Space Race

The Americans pulled decisively ahead of the USSR during the Gemini missions when the Soviet programme was effectively grounded. Their Voskhod manned capsules were death traps and the Soyuz programme was well behind schedule and of very poor quality - let's not forget Soyuz 1 killed its pilot.

Gemini on the other hand showed the Americans could manoeuvre freely in space, conduct long duration missions and repeatedly perform rendezvous - something the Soviets did not master until much later. At the same time the Americans had perfected large rocket engines and were able to get their bigger, heavier Saturn V off the pad with just five engines compared to the N1's 30 - which unsurprisingly, didn't work well.

Where the Soviets did score was that when they finally debugged their simple designs they proved exceptionally reliable - it's not poverty that's kept them using the Soyuz and Proton boosters - it's because they've had an epic success with them. And the Soviets did perhaps produce the best main engine ever designed for the N1 - used individually or in pairs it's been a huge success on the Atlas V.

Orbiters probably still fixable

But there are no spare ETs or SRBs.

Is there a charitable scientist in the house?

'Good job I don't believe anything spouted by scientists and quango's who's funding & existence tends to rely on spouting it...'

Does this maxim also apply to say oncologists? seismologists? virologists?

The Daily Mail forums are next on the far right.

Nonsense

They're coming from Denmark, compared to Danish the whole 'Bork! put de chicken in de pot! Bork!' dialect of Southern Sweden will be a breeze.

BTW. There's a sense of justice to all this. Now the Swedes are finding out what it was like to be English a thousand years ago - living in constant fear of an invasion from the sea of ferocious Scandinavian hairy rabid killers.

Viagra ads

The little blue pills don't really need marketing, but there does seem to be a lot of ads for erectile dysfunction on telly of late (usually during action movies - make of that what you will). They obviously can't show the condition or any before and after photos, so they have to approach the matter in incredibly elliptical manners. Watch one with the sound muted before the info at the end and there is precisely zero chance you'd guess what it was advertising - debt problems? soft furnishings? bedside lighting? a particularly dull holiday park?

Sadly

Some of these people have children and are all too often willing to inflict their Dark Ages lunacies on innocent people.

'The biggest scam on the planet.'

Organised religion or Sky TV?

Which only begs one question

How bad were the candidates that failed to get the top job?

Depressingly accurate

Don't forget the bit where the real money making part of the company is shipped wholesale back to the US 'so as to integrate it more fully with our core business'. If you're lucky a few widget makers or telesales jobs are kept over here.

Good idea

Similar notifications are already issued on Japanese TV and radio, so yes, this is a good idea.

Alternatively

Couldn't Orange come along and deturdify our streets?

You're missing the vital role of nicotine in boffinry

Most of the modern world could not have been built had boffins not been puffing away on their pipes.

Lester is remaining strangely elusive on the equally vital shed angle of the project.

I like a good shed.

That's my kind of thinking

I'd also insist the whole thing is lovingly lacquered in thermite just to increase the Michael Bayitude of the launch.

C-12

Living organisms preferentially metabolise C-12 over C-13, so their surroundings tend to show a depletion of C-12. There's a similar change in ratio when organisms metabolise sulfur.

This is a fascinating find as it pushes signs of life back to a point within 400 My of the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment which would have plastered the whole planet with massive craters - but which also brought a sizeable amount of the Earth's water.

There are practically no sedimentary rocks of this age left in the world, so this might be the best we can get for now. Although there is a chance fossils from an older rock could be included in a younger conglomerate or breccia. But pretty much every rock of this age has been through at least one phase of metamorphosis which tends to erase fossils as the rocks get cooked.

There is some evidence of life in even older rocks (3.8 Gy) from the Isua Complex in Western Greenland. Some sequences contain traces of graphite enriched C-12 suggestive that they originally came from sediments including living organisms. However, the Isua rocks are in a greenstone belt which has been heavily metamorphosed into gneiss and they've lost their original sedimentary features and any fossils have been baked away.

Yep - it was Contact

Agree with the previous AC, it was S.R. Hadden's Adnix which he followed with by the Preachnix that muted religious programming.

Tomorrow's World

I think like a lot of people I saw the transputer first of all on Tomorrow's World where it was raytracing a shiny Newton's cradle in real time. Thanks for telling the whole story.

And I couldn't help but think of Transputer last year when an Intel keynote conference talk was spent saying how widespread parallel processing was almost here...

Re: UGLY

Isn't this the one styled by the mistress of taste and refinement, Victoria Beckham?

Somehow it manages to look expensive AND cheap at the same time by appearing to be styled for rap stars who shop at Clare's Accessories.

PRS-650 is here

Although good luck finding one on the high street. Most Sony stores only carry the smaller 350 and I've not seen one in Waterstones since the week of release. They are still officially on sale and you can pick them up online - and you won't regret it. The 650 is a beast with a gorgeous touch screen and fabulous build quality which is only let down by the umbilical to the Waterstone's store. If that could be severed with a rival to WhisperSync then Sony would have the best reader out there bar none.

A UK version of the 950 (or more likely its follow-up) would be very gratefully received in this household.

Discounting

I'm not sure how a sustainable Android tablet market can be built on discounting unsold stock. It sucks money away from R and D and leaves the vendors even less competitive against Apple. Their current strategy is following the netbook path of 'me too' substandard products towards total irrelevance. Andrew pointed out yesterday the problem with Android tablets is that they look like iPads but they don't work as well.

From Larry Page on the Google Blog

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

'We recently explained how companies including Microsoft and Apple are banding together in anti-competitive patent attacks on Android. The U.S. Department of Justice had to intervene in the results of one recent patent auction to “protect competition and innovation in the open source software community” and it is currently looking into the results of the Nortel auction. Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.'

Which is a bit of a reversal from Google's public statements a couple of weeks ago that they didn't like the blatant patent grab going on right now.

@Dez666

'Is it not the time that industry/government put some serious effort to make mobiles unattractive to thieves.'

Nokia have been trying hard to make their phones unattractive and unusable for some years now.

Not floor wax

The distinct tang of Hershey is definitely stale ear wax.

A lardy cloying texture is distinctly a Cadbury's Dairy Milk thing. But the OP is quite right about Hershey chocolate having a nasty chalky texture.

Audience

I've always assumed there's a huge overlap between the audience for You & Yours and The Daily Mail.

'Today, the hidden peril of doors. Electricity - it sound terrifying, but is it? We investigate further. And at 12:30 we'll have a live studio discussion over the tragic case of Mrs. Volvox who stepped outside at eleven o'clock yesterday evening to find it was dark. What is 'night time' and how do we ban it?'

Mind you, the misery of accidentally tuning into You & Yours is nothing compared to the unspeakable of horror of 'Moneybox Live'.

Setting aside the gruesome image that evokes

The Apollo astronauts reported seeing bright flashes in their vision when they were travelling to the Moon and back. It was suggested this was caused by sub-atomic particles trapped in the Van Allen Belts passing through their eyes.

Ummmm....

A nice idea, except the Vela Incident took place over the Indian Ocean.

[GRIN]

Though it does cause problems for satellites. The ISS has to carry extra radiation shielding for the occasions when it passes through the SAN and the Hubble Space Telescope is shut down for its passage. I'm pretty sure it was also linked to the repeated failures of a number of low-orbit comms sats.

You're right...

...but it's actually a magnetometer.

payload on top

Is that even stable?

Maybe the nearest aerodynamicist can put me right, but wouldn't a weight on top and a weight on the bottom just mean that with the slightest disturbance the balloon rolls over until the two weights are more or less horizontal?

That sounds really sensible

The only difficulty with that suggestion is making sure the plane doesn't tumble when it released, but it sounds relatively simple and would avoid too much spin damage on the way up.

Wind doesn't seem likely

I'm not sure.

These images are from a crater wall in the southern hemisphere pointing north in the summer, so it gets the full heat (hah) of the Martian summer. You'd expect that to produce a convection of air up over the rim of the crater - opposite to the pattern we're seeing here.

Also, when you put the graphic over a 3D terrain, you don't see any of the tell tale swirls that you normally associate with windblown debris, these lines are going straight downhill:

(long URL approaching)

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/multimedia/images/?ImageID=3580&NewsInfo=59C884BFF2B8E0EFC8DB07B94F94BA55AC4A8F9603007CD8CA4D50EBAAD2D883DF99DED8EDD0DF46C0599EE2C2EF940CC2CED306DC461CEBDB1FCDC80B64D73904CAEF4AC312CFCADF0D13D2CED22FC5B6C7ADF9CDE1D1DED5CF8ACA150D4C12D642D29B4C46266CC351DB91C41CA9845C

There's still a chance this could be liquid CO2 seeping out of the permafrost, it would be able to transport material downhill, but it wouldn't leave any tell-tale traces for the orbiter to pick up. But then, liquid CO2 is not normally found in these conditions.

I wonder if ESA can point their Mars Orbiter towards Newton crater any time soon.

The Daily Mail

'Why is it that the Daily Mail is vociferous in support of penalties for certain crimes, but not so much for others (phone hacking)? '

You have to remember the same deranged moral compass that once had the Mail printing "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" has driven them on to the ideological rocks of the 1950s when everyone loved the Queen, there were no beastly foreigners around, everyone went to church and Europe could still be cut off by fog in the Channel.

There was a death penalty in the 1950s so we need it back. And only nice proper people had telephones back then and they'd never dream of listening to someone else's messages, so why the fuss now?

At a guess

The plastic used by LEGO might not be capable of withstanding the heat, cold and radiation Juno is going to experience.

But I'm with you on wanting a set for myself (LEGO is far too good for children)

Well if you're going to ask

http://santoki.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/bush_golf2.jpg