I've been following HST advent images the Boston Globe have been running over the last month, and reading the comments along the way. I was shocked at the amount of nonsense attributing the universe to a supernatural deity of some kind, around half of what was posted was along these lines. I’m tempted to bring out the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and preach to all how the universe was touched by his noodly appendage....
It's not every day we encounter such brilliance, I think everyone should take the time to read these words of wisdom from Richard Branson. Hospitals are there to cure people - they are not to kill people. Incredible. How on Earth did we manage to get along before this guy came along and shared his intellect with us? He accuses politicians of tinkering with infection controls in hospitals, largely in relation to strains of staphylococcus aureus that have become resistant to a large group of antibiotics, while he himself is doing the same tinkering suggesting all hospital staff be screened for MRSA....
Just a heads up for those living in the UK or further east. There will be a eclipse of the Sun on the 1st of August, best viewed from parts of Russia and China where it will be total. Only partial from the UK - around 10%. In the UK this will start at around 0931 local time (0831 UTC), the mid-point of the eclipse will be around 1015. Safely blurb:...
Congratulations to John Mason on winning Glasgow East, but I hope he is planning on picking up some science books soon. Mr Mason described his win as being "off the Richter scale", the only way I can interpret that as being so weak it is undetectable, or that there is no seismic activity at all, and as such it isn't on the scale. I don't think he meant it in that way, and as such I'll remind him that the Richter scale, which is a base 10 logarithmic scale for measuring the amplitude of the largest seismic wave during an earthquake, has no upper limit, and so nothing can be off the scale....
Just a quick post before I head off to Newport, over in Texas it seems the term black hole is now a racist remark, well to some people at least. Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield (white) seems to of got himself in trouble for saying that the county's collections office behaves like an area of space with an escape velocity greater than 300,000 kilometres per second. "It sounds like Central Collections has become a black hole"...
Well it looks like the blues finally have an excuse to why they lose all the time, no it isn't just because they suck. In a study recently published in Cyberpsychology & Behavior it was found that out of 1,347 games of Unreal Tournament 2004 (not pictured above), the red team won 55% of the time. Mihai Moldovan a neuroscientist at the University of Copenhagen, hypothesises that the colour red is a psychological distracter, at least for men....
One last thing I wanted to leave you with before I head off to Newport to see Catherine. Phoenix landed successfully last night! Here's the first image of the horizon we've got back. One thing I do have a comment to make quickly about, have you seen what the NASA personnel are wearing? Those silly blue t-shirts that make them look like McWorkers. Honestly NASA, let your people wear a shirt and tie instead of a dumb uniform somebody like Game would come up with, it looks much more professional and it isn't going to get any young people going into engineering or science....
Two days five hours to go until Phoenix lands on Mars, the mission is what NASA have dubbed a quick scout mission, where it'll briefly look into history of water on Mars and any habitability potential in the ice-rich soils near the Martian poles. Phoenix itself will land on Sunday at 23:53:52 (+/- 46 seconds) UT (Monday 00:53:52 BST), as you can see from the drawing above there will be no penny-pinching inflatable beach ball landing for this mission....
On Monday the ban on "saviour siblings" was defeated, and research using hybrid embryos can go ahead, today attempts to introduce law requiring a father figure for IVF treatment have been defeated and lastly, the big one which always gets people up in arms, attempts to lower the abortion limit have been defeated. Phew... I'm pleased to see Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg supporting the current 24 week limit. David Cameron, of course and no doubt like most of the Tories supported cutting the current limit to 22 weeks, and some even lower....
The International Astronomical Union recently released a trailer for the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Here's the YouTube version: They've got higher quality versions on their website in a mix of MPEG formats. I've taken the liberty of re-encoding their 1080p video to VC1/WMV, so that people who don't like installing 3rd party software can still watch it (yes ideally WMP should support H.264). I'll be hosting it here, for a while it weighs in at 86MB, if it gets too much traffic I'll have to pull the download and stick it somewhere else....