Mssv

I haven’t been following the Beagle 2 Mars Mission anywhere near as much as I ‘ought’ to be, but I loved this quote from the lead scientist of the project, Colin Pillinger.
Interviewer: What happens if you find life on Mars?
Prof. Colin Pillinger: I’ll find it a lot easier to get funding for the next mission
Spoken [...]

It’s a great idea - create a fictional online journal of a 19 year old English girl who’s interested in science (and boys, etc etc) to get other girls into science. And that’s what the British Council has done with Planet Jemma.
Now, I don’t dare to presume that I have any special insight into the [...]

A lot of people are getting angry and scared about new mobile phone masts being erected in their local areas; the vast majority of these masts are for 3G operations, which have a smaller coverage area than current mobile phone masts.
People don’t like the masts because they think they might be harmful to their health. [...]

Once again we are at that special time of year when the GCSE and A-Level results are announced for secondary school students here in the UK. There’s almost no point reading the newspapers since they always run the same stories. If the results for an exam improve, that’s because it’s getting easier. If they get [...]

Button cameras the size of a penny will soon be on the uniforms of Scottish police, recording with a 20 minute cache - a truly excellent idea that I feel will solve a lot of problems.

There was a lot of driving today to go and see the Penguin Parade at Phillips Island, about two hours south of Melbourne. This will hopefully explain all of the exposition on driving that I’ll make later.
On the way to the Penguin Parade, we stopped off at a little wildlife sanctuary to see some of [...]

An interesting thread on how broadcasters are dealing with the Simpsons episode ‘The Simpsons Versus New York’ which heavily features the World Trade Center.

NASA’s two new Mars rovers have been named ‘Spirit’ and ‘Opportunity’. I’m just as much for getting schoolkids to name spacecraft as anyone else, but couldn’t they have picked anything more inspiring? It sounds as if the PC brigade had sucked all the life out of this competition well before it begun. They’re not terrible, [...]

Some people believe that China is really serious about human spaceflight. Really serious, as in, intends to establish a permanent human present on the Moon in the near future. At least one Japanese politician thinks it could happen within four years.
To be honest, it doesn’t really matter exactly when it happens; if China decides to [...]

Tough Love for PhDs - Brad talks about the mismatch between tenure-track positions and PhDs granted as US universities (I don’t know what the situation is in the UK). Good job I have four years to figure out what I want to do.