Archived Blog
News just came in that Simone got onto the advanced surgical training program. Yay. Of course this does mean that whatever else happens, I am going to be married to a surgeon….
Now we just have to wait and see where she gets posted to next year, and hope that it’s vaguely close to Logan where I will be all year.
News just came in that Simone got onto the advanced surgical training program. Yay. Of course this does mean that whatever else happens, I am going to be married to a surgeon….
Now we just have to wait and see where she gets posted to next year, and hope that it’s vaguely close to Logan where I will be all year.
While I was looking aroud the net for an image of the Voyager plaque I ran across Carl Sagan’s web site. Now Carl is something of a personal hero for me. He was a very famous cosmologist and science communicator, and wrote one of my favorite books Contact, which was eventually turned into a movie starring Jodie Foster. He also stared in and produced the immensely popular international hit science show Cosmos. Unfortunately he died just before the movie was made.
I have been poking around trying to find a good picture of the engraved gold plaque that was placed on the side of the Pioneer and Voyager space probes, which shows, among other things, the rough position of earth in relation to 14 pulsars (stars which pulse at a regular rate).
Eventually I found both a meduim sized and a large image of the plaque, but being finally able to see the image meant that I then had to figure out how to read binary so that I could make some sense of it.
I have been poking around trying to find a good picture of the engraved gold plaque that was placed on the side of the Pioneer and Voyager space probes, which shows, among other things, the rough position of earth in relation to 14 pulsars (stars which pulse at a regular rate).
Eventually I found both a meduim sized and a large image of the plaque, but being finally able to see the image meant that I then had to figure out how to read binary so that I could make some sense of it.
While I was looking aroud the net for an image of the Voyager plaque I ran across Carl Sagan’s web site. Now Carl is something of a personal hero for me. He was a very famous cosmologist and science communicator, and wrote one of my favorite books Contact, which was eventually turned into a movie starring Jodie Foster. He also stared in and produced the immensely popular international hit science show Cosmos. Unfortunately he died just before the movie was made.
Scientific American is reporting that scientists have figured how to use chicken eggs to produce human monoclonal antibodies. Now I could go off on a fantastic tangent about what monoclonal antibodies are, how they work, and so on and so forth.
Suffice it to say however that they are a new type of medicine, and using eggs to make them is cool because it will massively simplify production, and hopefully promote researchers to find more and better uses for them.
I have a slightly irritating subconscious habit of turning to Simone and saying “Hey” in a “So, how’s stuff” kind of way. I do it all the time, and most of the time I don’t even reaslise that I’m going to do it until I’ve already done it.
Apparently it can be mildly irritating at the best of times, but when I’m concerned about Simone (because she’s tired or unwell or whatever) I do it more often, and it quickly becomes really really annoying.
It really is a pretty stupid habit, but as I commented the other day in relation to hats, obsessions, compulsions and subconscious habbits usually are..
Just read a BBC article with some scarey scarey stats on smoking in China:
Between that and the birth rate going through the floor thanks to the gender imbalance (see, told you one child policy was a dumb idea) it’s a wonder there are any of them left.
On the way to school this morning I was once again dumbfounded by the sheer blinding cluelessness of politicians on multicultural issues. This time it was the New South Wales backbencher Bronwyn Bishop proposing that the government ban moslem girls from wearing head scarves in schools.
Coming a week after the government ran a meeting with Moslem leaders to promote dialogue and understanding this comes out as promoting the exact opposite.
Now although I don’t agree with it at all, there is nothing legally to stop the government saying that you can’t wear religious symbols to school, but any rule has to apply to everyone, not just muslim girls wearing head scarves. It has to be an equal opportunity opression, stopping christians wearing crosses, catholics carrying rosaries, jews wearing a kippah, and so on. The fact that she was focusing on only one group shows that it is not a matter of opression, but simply a matter of racism, which is far far more disgusting in a supposedly human rights embracing parliamentary democracy.
Subsequently the PM came out this afternoon and quashed the idea, although his reasoning was because such a ban would be “Difficult and rather impractical” to enforce.
I think that Greens senator Kerry Nettle was wholely correct when he made the observation that: “The right to wear a headscarf if you are a Muslim schoolgirl is surely a matter of cultural and religious freedom, which the Prime Minister appears not to understand. Freedom of religion is an Australian value – that is the message John Howard should be sending – not that banning headscarves is simply impractical.”
As a side note I’ll also be interested to see what comes of the law suit that the 10 year old imigration detainee has filed against the government, especially given that the Australian Human Rights Commission ruled that his continued detention was unjust 3 years ago.
