Who turned out the lights on Saturn's rings? Well nobody, recently Saturn entered its equinox, meaning the Sun is directly above the equator. As the rings are in the same plane as the equator, they receieve much less light showing only an edge on profile towards the Sun. This happens every 14.8 years as it travels around the Sun but this is the first time we've had a spacecraft in orbit to capture it....
I think it's time I return to blogging after taking my somewhat late summer break, what better way to kick it off again than by answering some questions I've received over the last few weeks from some creationists. Proofneededdesperately posting from South Africa asks: 1. How do we distinguish between right and wrong, according to evolution? Who decided murder/adultery/theft is wrong? Don't animals do it? 2. What is morality and why do we have it if the animals don't?...
A new build of WorldWide Telescope has gone up, for both Windows and Silverlight platforms. Grab it from here. Cosmos view has been re-worked and looks a lot better, the Solar System view has had a view changes, eclipes now work on other planets, the Sun looks a bit better from a distance, although the planets all seem to still be spheres /facepalm I was really hoping that would get sorted in this release....
Another question from those crazy creationists. Evolutionist: What colour was the skin of the first human? Black. Black? really! Yes. So why are some races made different varieties of colours? Is there a reason for this? Yes, we call it evolution. Homo sapiens originated in east Africa around 200,000 years ago. By about 70,000 years ago the human population is estimated to be around 2000 to 5000 individuals. From those about 150 people crossed the Red Sea and went on to inhabit the rest of the world, Asians branched first, settling in southern Asia by about 60,000 years ago, later reaching east Asia by about 30,000 years ago, Europeans branched off the older Asian populations settling in Europe around 50,000 years ago, with members from northern and eastern Asia settling in the Americas between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago....
Continuing the series on answering crazy questions from crazy creationists (see here). Why are the atheist and evolutionist worried about global warming? Because rebuilding our coastal cities would be expensive, as would redeveloping our agricultural industries. The sooner we have control over our climate the better. If speaking in your terms that there is no Christ or God, everything is meaning less etc... Than why are you worried about your air supply, war all around you, energy shortage, etc....
David Pogue well known Steve Jobs fanboy has wrote a gushing article on the New York Times over Apple's new pay-ware service pack. He writes: In any case, Snow Leopard truly is an optimized version of Leopard. It starts up faster (72 seconds on a MacBook Air, versus 100 seconds in Leopard). It opens programs faster (Web browser, 3 seconds; calendar, 5 seconds; iTunes, 7 seconds), and the second time you open the same program, the time is halved....
This is a pretty swish looking netbook. More details will be announced next month. But it looks like its got a 10 inch screen probably around 1280x720, GPS built in, 3G built in plus 12 hours of battery life weighing in at 1.25kgs and running Windows 7. Nice.
So I've just logged back into World of Warcraft after having a break for 5 weeks. I see the spammers have got a new way to spam links in the game now. By making URLs out of corpses. Sigh.
Those using the pre-release version of Microsoft Security Essentials may have noticed a new update being pushed down lately. There's a few couple of changes of note. It now reports itself to the Action Center / Security Center as Microsoft Security Essentials, previously it reported itself as Microsoft Antimalware. It also features a new set of icons, here's the old set: And the newer ones, which are much clearer.
I stumbled upon a question on Yahoo Answers today, its related to a bit of confusion creationists have with evolution. The same sort of confusion you can see in my original questions for "evolutionists" post. Soldier for Salvation asks "Why do evolutionists always try to separate the Big Bang from their other ideas?" Where to start, as always I object to the term evolutionist, like Darwinist, its used to discredit people who accept evolution....