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Mars lander Phoenix enters the martian orbit this afternoon, and there are several places you can watch the event “live”. I put live in quotes since there is a 15 minute delay between when it happens and when we see it, due to the distance that it has to travel to get back to us.

The landing is being referred to by NASA as “7 minutes of terror”, and there is good reason for this. The Phoenix will enter the atmosphere traveling between 12,000 and 13,000 mph, and will slow to just 5 miles per hour by the time it reaches the surface.

Of the last thirteen attempt to land on the surface, only five have been successful, so while they are hopefully optimistic, they are working against the odds on this one.

If you want to watch, you can do so here :

[ CNN with Miles O’Brien ] will stream the landing live on the internet at this link.
[ NASA TV ] will have coverage both on the web and on TV
[ National Radio Astronomy Observatory ] will also have it available.

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To quote from [ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ].

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical
value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very, very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Today is national towel day.  A day meant to honor and show appreciation to Douglas Adams (1952-2001).

So, before you leave for that BBQ, or whatever else you have going on today, don’t forget your towel.

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