Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Just a quick pointer to the ESA Mars Express image browser, a rather nifty Flash tool for finding quality Mars Express images from a rotating globe...

Also, to a set of rather beautiful images of the Valles Marineris...



Some day my story of uplifted gorillas building a bridge across the Valles Marineris will finally see light...

The office windows looked out over the Valles Marineris, pulling in a light-lagged real-time video feed. It was late afternoon on Mars, and a squall was screaming up the immense canyon, driving a swarm of micro-lights before it. Just a few thrill-seeking body-hoppers, dodging the lightnings and the rain, playing with the winds, mortal flesh for a summer's afternoon. Turning away from the worlds, I glanced over to the waiting swarms of agents and viziers: AI implants and intelligence augmentations hovering in the quiet corners of my mind. They shone bright, reflecting the invisible colors of a virtual light, thoughts dancing in the winds of the datastream.

Radio 4 brands itself as "intelligent speech", and the regular discussion series In Our Time is one of the highlights of its current roster. It's a "big ideas" programme, looking at the issues and ideas that are at the heart of current scientific and philosophic debate.

Last week's edition focused on the Burgess Shales, the Cambrian Explosion, and evolutionary matters in general. With a line-up that included Simon Conway Morris (one of the early experts in Edicarian fauna), this was an example of what public service broadcasting should be - an intelligent round-table debate that took three viewpoints and used them to expound on palaeo-climatology, modern evolutionary thought, the thesis of Steven Jay Gould's Wonderful Life, and on the scientific process - all in a half-hour slot.

In the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia in Canada, there is an outcrop of limestone shot through with a seam of fine dark shale. A sudden mudslide into shallow water some 550 million years ago means that a startling array of wonderful organisms has been preserved within it. Wide eyed creatures with tentacles below and spines on their backs, things like flattened rolls of carpet with a set of teeth at one end, squids with big lobster-like arms. There are thousands of them and they seem to testify to a time when evolution took a leap and life on this planet suddenly went from being small, simple and fairly rare to being large, complex, numerous and dizzyingly diverse. It happened in the Cambrian Period and it's known as the Cambrian Explosion.

MP3s of the show are available from the BBC for a limited time.

Just looking at a rather interesting press release from Orange, which should also catch the fancy of purplecthulhu.

The robotic Faulkes Telescope in Hawaii is being controlled using 3G data cards, so that observers can use their observation slots no matter where they are.

David Bowdley, educational programmes manager for the Faulkes Telescope Project, conducts observing sessions on his laptop using the Orange 3G Mobile Office Card. “The first time I used the card for a session was when I was driving with a friend on the M60 just outside of Manchester. Observing asteroids whilst travelling at 70 mph is quite an experience! The images that come through from the telescope can be quite large, and the Orange network had no problems in transmitting the data. I was really pleased with the download speeds, and 3G really is comparable to broadband. Now if I have an observing session booked when I am going to be on the move or away from the office, I simply log on using the 3G network.”

One thing though - surely he shouldn't have been astounded to be observing asteroids at 70mph, when he's already doing it at 28.13 km/s...

...then why not show the world you believe in it!



(link from the codepope)

It's not often you find out about languages from signs on sandwich bar doors, but a sign reading "Ancia en puoc furlan" pointed us at a romance language from north east Italy.

Spoken by half-a-million people in and around Venice, Furlan (or Friulian) is just about readable with a little Latin or Italian knowledge. It's interesting to see how languages have evolved from Latin - there's an interesting path to be traced from Vulgar Latin (and Italian) to Furlan to Romansh to French.

And no - it's not the language of the Minbari religious caste

If you're using Flickr as a photo host, and Adobe Elements 3.0 to edit and manage your pictures you may find yourself wishing that Flickr's Uploadr was built into Elements.

Well, while it isn't, you can still use the two together. On Windows XP machines you can just drag and drop images from the Elements Image Well onto the Flickr Uploadr - saving time looking for your neatly tagged and catalogued images in your My Pictures folder...

Pity it doesn't deliver the Elements image tags with the picture, but it's a start.

Rar!

A fill flash shot taken into a street light of a snow flurry, in the middle of last night's heavy snow showers.

Putney, London. February 2005

Another streetlight photo of snow flurries, this time with water flares from the snow on my camera lens.

Putney, London. February 2005