Leon’s got a couple of nice photos from Hawaii from the collapse of an entire active lava bench belonging to Kilauea volcano.
The USGS also has another photo (shown below) from the press release of the resulting lava hosepipe that was created when a 6 foot wide lava pipe was left spewing molten rock into the see from a height of 50 foot. Quite an amazing sight!
It would appear that Wales beat Australia by two points, their first victory over the Wallabies since 1987, the year I went to University! Thanks Rich for this, it didn’t get reported down here – presumably because it’s rugby union, and the heretics here don’t follow the One True Way, all you hear is league!
In the past day or so we’ve had Angela Merkel become the first female German Chancellor, and just now Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia has become the first elected female African leader.
Chatting to Rich on Jabber whilst I was trying to chomp all but a small section out of a 60MB log file with vi and it was taking forever, hence the following conversation:
Chris: I need a faster ‘vi’
Rich:: <italic>vi</italic>
Rich:: how’s that?
Thanks Rich, very silly indeed! 🙂
And now it’s finally finished, saying: 805664 fewer lines, phew!
I read this yesterday, but only got around to blogging it today..
The Dover School Board who got sued by predominately Christian parents for trying to bring Intelligent Design onto the curriculum had 8 of their 9 members up for re-election, and they have all failed to get back onto the board!
However, now Kansas has decided to teach ID in science lessons, a move the state governor is concerned will make it harder to attract hi-tech investment to the state, and:
In her statement, Sebelius said that the board should concentrate more on strengthening science-teaching standards, not weakening them, and that stronger public schools ought to be the board`s mission.
Well, I’ve listened to the first New Scientist Podcast and, frankly, it was rather disappointing. 🙁 A bit too American and glitzy for me and it came as something of a culture shock thinking of that as coming from what has, to me, always seemed a rather more British publication.
A much nicer science podcast (and a lot longer too, about an hour instead of 10 minutes) is the excellent Australian Radio National program The Science Show presented by Robyn Williams (no, not Robin) which isn’t afraid to get into the nitty gritty of a story and also has a great sense of humour. There’s also the fact that Robyn has been doing this since the 70’s, so there are nice touches like them playing extracts from him interviewing Fred Hoyle in 1978 when discussing (in 2005) a new biography of him.
The Science Programs’ podcast XML file is here.
Courtesy of James..
My blog is worth $10,161.72.How much is your blog worth?
The original is here at the ABC, click the picture to see it in more detail, but here’s what it looks like:
Protests against the counter-terrorism laws are being held in capital cities around Australia.
Now that’s one hell of a picket line.. 🙂
This makes it sound horribly like CSIRO is going to be moving its research away from renewables and towards “cleaner” fossil energy, and exploration for fossil fuels. I’ve tried to find the report the ABC refers to, but with no success. 🙁
Update: Aha, that would be because it was leaked.
The ABC is reporting that the Federal Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC – part of the Australian government) has said the unthinkable, that under coming anti-terror legislaton Australia is taking the the first step towards a police state. They quote him as saying:
“The defining characteristic of a police state is that the police exercise power on behalf of the executive and the conduct of the police cannot be effectively challenged and regrettably that is exactly what these laws are proposing,”
The report goes on to say that the judicial review of control and detention orders is illusionary and that the experience both in South Africa and in Australia is that when the government says “trust me” with respect to not abusing their powers that trust is all too often betrayed.
“Revelation of the Palmer report demonstrates how abuses of power can occur where there is no acceptable and realistic way that people can question what is happening to them.”
The Palmer Report (PDF) mentioned there is the report into the wrongful detention of Cornelia Rau and the wrongful deportation of Vivian Alvarez.
But we are not even to be trusted to see the legislation, we cannot talk about the latest draft because the Federal Government have tightened things up so that those in the State Governments can’t reveal them to us. The only reason I can think of is that they don’t want them discussed by the public, they fear what may be found.
Please, contact your state and federal politicians and ask them to open up these laws for discussion in the public domain, let us see what is proposed and work out whether we feel they fit the threat. Surely that’s not a problem if they’ve got nothing to hide – after all, that’s what they tell us..
