Space is the place
It was another weekend chock full of house guests and out-of-town visitors, so it was not until yesterday that I heard that the guy shot in the tube station last week was not, in fact, a bomber. When there were no statements from the police after the first few hours, only eyewitness testimonials from other commuters, I sort of expected this. I mean, after the guy was dead, you have to think it was pretty obvious whether or not he had a bomb, and if there is a bomb, why wait to talk about it?
It put me in a pretty arch mood, so I was in a vulnerable moment when I saw this plea on Slashdot to donate to The Planetary Society to help fund their project to save a chunk of NASA’s data from Pioneer from being destroyed, and I sent them a chunk of money. While Bush’s proposal last year to put a permanent base on the moon as a stepping stone to Mars is a bit misguided and politically motivated, it wasn’t a stupid move. I do believe in space exploration in general as a way to bring humanity together, to foster a perspective of life which makes it difficult to even think about blowing other people up.
And it seems like there has been a lot of space news since then, too. Besides the successful shuttle launch, another Slashdot story pointed to some weird sounds from Saturn. You really should check them out; they’re creepy creepy creepy. They’re not really ’sounds’ per se, but radio emissions related to auroras near the north and south poles of the planet, recorded by the Cassini probe (a joint project between NASA (the Cassini part) and the ESA (the Huygens part)), and tweaked to be human-audible.