Mssv

Collective - the BBC’s latest effort to create its own online community and yet more evidence of their web savvyness. As pointed out on Metafilter, it’s more accessible than h2g2, but to my eyes the front page looks far too busy for newcomers. What I’d like to know is how on Earth the BBC manages [...]

Dragon Space - a dedicated web portal for all China-related space news. Pretty nifty, and it has all the latest happenings with their Shenzhou craft, the fourth of which is expected to take off within the next few days.

Putting your life online - recording and organising all of your emails, conversations and other life events on a computer to serve as a supplemental memory system. This isn’t a particularly new concept, but it is likely to be the first decent implementation. Very interesting stuff - I wonder how it’ll affect kids growing up [...]

I’ve finally done something I’ve been meaning to do for months; set up a wiki. Or to be exact, three wikis. Wikis are webspaces in which any material can be edited or added by anyone; a bit like a community whiteboard with hyperlinking, if you will. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but after [...]

Such is the power of Google; I go to a lecture by Steve Jones tonight, and five minutes after I get back I can find the exact same image of a bull elephant seal surrounded by its army of penguins used by Steve.

This optical illusion has been making the rounds on the Internet recently, and most people are astonished to find that the A and B squares are the same shade, to the extent that they consult Photoshop to confirm that A is not darker than B. The explanation for this is simple - the eye is [...]

The Guardian has released the results of their ‘Best UK Blog’ competition, in which I was pleasantly surprised to see mssv.net on the shortlist. Also check out the related Metafilter thread for more comments.

I just renewed my subscription to Salon.com. Salon is one of only three places on the web that I’m prepared to pay to read (the other two are Kuro5hin and Metafilter - both of which I’ve donated a few dollars to). I don’t visit Salon quite as much as I used to in the past, [...]

There’s been a bit of a disturbance on the New Mars forums I administrate. In the past two days someone has signed up and made 40 posts, all of which are hostile to space and Mars exploration. People got upset and complained (very politely though). I decided to do a bit of research.
One peculiar thing [...]

Thanks to a generous grant from Trinity College at Cambridge University, I was able to attend the full week-long British Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Festival of Science in Leicester this year, from September 9th to 13th. This is a brief report of what I learned there.