Briefly is better than nothing…
The all-female team of scientists and engineers planned the event after noticing they were occasionally a supermajority on the rover operations team. They designed an action plan and transmitted all the computer codes for the day’s activities, including using the robotic arm to take microscopic images of dust while Spirit was stationed on a slope. Though men still outnumber women in space exploration, the gender mix is changing.
More from NASA.
CNNN does it again.
“Gay scientists isolate the Christian gene”
Clive James on privacy for the BBC:
“to the contention that nothing is private for the prominent, shouldn’t we be saying that privacy is for everyone, and not just for you and me?
To say that, however, you have to believe in private life as a value. I think most of us still do, although it may very well be true that a private life is becoming impossible to lead. But just because it’s fading from existence doesn’t mean that it was never vital.
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To live in society at all, we have to keep a reservoir of private thoughts, which, whether wisely or unwisely, we share only with intimates. This sharing of private thoughts is called private life.
Until recently, the concept of private life was basic to civilisation. Its value could be measured by the thoroughness with which totalitarian states and religions always did their best to stamp it out. But now we have to face the possibility that the latest stage of civilisation might also be trying to stamp it out.
You can still keep your thoughts to yourself – nobody has yet invented a machine that can get into your head and broadcast what it finds – but if you try to communicate those private thoughts to anyone else you run an increasing risk that they will be communicated to everyone.
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Pinching private phone calls and e- mails ought to be a crime, but somehow it isn’t. And it probably won’t be. There are too many laws as it is; too many of the new laws are useless; and a law against printing anything you can find would probably be seen as an infringement of free speech, even though the unrestricted theft of private messages amounts to an infringement of free speech anyway.
I had no idea she was so funny – she’s very deadpan, and it’s a good overview of her achievements too.
So go watch one of my geek heroes Grace Hopper on YouTube.
If you didn’t get a chance to watch them in a venue (we watched them at the Barbican in London as part of the Australian Film Festival) you can check the Tropfest 2008 entries out outline.
I liked Marry Me, Made in Australia, Beggar’s Belief because it was set down the road from my old place, White Lines and the shark and mouse ones.
I randomly came across ‘Fictional Cities‘ while looking for something else.
We all have our favourite places and favourite stories about them. Our idea of these places is usually a mix of experience and imagination, and fiction is usually no small contributor to our mental maps.
I love London, Venice and Florence, so I made this site, with lists and reviews of all sorts of fiction set in these three cities.
Their ‘Quick guide: Sustainable food‘ covers what sustainability is, and how you can eat sustainably.
The Observer also finally acknowledges that maybe eating fish just isn’t sustainable.
I randomly came across artslice, a “place to learn a new “art word” or artist a day. There will be fun facts to know and tell taken from the pages of art history as well as current working artists”. Cool!
According to a report on the BBC
The 2012 Olympic Games will drain away up to £440m from London’s sport and arts groups, a report shows.
“Both the Cultural Olympiad – a four-year programme of events aimed at increasing participation in cultural activity – and the Government’s Olympic sports participation target – to increase the number of people who are physically active by two million by 2012 – were identified as being heavily dependent on smaller grassroots organisations.
But the report, by the assembly’s economic development, culture, sport and tourism committee, said it was these very organisations that would be hardest hit by the funding diversion”
“…our investigation shows that the on-the-ground opportunities Londoners were promised are at risk because the funding diversion effectively ham-strings the organisations needed to deliver them.”
I’d love to say “London Olympics in ‘bad for arts’ shocker” but of course no-one with any sense is surprised.
The historic apology offered by prime minister Kevin Rudd to the “stolen generations” was a crucial step for Australia, as Richard Flanagan wrote on these pages this week. But it does not make amends for the role played by the British in the destruction and degradation of the Aboriginal race. Initially soldiers, convicts and settlers killed Aborigines as if they were animals threatening the crops. Later, in the 20th century, Fabian socialists provided the intellectual justification for the eugenics policy that led to the stolen generations scandal.
The British exterminated the entire tribe of Tasmanian aborigines, leaving only 40 survivors who were herded off their land and placed on an offshore island gulag. The governor’s wife led the hunt for their skulls to decorate London mantelpieces. At least there was a parliamentary inquiry, which reported in 1836 that “not a single native now remains upon Van Dieman’s land … the adoption of any conduct, having for its avowed or secret object the extermination of the native race, could not fail to leave an indelible stain upon the British government”. That “indelible stain” was, a century later, termed “genocide”.
Go read the rest in the Guardian.