blather

IMAGE_00120.jpg

Originally uploaded by HNM_1977.

We have the technology

Index cards + venn diagrams = very funny site

Indexed

Via J-Walk

Hypochondriacs rejoice, Google seem to be intermittently testing some sort of auto ailment testing search engine. As of 10pm BST it’s up and down but you can get it working with some cheeky search terms:

Just putting in ‘bakers cyst’ (don’t ask) prompted the following refinements:

Condition info:
Treatment
Symptoms

More condition info:
Tests/diagnosis
Causes/risk factors

Audience:
For patients
For health professionals

Info type:
From medical authorities
Alternative medicine

Here is the result from ‘for patients’

To get to these pages while it’s not working append the following

• more:condition_treatment
• more:condition_symptoms
• more:tests_diagnosis
• more:causes_risk_factors
• more:for_patients
• more:for_health_professionals (you get a whole new set of refinements here)
• more:medical_authorities
• more:alternative_medicine

I seem to be discovering a lot of magazines at the moment. First there was Spaceship Away and now here’s another one for you to get excited about. Once again a stroke of genius!! In their own words:

If you like to tweak, disassemble, re-create, and invent cool new uses for technology, you’ll love MAKE our quarterly publication for the inquisitive do-it-yourselfer.

Every issue is packed with projects to help you make the most of all the technology in your life. Everything from home entertainment systems, to laptops, to a host of PDAs is fair game. If there’s a way to hack it, tweak it, bend it, or remix it, you will find out about it in MAKE

The publication is inspired by the bestselling and highly recommended Hacks series books but with a twist:

MAKE is a mook (rhymes with book). We’ve combined the excitement, unexpectedness, and visual appeal of a magazine with the permanence and in-depth instructiveness of a how-to book.

….Indeed!

“The kind of magazine that would impress MacGyver”
— Marcus Chan, San Francisco Chronicle

***UPDATE***

Comments seem to be a bit broken so I’ll add my bit here. Since returning from exile, I’ve not seen MAKE in the shops, but have been addicted to the MAKE blog. It is by far my most bookmarked ‘I’ll come back to that later’ of all my 200 odd feeds.

Here are a sample:

• Strange vehicle encyclopedia
  
• Home built recumbent bicycle
• Build your own RC helicopter
• Mythbusters in Lego (accidently caught Mythbusters on BBC2 yesterday, missing the much better US voiceover unfortunately
• Knit your own digestive system

At last!!! As a fan of 1950s sci-fi and as a former subscriber to the Eagle comic this made me squeal with delight.

A chap called Rod Barzilay has launched a new magazine called Spaceship Away. This magazine is not only in the style of those glorious 1950s comics, but it specifically includes adventures, new and old, from all your favourite space heros.

Rod’s aim is to bring brand new Dan Dare stories to the general public which are very much in the style of the 1950s original, and he has achieved that by bringing some of the original Dan Dare artists on board.

The most exciting part of this is that Spaceship Away has just started reprinting the old Journey Into Space comic strips!!

How cool is that!?

OK so the publication isn’t cheap, and it is only mainly available mail order, although I believe some specialist comic shops such as Area 51 do stock it. But for nostalgia nuts like me it’s a dream come true.

You can read an interview with the owner/creator here.

OK this is a little late but interesting nonetheless.

Citing sensitive information, NASA said that it will not publicly release its official report on the failure of a spacecraft during a mission to rendezvous with a Pentagon satellite without human help.

The robotic Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology (DART) spacecraft was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., in April 2005 to perform an unprecedented rendezvous with another satellite without human intervention. Read the story here.

More info on the DART mission here.

Cricket at New Road

Originally uploaded by HNM_1977.

Straight from the phone…

On November 28 approximately 35 acres of land that had been slowly forming from the outpouring of lava from the Pu`u `O`o vent of Kilauea volcano Hawaii fell into the sea.

(More pics and daily report from the front line)

And what happens when you behead the lava tube that was building this bench? A 6 foot wide ‘firehose’ of lava streaming into the sea.

Whilst alerted to the latest from the Russian space program by Space.com we came across the gem below from the Babakin Science and Research Space Center.

But lets get the ‘news’ out of the way first. Highlights of the nine year program that have apparently been approved include:

• Development of the new 6 crew member, reusable Clipper spacecraft
• Building Russia’s segment of the international space station
• A new sample return mission to the Martian moon of Phobos
• Work to begin on preparations for a manned trip to Mars by the end of 2006 (work beginning not the mission itself!)

On the right of that story is a picture of the proposed Phobos-Grunt (stop sniggering at the back) soil sample return vehicle from the Babakin Science and Research Space Center.

Go to the english version of their website and, well frankly, it’s a bit rubbish. Well I can’t get it to work, but there is a fascinating ‘Company Presentation’ which I urge you to download (all 3.48MB of it).

For those that can’t be bothered, I’ll summarise the juicy bits here

Slide 2 starts off in rollercoaster style

The federal state unitary enterprise BABAKIN Science and Research Space Center is a branch enterprise of LAVOCHKIN Association – one of Russia’s leading enterprises in the development of interplanetary spacecraft. BABAKIN Space Center enters the system of Russian Aviation and Space Agency (ROSAVIAKOSMOS).

You can whiz through the next few organongram slides and onto the ‘Historical (sometimes spelt Hystorical) Review. Apart from the collection of Ikea-esque names (Venera, Prognoz, Granat, Kupon and Fregat) they seem to have had a hand in pretty much all of the former Soviet program’s unmanned space endeavours.

Amongst these are the Vega sent to Venus

Moving onto their ‘Current Activities’ and it gets a little weirder:

• Re-entry vehicles
• Solar Sail (looks a bit like the one sponsored by the Planetary Society that crashed and burned recently
• Satellite Platform
• Upper stages
• Rovers - These little fellas are odd
  
  All of them look like they’ve been made on a 1950’s version of Scrapheap Challenge
• Pneumatic Landing Devices - now this is loopy
  
• Balloons and Dirigibles
• Remote Controlled Airplanes

Anyway take a look and enjoy our Russian friends’ visions of the future

This, of course, is a question that many of us have never asked.

So imagine my suprise when I opened my paper to find a review of a book with such a title. To my utter amazement this wasn’t some new management-speak-business-guru-lifestyle-advice-flavour-of-the-month; no. It was an entirely different beast.

Who Built The Moon?, takes a look at numerical relationships between the sun, moon and Earth and argues that they are evidence of a message for Human Kind.

What sort of message? I’m glad you asked me that:

The message is that future humans conquered time travel and went back to construct the moon to ensure Earth orbits in precisely the right alignment to the sun to encourage the evolution of humans.

Keen observers will notice the exciting and, perhaps, fatal paradox this creates. How did they become “future Humans” if they didn’t evolve in the first place? But this is a minor quibble in what is clearly an intellectual tour de force.

The book appears to be an entirely original journey to the fringes of crackpottery and home again in time for whale omlettes.

Enjoy poking fun at it with your friends.

No, not the Emmys, but this year’s highly anticipated Accouncy Age Awards.

Top of the shop is the shortlist for the prestigious Big Four Firm of the Year. And the nominees are (drumroll please):

Deloitte
Ernst & Young
KPMG
PricewaterhouseCoopers

You would have to be very disappointed if you were one of the Big Four firms, not to make the shortlist of the BIG FOUR FIRM OF THE YEAR…

Things are settling down - sofas are arriving next week and more importantly hopefully so will broadband.

Both blatherers are now in the same timezone, so hold onto your hats, stand by your mixed metaphors and get ready to dig the phat flavours that we’re going to lay down on the 1’s and 0’s.

Large.

(and if we get round to it we might do a podcast too)

Meanwhile, congratulations England on regaining the Ashes - I’m just glad that there are 15 months to get Freddie’s liver in a fit state to challenge for the return series.

Looking for nice DVD covers for your “off air” recordings of the 2005 Christopher Ecclestone Dr Who episodes?

Then try here and here.

What about nice covers for “Classic” Who releases? Try here , here or even here.

Not enough Who? Then take a look at Loose Cannon Productions who have attempted to recreate missing episodes through use of telesnaps and other means. These reconstructions are FREE and available WORLDWIDE.

BBC to delay news (by 2 seconds) but this is ridiculous.

When it comes to crashed U2 planes, the delay seems to be about one day… This story has just flashed across the BBC’s ticker on their News homepage (9:00am BST THURSDAY). Whereas the rest of the world was reporting it soon after it happened eg Reuters - posted 5:16am BST WEDNESDAY and the other 700 odd reports that are up already.

The ever useful Techbargains alerted blather to a new sub-$100 mono laser printer from Dell. No sales, no coupons, slap a hundred bucks on the counter and they give a printer and some change.

Says consultant Charles Wolf in a article on CNET:

Dell is going to screw everybody

How right he is, but for all the wrong reasons if you live on the eastern side of the Atlantic. For indeed the Dell 1100 is $99 in the US, but a staggering £93 in the UK.

Now call me old fashioned but I was foolishly under the impression that when one exchanged US dollars for British pounds, one currently received approximately $1.82 for every shiny pound coin, not as Michael Dell would have it - almost parity. Non of this 90 day US warranty rubbish either - both in the UK and the US this printer has exactly the same next business day unit exchange, for 1 year. And no the US price does not include sales tax, but show me a state that has 72% sales tax to bring it up to the UK price and I’ll happily eat my own head.

No thanks Dell, not this time.

Head of the Catholic Church in the Philippines Cardinal Sin, dead at 76.

I’m just sorry to see someone like that go

said close friend and now unemployed headline writer Ivor Biggun.

Bangladesh humble sorry Australia

A team that was not able to dimiss any English batsmen on Thursday have beaten the best team in the world. This is only the tenth time Bangladesh have won a one-day international against anybody in 108 attempts.

This is why Bangladesh should be playing top class cricket, at least in limited overs. They will only improve by playing against (and occasionally beating) the world’s best. And no matter how poor a side looks before, at the beginning, middle or near the end of a match - never ever write them off. I suppose that now applies to Australia, who play England tomorrow.

Vaughan, Trescothick, Flintoff et al, beware the backlash but do not be afraid to go in for the kill.

Australia. Land of sub-par cricketers, (more here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Oh and let’s not forget that they lost to Somerset as well). It is also home to some spectacular wildlife, and even more spectacularly named birds. Check out the Christian Science Monitor’s article for the low-down on holidaying for birders.

Much of the birding activity in Queensland is centered in the far northern reaches of the state. Some 20 percent of the people visiting the area spend time bird-watching…

…While only 8 percent of the world’s bird species appear in Australia, more than 300 species are found there and nowhere else on the planet outside zoos or natural-history museums. The country also serves as a honeymoon suite and maternity ward for migratory species coming in from other parts of Oceania.

(Via Gadling)

This earthquake has occurred off the coast of California.

A tsunami advisory for Hawaii has been issued. Hopefully no threat here, but local threat across the west coast of the mainland - will keep you posted.

UPDATE

From the 5pm advisory:

EVALUATION

THE WEST COAST - ALASKA TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER HAS ISSUED A
REGIONAL TSUNAMI WARNING AND WATCH FOR OTHER PARTS OF THE
PACIFIC. BASED ON ALL AVAILABLE DATA THERE IS NO DESTRUCTIVE
TSUNAMI THREAT TO HAWAII.

HOWEVER SOME COASTAL AREAS IN HAWAII COULD EXPERIENCE SMALL SEA
LEVEL CHANGES AND STRONG OR UNUSUAL CURRENTS LASTING UP TO
SEVERAL HOURS. THE ESTIMATED TIME SUCH EFFECTS MIGHT BEGIN IS

0929 PM HST 14 JUN 2005

BULLETINS WILL BE ISSUED HOURLY OR SOONER AS CONDITIONS WARRANT.

Update to the update at 6:12pm

EVALUATION

THE WEST COAST - ALASKA TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER HAS CANCELLED
THE REGIONAL TSUNAMI WARNING AND WATCH IT ISSUED FOR OTHER PARTS
OF THE PACIFIC. BASED ON ALL AVAILABLE DATA THERE IS NO
DESTRUCTIVE TSUNAMI THREAT TO HAWAII AND THE ADVISORY FOR HAWAII
IS ALSO ENDED.

HOWEVER…SOME COASTAL AREAS IN HAWAII COULD EXPERIENCE SMALL SEA
LEVEL CHANGES AND STRONG OR UNUSUAL CURRENTS LASTING UP TO
SEVERAL HOURS. THE ESTIMATED TIME SUCH EFFECTS MIGHT BEGIN IS

0929 PM HST 14 JUN 2005

THIS WILL BE THE FINAL BULLETIN ISSUED FOR THIS EVENT UNLESS
ADDITIONAL DATA ARE RECEIVED.

UPDATE 9:40 pm

Well 9:29pm has come and gone and no alarms. If you don’t like the ground shaking, the place not to be at the moment is Adak, Alaska. I make it seven magnitude 5 quakes or greater in the past four days and 20 of Mag-3 or more.

If you want to keep up with earthquakes on the fly there are a couple of RSS feeds from the USGS that you can subscribe to with your favorite news reader.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/catalogs/eqs7day-M5.xml
(My favorite, only M5 quakes or larger. Can be a bit confusing as it will show the same earthquake 3 times, once as it appears in the past hour, once in the past day and once in the past week)

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/catalogs/eqs1day-M2.5.xml
(Probably more for your hardcore tremblor nuts, this will give you every M2.5 or greater quake - I suppose this will give you some idea of how active the ground beneath our feet is, but you’ll probably be swamped with posts and ignore the real biggies.)

DSCN2658

Originally uploaded by Hendini Nutter Minor.

In a desperate attempt to cram as much of Hawaii into our last couple of weeks here, we airmiled our way over to Kauai last weekend. The oldest of the main Hawaiian islands, it has benefitted from an extra couple of million years erosion. Consequently, it has a quite unique landscape some of which you can see in the Flickr gallery.