The ABC have a story about some robbers who failed to rob a restaurant because they couldn’t boot the front door open. They didn’t realise it was a sliding door..
A certain Gary Larson Far Side cartoon springs to mind..
New Gamma Ray Burst space telescope launched
The Swift Gamma Ray Burst space telescope was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral today.
I know a number of the folks at the AUS-VO workshop were looking forward to this.
The idea is that when this new detector spots a Gamma Ray Burst it immediately turns to it and images it at various wavelengths. I also believe that it will transmit a finding chart to the teams so that terrestrial telescopes (such as the ROTSE robotic scopes can provide follow up observations.
US healthcare crisis
The Florida Herald Tribune is reporting that the Tenessee TennCare plan may die, leaving around 430,000 people with no funding for medicine.
The consequences could be very severe for some..
“In this country, rich as it is, people shouldn’t have to choose whether their child will live or die,” said Angela Ray, the mother of a severely ill 12-year-old girl in Lawrenceburg. “It’s amazing to me that it’s come down to this.”Her daughter, Jasmine, must take 20 extremely expensive medications every day to control the rare stew of chronic diseases, including Elephant Man Syndrome, that make it impossible for her to run and play. There are no doctors in Tennessee who can treat her, so her parents must frequently drive her to Birmingham, Ala., for care.
Soon, she may lose that care – out-of-state trips are covered by TennCare, but not by Medicaid – and possibly, her life.
The Religious Right start to flex their muscles
Two snippits here, one laughable and the other a bit more serious.
First off from Australia, it’s been reported that “Family First” want to promote the preaching, sorry, teaching of creationism in schools as an alternative to evolution.
Unfortunately the newspapers that reported this require you to register, so I can’t just point to an article about this (it appeared on the front page of Thursdays “The Age” as you can see from this Google News search). What I can do though is link to their letter page for handhelds that doesn’t require registration. It’s interesting (and encouraging) to note that the first two letters attacking “Family First”‘s position are from ministers!
On the more serious side in the US right wing conservatives are attempting to sneak in an abortion-related clause into spending legislation that must pass if various government agencies are to continue operating. This was reported originally in the New York Times (that also requires registration) but through the power of Google News I’ve found the story reprinted in Floridas Herald Tribune.
It appears that rather than be up front about things they have inserted a clause in a bill that everyone has a vested interest in having passed so they can go home for the holidays – oh, and keep the government running..
The Australian Virtual Observatory
I’ve spent the last two days at the 2004 Workshop for the Australian Virtual Observatory representing VPAC along with my friend & colleague Damon Smith. We were there representing the APAC Compute Grid project and Damon presented on the Certificate Authority that VPAC is running as part of this effort.
However, given that I did my degree in “Physics with Planetary and Space Physics” it was really nice to get to merge two great interests of mine, big computers and astronomy. 🙂
It was really interesting, although at times as virtually everyone there was working in astronomy at postgraduate or postdoc level it was a bit over my head. Some of the really interesting things to come out of it were:
- NIght Sky Live – a website that links to images from CONCAMs (CONtinuous CAMeras) that are mounted on a number of telescopes worldwide, and a number of them are always in night. There are two in Australia, both at Siding Spring.
- The second of the two scopes at Siding Spring is a robotic telescope known as a ROTSE (actually it is ROTSE IIIa) and is involved in automatic follow-ups of Gamma-Ray burst events.
- SkyMapper (to be built at Siding Spring by ANU) is going to be the replacement for the Great Melbourne Telescope which was destroyed by bushfire in 2003. It will do a full-sky survey of the southern hemisphere (all 20,000 square degrees) and catalogue over 1 billion sources. They estimate they’ll have generated around 90TB of data (65TB images and 25TB calibration) by the time they’ve finished the survey.
- Swinburne are working hard at bringing online about 12TB of historical pulsar data from the southern hemisphere, and their CPSR2 dector generates about 11TB of raw data a day (128MB/s), so they have to process it all (“fold it”) down to about 1.5TB a day to make it manageable.
But the scariest fact of the day must go to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which apparently will be capable of generating 8 PetaBytes of data each year once it goes live!
Congratulations to Rich Boakes and Emma Reeves!
Just had an email from a friend that I met at last years IEEE CC&Grid conference in Chicago. It says:
In February 2005, it will be ten years since Emma and I met (on a cold undergraduate night in Plymouth). We've been a blissfully happy item ever since and thought we'd do something to mark the occasion. I am therefore delighted to announce that Miss Reeves has accepted my proposal of marriage. Rich -- http://boakes.org
Please join with myself and Donna in congratulating them!
Plunderers are trashing the Titanic
A sad piece of news, plunderers have been stripping pieces from the wreck of the Titanic, including the ships bell from the mast and the name from the bow.
This is from a report done by Dr Bob Ballard, the man who rediscovered the Titanic, about which the ABC news has a story, as does National geographic (for whom he works) and USA Today.
Edelweiss Pirates
Every Sunday ABC News Radio broadcasts a show from Deutsche Welle in Germany called “Inside Europe”, and yesterday I caught a piece about a German WWII rebel youth movement that I’d not heard of before.
The Edelweiss Pirates were rebelling against the strict behavioural codes of Nazi society, just like teenagers do anywhere, but in that extreme setting that could lead to them getting beaten or killed (6 of them were hanged along with 7 adult friends in one execution in Cologne) .
The difference is that because they were being rebellious in general, instead of specifically at the Nazis for political reasons, they’ve been seen as criminals rather than a form of resistance, even though they carried out sabotage and handed out anti-Nazi leaflets, but this is changing with the 60th anniversary of the execution of the 6 in Cologne on 10th November 1944.
There is even a German film being made to commemorate them.
Update:
A good, short summary about the Edelwiess Pirates is here.
An alternative American election capitulation speech..
Oops, missed this for a week..
Thanks to Phillip who posted a link to this rather amusing captiulation speech in a comment to a previous article.
Some of the comments are fun too, I liked:
Please, blue states, please, when you secede: allow those of us stuck in red states to apply for political asylum.
and
My son saw a red/blue map by county in Newsweek, and was depressed, as I was. Then, I noted that if you superimpose a satellite picture of the US over the red/blue map by county, the areas that are lit up were all against Bush. Some real symbolism there. The dark, empty expanses were what out weighed the points of light.
A “Dear Internet Explorer” letter..
Found via Linux Weekly News, a rather amusing breaking up with Internet Explorer and leaving for Firefox letter..
Dear Internet Explorer:It’s over. Our relationship just hasn’t been working for a while, and now, this is it. I’m leaving you for another browser.
I know this isn’t a good time–you’re down with yet another virus. I do hope you feel better soon–really, I do–but I, too, have to move on with my life. Fact is, in the entire time I’ve known you, you seem to always have a virus or an occasional worm. You should really see a doctor.
…and it carries on in that vein, very well written.. 🙂