I'm in no position to dispute the author's technical competency, but on the basis of a series of haranguing messages I received from him after making a small space-related thingy (http://wheresthatsat.com), I believe he does regard US-based space activities (including everything from NASA to commercial enterprise to hobbyists like me) with blanket disdain. That's consistent, for better or worse, with the conspiratorial tone you note.
I don't know of a paper, but on the Tcl wiki there is some discussion of the "non-recursive evaluation" (NRE) engine that enables these features [1]. More formal descriptions of the new coroutine [2] and tailcall [3] commands are listed, among others, here [4].
Jonathan's Space Report (http://www.planet4589.org/jsr.html) is an exhaustive accounting of human activity in space (manned or unmanned), with a focus on recent launches. Released every few weeks. Back issues run to 1989 and continue to the present day.
Emily Lakdawalla writes some very good explanations of space science for the Planetary Society - very accessible, but with more detail and intelligence (IMHO) than you get from other media outlets.
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/
Considering most of those phones all broke and cracked on the very first drop, I'd say not really.
I have dropped my 15th unit, my current iPhone 4 one time so far on the sidewalk of SF -- it landed on its corner and has a dent and a scratch. I feel lucky that I have only dropped it once in 8 months.
The things are fragile. There is no denying that. With the iPhone 4 introduced with now 100% MORE glass to break! (the rear panel) I think its actually irresponsible of apple to not put a lanyard hole on the damn thing.
With respect, I think a greater part of the problem is mistreating your stuff. One, two, even three broken phones I can see. Fifteen indicates a problem with the user.
My iPhone 4 fell out of a pocket as I was getting out of my car and cracked the back glass, which was a cool $70 out of my pocket. I got a replacement back and it's fine again, but I made goddam sure not to drop it again.
I dropped my iPhone 4 the day after I got it, at 25 mph from a bicycle, on an industrial concrete road, and the phone survived without a scratch. I got the Apple bumper the next day.
I have two kids, 10 and 7. Can't tell you how many times that phone has been dropped since. A lot. I took it mountain biking one too many times, took one too many jumps, shattered the front glass. Apple immediately replaced it for free despite being a month out of warranty, but it was still a 3 hour ordeal since the store I went to didn't have my model in stock, so I had to go to another store. Considering my take home is around $75 an hour, Unless you're rich and have a lot of time to deal with the hassle (a rare combination), I think your vanity is getting in the way of good sense, thus I question your judgement.
Nobody's useless. It's easy to get wrapped up in the impression that we are defined by our jobs (especially around this site), but we aren't. I have had some unrewarding jobs myself, with little big-picture purpose and no easy way out, but the solution is to find (and make) value in other activities. Cultivate a hobby or an art or a programming side project that is important to you. Even the small "feel good" activities you mention are not insignificant if they impact someone else - and if you choose activities that are more interesting to you I suspect you will find them to be more satisfying.
If you're working with real-world objects, one approach is to place the object of interest on a turntable, allowing you to capture multiple perspectives with a single camera/sensor. Philo Hurbain has made some delightfully clever LEGO NXT 3D scanners this way (delightful especially because they're used, in turn, to digitize the shape of complex LEGO parts) - one using a needle probe, and another using a laser.
Or what about using built-in motion sensors to record the relative camera location and orientation of a series of frames captured with an e.g. iPhone camera? I don't know exactly how the accelerometers and gyros work, or what sort of data they provide (linear distance vs just orientation changes?), but imagine holding down a "scan" button as you simply swing the phone around a subject to capture a series of images. I would think it would be possible to reconstruct 3d surfaces (at least under suitable illumination conditions, I guess) given known camera location/orientation for each frame. Pushbroom stereo, in remote sensing parlance...
Tracking movement in 3D using dead reckoning is apparently very inaccurate, with the iPhone sensors I wouldn't expect it to be accurate for more than a few seconds at best. I visited a startup working on the problem a few years ago, and they had problems even with dedicated hardware.
