Lets have the delegates to the UN have a bug banquet to show their support of entomophagy. I know that support from political leaders would help. I’m sure having the Obamas munching on some meal worms while Prince Charles and Camilla have a feast of crickets will really push people towards eating insects instead of food.
Mark Caris :
@Paul Pardee Yes, eating bugs is disgusting. Not wholesome like hormone fed, fecal-spattered beef, covered with a processed pus-filled milk (BGH induced) product, in a bun of pesticide-contaminated GMO wheat. yum.
Of course, a pigs’ rectal lining filled with unsaleable, nitrate treated offal sounds good now, too…
Shocking, exciting news from Russia early this morning as coincidentally [because they were on different orbits reports CBC Radio] on the same day a major 50m asteroid (2012 DA14) is set to fly by Earth, a meteorite has struck Russia. Reports are that there are injuries, which have been very rare for meteorite impacts until now.
The camera person nearly lost their poop. Sonic boom of doom, anyone?
There is confirmation from scientists that the report of the Russians “shooting” this down are erroneous boasting.
@colbycosh absolute nonsense that they shot it down. Moving 8km/s according to @BadAstronomer regardless, very cool— Ryan Hastman (@RyanHastman) February 15, 2013
ADDED:
NBC has some more video, and the following video that streamed for me was about 2012 DA14 which flies by later today and has no chance of an impact with our surface or atmosphere. We’ll be talking about the Chelyabinsk meteorite for a long time after today.
Watch this one to the end, it has more sonic booming. It gives a sense of how far that sound wave had to travel to hit at the camera.
“Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said the meteorite was travelling at a speed of 30 kilometres per second and that such events were hard to predict. The Interior Ministry said the meteorite explosion had cased a sonic boom.
Russia’s Emergencies Ministry said 514 people had sought medical help, mainly for light injuries caused by flying glass, and that 112 of those were kept in hospital. Search groups were set up to look for the remains of the meteorite.”
FRIDAY Morning CST: Fragments may have fallen into a frozen lake. Fragments of a meteorite were found on a Saskatchewan pond’s icy surface several years ago after video helped lead searchers to the area.
UPDATE: At 10AM CST, the Russians are reporting 985 injuries took place. I feel bad about all of the people who rushed to windows to see the flash of light, and wound up with a face full of exploding glass as the shockwave hit. It would be me too, if I’d been there, and hadn’t had a quick way out onto a balcony. Duck and Cover isn’t drilled into me.
ADDED: Compilation video including some with windows breaking off screen.
ADDED: This is one of the more amazing ones I’ve found:
I’m excited to learn that my name is selected as a site on Mars. I am unable to easily find which John Klein it’s really named after, but I’ll take the collateral naming honour.
I can’t simply make a fun Star Trek related blog post, I have to tie it into the Canadian political discourse also. So, here we go.
Ottawa Citizen reporter, Glen McGregor came up with a manifesto to guide modern journalism. He’s seen journalism fall prey to some ridiculous habits, like commenting on the tweets of celebrities as if they are newsworthy. It’s hard to deny that celebrity tweets are amusing, but they are rarely “newsworthy”. Journalists, in newspapers, should stick to roughly the guidelines in Glen’s #cdnpoli Dogme95.
A few days ago I posted a video of the International Space Station zooming over Regina. More recently, William Shatner who played James Tiberius Kirk on the sci-fi TV show Star Trek, tweeted to Commander Hadfield who is a Canadian working aboard ISS. Although it’s not really news, it does help promote the news that the Canadian commander is tweeting from aboard the space station, so it’s not so bad that CBC is using time to write about it, especially since it’s their entertainment/community team focused on it. It’s when they automatically make it a “Top Story” that I worry for the state of our country’s journalistic defenders.
@WilliamShatner Yes, Standard Orbit, Captain. And we're detecting signs of life on the surface.— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) January 03, 2013
@Cmdr_Hadfield So long as you're fixing the ISS warp drive, alien threats will consider you to be Scotty, not the token Red Shirt.— Saskboy K. (@saskboy) January 04, 2013
I was checking to see the next time the International Space Station would fly over Regina’s skies, and saw it was in two minutes! (There are only a few times a week it is visible for a couple minutes, sometimes none.) I threw on my ski pants and coat, and grabbed my camera (and card out of the computer), then flew down the stairs and outside. I even remembered my little tripod to hold the camera properly for a night shot. It’s dark in Regina at 5:50pm still, and will be for another month or two.
He was the first person to walk on the Moon. No one has set foot on the Moon since I was born. It’s possible the last human to ever walk on the Moon has already done so, and that’s terribly sad.
He once was asked how he felt knowing his footprints would likely stay on the moon’s surface for thousands of years. “I kind of hope that somebody goes up there one of these days and cleans them up,” he said.
I agree with Armstrong, since that would be preferable to the alternative that they are never seen again, in-person.
I tried photographing some Perseid meteors, but didn’t have much luck this year. I did get some nice shots of the Moon, Jupiter, and Venus though.
-I took this one while a meteor flew down, from above Venus, but it didn’t show up. Maybe the shutter wasn’t open like I thought, or my ISO and shutter settings were not good enough given the 15 second exposure (to increase my chances of the shutter being open during a meteor).
I did see a nice bright green one, and it left a trail of green smoke in the sky which cleared after about two seconds.
Jupiter’s moons clearly visible, at 48X digital zoom
I use a mini tripod, with bendy legs.
Is there a scientific purpose in aiming the rover’s laser at Earth and detecting the flash here? I think there must be. We could use it as confirmation that SETI’s laser detection scheme from a distant solar system would be viable. I seriously hope NASA is prepared to conduct this experiment.
If Martians sent us a mobile, nuclear powered robot that shoots fricken laser beams from its fricken head, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t be as gracious as they’ve been so far.
One thing missing from Curiosity, that seems an obvious oversight since it’s included on every mobile computer now, is a MICROPHONE! It would be more of a novelty than anything, which is why it was left out I’m sure, but we apparently have not heard actual recordings from the surface of another planet before.
There have been attempts before to put a mic on Mars, but none have returned data. We’ve got synthesized sound only.
Mars Science Lab which is presently the Curiosity rover, landed on Sunday night Earth time in Saskatchewan. There’s an excellent video first that explains why the landing was carried out in this manner. Then there’s a dramatic version timed with video clips from Earth of the people in charge of programming the landing. The third video is a sample of the landing and the work the rover is going to set out to do by next week.
