Getting Some Perspective – The Earth from Space

The Planetary Society has some amazing images & animations of Earth taken by planetary spacecraft.

My favourite at the moment has to be the image of Earth from the surface of Mars, taken by the Spirit rover in 2004 and the first image taken from the surface of an object beyond the moon.

You Are Here

Shades of the Total Perspective Vortex, for those HHGTTG fans out there.

Speaking of which, Paulo Ang has a rather wonderful Flash animation entitled “The Total Perspective Vortex” which makes powerful use of planetary and astronomical imagery alongside music and a liberal smattering of Hitch Hikers quotes.

Oddpod – Donna’s new Podcast with Caiseal Mor

Well after a few months of tinkering around my fab wife Donna has her new podcast Oddpod off the ground!

Her first guest is Caiseal Mor:

Caiseal Mor is best known as a bestselling fantasy fiction novelist. Those managing his public image have portrayed him to the public in many ways, none of them as a man with autism. Here Caiseal talks to autistic author, Donna Williams, about his decision to go public with his autism, a diagnosis he had in late childhood.

ObTech: The podcast is recorded using Cubase and then some extra tweaking done with Audacity under Linux. We’re using WordPress with the excellent PodPress plugin to deliver it from our Debian Etch Linux virtual machine (using Xen) hosted with those nice folks at Rimuhosting.

RIP Kurt Vonnegut – 1922 to 2007

So it goes.. 🙁

American literary idol Kurt Vonnegut, best known for such classic novels as Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle, has died on Tuesday in Manhattan at age 84, The New York Times has reported. Longtime family friend, Morgan Entrekin, who reported Vonnegut’s death, said the writer had suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago, the newspaper reported.

EMI+Apple to sell “premium” tracks without DRM

A very interesting development courtesy of the BBC:

EMI said every song in its catalogue will be available in the “premium” format. It said the tracks without locks will cost more and be of higher quality than those it offers now.

These DRM free tracks will cost 99 pence on iTunes, but apparently that’s only for single tracks, you will be able to buy an entire album DRM free for the same cost as one with DRM. Steve Jobs said:

The right thing to do is to tear down walls that precluded interoperability by going DRM-free and that starts here today.

“An Inconvenient Truth” Wins Best Documentary Oscar

Congratulations!

The film, An Inconvenient Truth, former US Vice-President Al Gore’s dire warning about the threat of climate change, has won the Oscar for best documentary. Making use of a vast body of scientific data, the film represents a stinging rebuttal to the dwindling and increasingly discredited band of skeptics who refuse to acknowledge the extent of climate change.