I was poking around (being a bit of a geek (Ok, so nothing new there)) the other day, and found this article in Icarus (Volume 173, Issue 2, Pages 300-311) entitled “The calcium exosphere of Mercury” about how it would seem that Mercury has an exosphere around it’s poles composed of gaseous calcuim. Toasty….
Month: February 2005
Nature Futures
Nature has started publishing “Futures” again. they first ran futures, which are one page speculative science fiction stories, in 1999, and I fell in love with them, as they were almost universally clever and insightful.
So if you have a nearby academic library, drop in and read a few.
A little gem from Phil
My mate Phil, who some of you may know, and who is always full of entertaining little oddities, sent me this the other day:
It’s a Maoist review of Alpha Centauri
http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/bookstore/vgames/alphacentauri.html
(Alpha Centauri is a computer game and if you don’t know anything about it you should firstly ask James, Phil or I what it is, and once we’ve finished our rant you should go out and buy a copy and prepare yourself to loose the next 18 odd hours (at least) to playing it).
Anyway, the review is quite a funny read.
Rejoining the 80’s
Well, in addition to finally getting a web page (which is much more 90’s than 80’s), I also got around to rejoining the 80’s last thursday, in so much as that I went and bought a VCR.
We already have a DVD player (which we seem to mostly use to watch and avidly re-watch the Harry Potter movies), but recent events involving conflicting viewing preferences (Simone wants to watch ER and I’ve become more attached to Lost) meant that we had to acquire some form of recording technology.
Now what would have been really cool to get was one of those new ~$1500 Hard disk recording/DVD writing gizmos (I don’t even know if they have an official name) so that I could record my shows 21st century style, but given the economic (the VCR cost all of $120 – isn’t it surprising, I remember when they were three or four hundred, and constituted a fairly major investment) and technical realities (our middle aged TV doesn’t have input ports for that kind of new fangled technical wizardry) I will have to put off that particular non-necessity until some later stage.