Paul Smith's Blog

"It's a genius' conundrum." Recent article on the Arizona Republic: But Hawking also said survival of the human species depends on finding somewhere else in the universe to colonize. This is where the message became contradictory. The need to leave the planet was based on his rather dispirited view that "life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of....

The media are over-hyping the whole shuttle safety thing again. Let's keep things in perspective. The International Space Station is years behind schedule, modules that other countries have spent billions on are just sat waiting to be taken up. The Hubble Space Telescope is in dire need of maintenance, and that's just for starters. The shuttle has to launch and has to get its list of jobs done NOW. Before the US regime makes more of a mess of the NASA budget - if you want to go to the Moon Mr Bush you need to come up with some hard cash and stop cutting other programs which leave international partners in the lurch, like Russia who have been forced into handling the ISS single handedly, which made a mess of their budget having to pay for all the extra launches....

It's a difficult argument to make, what difference is killing a whale to killing a cow, fundamentally not a lot. However whales are not domesticated cattle. We artificially keep the number of cattle high for food, their natural numbers would be much lower. We effectively made the modern cow, sheep and other animals today, their whole evolution has been guided by us for thousands of years. Whales are also not mindless fish....

I'll save you some time; links to this great resource: web and a feed for it, is it my favourite feed? Yes, it is. The first APOD appeared eleven years ago today, on 1995 June 16. Although garnering only 14 page views on that day, we are proud to estimate that APOD has now served over 400 million space-related images over the last eleven years. That early beginning, along with a nearly unchanging format, has allowed APOD to be a consistent and familiar site on a web frequently filled with change....

I am so fed up with the damn Christian fundamentalists constantly using this in their propaganda, we have one of Kent Hovind's videos going on about evolution was Hitler's religion we have many others attacking atheism because Hitler was an atheist. He and anybody else claiming that is lying, some evidence to back this up from Mein Kampf: "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord....

The current representatives of the US ruling class in the White House have so far described the three recent suicides in Guantanamo Bay as 'an act of war' 'a good PR move' and a 'planned event' - opposed to an accidental suicide I suppose. Capitalism has to go. You smash one set of bastards and another set of bastards pop up somewhere else. Enough of this madness. I'm really losing respect for Americans who just aren't concerned about their own violations of human rights....

You know what I'm getting fed up with? Environmentalists going on about how we should turn things off at the wall instead of leaving things on standby. OK good advice for saving power, but this won't reduce carbon emissions, it will slow them a tiny bit. In France which is 90% nuclear powered it will do bugger all. We need real solutions, and less of being told how to live our daily lives....

Took this last night, with my Canon 350D and an 18mm lens piggy backed on my TAL 2M with a 184 second exposure @ ISO 800. Thousands and thousands of stars and a glow across the sky from millions and millions of stars. How many other civilisations exist within this one frame? And how disappointing it is that light travelling for thousands of years gets swamped by the few thousand lights of Yeovil....

"We were expecting this. It's the authorities that are allowing this to happen," said a woman holding a limp red carnation who identified herself only as Anna, a lesbian. Talking to the press after the religious and nationalist groups violently interfered in a gay parade in Moscow. Yuri Luzhkov Moscow's mayor simply said "as long as I am mayor, we will not permit these parades". Police detained the rally's main organizer, Nikolai Alexeyev, as he attempted to lay flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a symbol of the Soviet Union's victory against fascism in World War II, just outside the Kremlin wall....

According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, the Big Bang represents The Beginning, the grand event at which not only matter but space-time itself was born. While classical theories offer no clues about existence before that moment, a research team at Penn State has used quantum gravitational calculations to find threads that lead to an earlier time. "General relativity can be used to describe the universe back to a point at which matter becomes so dense that its equations don't hold up,"...