Posted in Announcements, In The News on Dec 6th, 2005
[Apple, Battlestar Galactica, Blog Updates, iTMS]Today, Apple released a major expansion of its TV show offerings, including something I’ve wanted for a very long time: Battlestar Galactica. It’s also added shows from NBC, USA, the Disney Channel and more. Though this is not a development that will go towards the general “betterment of […]
Posted in In The News, Opinion on Dec 2nd, 2005
[Agnosticism, Atheism, Belief, Christianity, Materialism, Moral Relativism, Religion, Smut for Smut]Boing Boing linked to a group of Atheist students at University Texas San Antonio who are handing out free porn to anyone who turns in their Bibles. This is an absolutely puerile stunt that will do nothing but give their organization a bad name.
These […]
Posted in In The News on Dec 1st, 2005
[Pi, UPenn]My friend and frequent commenter, Tom, has a fun blog entry (as well as some good investigative camera-phoning–photo credit: Tom Adams) today about a nerd who wrote out 1881 successive digits of pi on the sidewalks at UPenn.
Evidently the whole thing spanned 3 city blocks. Also, based on a somewhat-random sampling of digits, […]
Posted in In The News on Nov 30th, 2005
[Climate Change, Global Warming, Gulf Stream]Nature’s latest issue, due out tomorrow, publishes the results of a study that shows that the Gulf Stream current (the one that keeps Europe warm despite the fact that the UK is as far north as Hudson Bay) has slowed by about 30% since 1957. Actually, the study notes […]
Posted in In The News, Opinion on Nov 28th, 2005
[Space, Space Exploration, Why Space]This week’s selection of articles in The Space Review is predictably excellent. Sam Dinkin, in “The High Road” makes a really important statement about the necessity for cooperation among the ranks of the space advocacy community. He suggests that no one publicly make derogatory or divisive statements because the […]
Posted in In The News on Nov 24th, 2005
[Budget, Cost Overrun, NASA, Politics, Shuttle]Today’s Washington Post has a major piece on the very large shortfall that NASA is facing in the next few years by trying to both satisfy its commitments to the ISS partners and develop the new Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) by 2012. Jeff Foust, over at Space Politics has […]
Posted in In The News, Opinion on Nov 23rd, 2005
[L5 Society, Mars, Mars Society, Space, Space Advocacy, Space Cadets]Before reading this entry, check out Jeff Bell’s latest opinion piece at SpaceDaily.com. In a somewhat wide-ranging criticism of modern space activism, he singles out the Mars Society, and Robert Zubrin’s ideas, as the most obvious symptoms of a much deeper malaise affecting us Space […]
Posted in In The News on Nov 21st, 2005
[Asteroid, Astronomy, Hayabusa, Itokawa, Rubble Pile]Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day gives us the great picture to the left of Asteroid Itokawa taken by the currently status-unknown Japanese probe Hayabusa. This picture is simply astounding because it is completely unlike any picture of an asteroid, moon, or planet we’ve seen so far. It […]
Posted in In The News on Nov 21st, 2005
[Manned, Mars, Phobos, Space, Space Exploration]This week’s The Space Review features some truly excellent thinking about space. In addition to a great piece explaining how the Vision for Space Exploration’s return to the Moon is much more than just another Apollo, Jeff Foust discusses the suggestion that a manned mission to Phobos could be a […]
Posted in In The News on Nov 17th, 2005
[Ice Pick, Lobotomy, NPR, Transorbital]Last night on All Things Considered, I stood transfixed for almost 25 minutes listening to the story of a procedure: the transorbital, or “ice-pick” lobotomy. It was used between 1946 and 1967 on over 2,500 victims-cum-patients to treat certain mental illnesses, and was invented by a man named Walter Freeman. […]
