Month: March 2004

The UK’s Channel 4 presents a video of American and British (?) television actors revealing their favorite curse words. I think my favorite was Zach Braff of Scrubs. Pretty fun, but definitely NSFW… (links directly to Shockwave video)

To continue with the astronomical theme today, this MetaFilter thread links to a very nice image of the Earth, courtesy of NASA’s Blue Marble Project. Also, check out this recent picture of the Earth taken by one of the Mars Rovers; it’s black and white, obviously, but astronomers contend that if one were to gaze at the Earth from Mars, it would appear as a pale blue dot.

NASA has scheduled a briefing this afternoon on “the discovery of a mysterious object in our solar system,” which the BBC reports is a planet-like object provisionally known as Sedna, for the Inuit goddess of the sea (although The Australian News apparently had the scoop). Sedna is currently about 17 billion kilometers from Earth, about three times the distance to Pluto, the farthest current planet, and ranges from 1,180-2,360 kilometers in diameter, compared to Pluto’s diameter of 2,360 kilometers. As the article points out, this discovery will probably “reignite the debate over what constitutes a planet,” as some feel that even Pluto is too small to be a planet, instead classifying it as a “Kuiper Belt Object.” However, Sedna “could be the first such world discovered in its normal orbit,” unlike most of the other objects recently discovered, which apparently perturbed out of their orbits after first being observed in the Kuiper Belt region. There are some good discussions in the Slashdot and MetaFilter threads, which will no doubt become more lively once the actual press release makes the web (currently, it’s just a placeholder page).

Update: The official press release confirms that the most distant object in our Solar System has been discovered. As previously reported, the “planetoid” is called Sedna, and apparently there is “indirect evidence” of a moon that will hopefully be investigated by the Hubble Space Telescope. It looks like no one is making the bold claim that this is the 10th planet yet…

Georgia native Alice Regina Pike tried to pass off a “$1 million dollar bill” at Wal-Mart, claiming that her husband gave it to her. I’m just dumbfounded at the stupidity of this woman…

The NHL trade deadline expired yesterday with surprisingly few “big” trades; here is a site that has tracked all the trades. The Washington Capitals continued their trend of rampant trading, shipping Mike Grier to Buffalo for a relative unknown. I’m very surprised that they held on to Olaf Kolzig, although now he has to languish at the battered remains of an already weakened team. The Colorado Avalanche was in the running for Olie, as they were in desparate need of a veteran goalie, and it looks like they have found one in Edmonton’s Tommy Salo, who was among the many last-minute trades yesterday. The playoffs should be interesting this year, as several teams have tried to bolster their rosters with some fresh blood. However, it always bothers me to see some of these last-minute trades end up not even staying with the team, effectively acting as rentals for an end run to the Stanley Cup. I suppose the NHL is not alone in this respect, though…

Are you tired of “free” sites on the web that require you to register with personal information before you can view their content? If so, visit BugMeNot.com, which helps you to “bypass compulsory web registration” at sites like the New York Times and the L.A. Times by supplying working logins.

Gamespot has a very thorough feature entitled “When Two Tribes Go to War: A History of Video Game Controversy.” From Death Race to Grand Theft Auto and everything in between, this article does a good job chronicling the many games that elicited controversy, be it for violent or sexual content, litigious companies doing battle, or just plain poor taste. I had no idea some of these games were even considered “controversial,” but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised…

As many of you probably know, NASA has decided not to launch a mission in 2006 that would extend the Hubble Space Telescope’s life until 2010. Instead, it will launch “an unmanned robotic vehicle to guide Hubble toward a safe crash landing in the ocean.” An official of the Space Telescope Science Institute, the management agency of the telescope, is quoted as saying that the mission would comprise about 1% of NASA’s budget. Considering how much amazing data the telescope has been able to find, and how much potential data will be lost in between the time the telescope crashes and its replacement is launched (supposedly in 2011, although who knows for sure?), I am amazed that NASA isn’t trying harder to find a solution.

I signed the petition at Save The Hubble, and I strongly encourage everyone interested in the telescope’s fate to do so as well. In the meantime, check out the many posts I’ve made about the Hubble Telescope that show just how much we will be losing if we allow it to be destroyed before its time…

Update: The day after I posted this, NASA published the results from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, a million-second exposure of a “dark” region of the universe that revealed the farthest galaxies ever seen. The survey included galaxies with a redshift of 12, indicating that they existed just 400 million years after the Big Bang (the current accepted age of the universe is 13-14 billion years).

Try Couronne, a very addictive game sort of similar to bumper pool…

I tried to fix my comments to allow you to see the original post in the comments box, and now I broke them but good. I’ll try and get them fixed soon…

Update: Looks like I fixed them, although I’m not really sure what went wrong in the first place…