Krioma.net

Now this is what I call an excellent advert to promote men checking themselves for testicular cancer. Go Rachel! (thanks for the link Clive!)

http://www.rachelgetsfruity.com/flash.html

A star has exploded in M51, the whirlpool galaxy. Here is an image of the discovery. The star marked is the supernovae. More information, along with pictures, can be found here.

New Little Britain script:


Parry: "Now Stevie what do you want to do?"

Gerrard: "I want to go to Chelsea"

Parry: "Are you sure you want to go to Chelsea?"

Gerrard: "Yeah"

Parry: "Now remember you said that last season and you know what a
cafuffle that caused"

Gerrard: "Yeah I know"

Parry: "So you're sure you want to go to Chelsea?"

Gerrard: "Yeah"

Parry: "Right i will go and make a statement"


3 hours later


Gerrard "I want to stay"

Today is a sad day. I feel for the people involved. Why do people do this? I will never understand, well I hope I won't. Oh and well done to the emergency services, looks as if the plans went well.

I hope so!

Exclusive By Chris Bascombe, Liverpool Echo

MICHAEL OWEN is desperate to make a sensational return to Liverpool.

The former Reds striker wants to end his Real Madrid exile and Anfield officials have been alerted to Owen's fervent desire to rejoin the club he left last summer.

A dramatic swoop hasn't been ruled out.

However, Rafa Benitez has already made other arrangements in the transfer market and would need convincing to move for the 25-year-old striker.

The European Champions have not budgeted for a bid for Owen, who joined the club as a schoolboy but decided to leave for Spain in an £8m deal last year.

Although Benitez could be in the hunt for a proven goalscorer before the transfer window closes, that would depend on how much he could raise in player sales.

His first priority is a target man, with Southampton's Peter Crouch still top of his wish list.

Liverpool are interested in the possibility of arranging a year loan deal with Real Madrid for Owen, but that would require some skilful negotiation and appears to be an extremely optimistic option at this stage.

Owen left with the Real Madrid squad for a summer tour of America yesterday, but he's anxious to return to England before the start of the season - and Liverpool are currently the only club which interests him.

Model professional Owen has never publicly expressed any discontent about life in Madrid, but privately he's become increasingly disillusioned since leaving England.

On the pitch, Owen's goal record defies the accepted view he's failed to make an impact in Spain.

He scored 14 goals in 22 starts, but he's never completely settled and has found himself regularly on the bench, despite his impressive goal ratio.

Owen scored 158 goals in 298 appearances of an Anfield career which began in 1997 and is seventh on the list of the club's all time goalscorers.

Meanwhile, the Luis Figo saga should be resolved this weekend.

The only issue now is Figo's pay-off from Real Madrid.

The Spanish club are no longer demanding a fee for the Portuguese star.

The 32-year-old midfielder is in the United States but will leave the Madrid tour when he's decided between Liverpool and Inter Milan.

The Reds are now in Switzerland preparing for the clash with Bayer Leverkusen in Austria tomorrow night.

I saw this film earlier today - it was interesting. Essentially a bunch of attractive women go down into a cave and bad stuff happens. As always I won't go into more detail as it would spoil the film. Not one for anyone who can't take a bit of gore. It is fairly interesting and quite entertaining though if you are going to see a film at the moment I would recommend War of the Worlds, which was quite good.

Yesterday I traveled down to the Oval in London to watch the Twenty20 Cup quarter-final cricket match between Surrey and Warwickshire. Unfortunately the Bears (Warwickshire) lost in the end but only in dramatic circumstances - a bowl off. Twenty20 cricket is different to the normal game in that you only have 20overs to get as many runs as possible. Surrey managed a decent target for Warwick but it should have been possible for them to get. It, however, became very dark and even started to rain. This meant the Duckworth-Lewis method (see: [CricInfo] for more on this) had to be applied for the scoring and thus reducing the overall score needed by Warwickshire at the loss of 5 overs. Warwick then went on to get the exact score required for a draw (with the final two runs coming off the last ball), after losing the exact same number of wickets!
The interesting scenario of a bowl off now occurred, after the teams took about 20 minutes to agree this was the appropriate course of action. This is like penalties in football and is the first time it has occurred in the competition. Unfortunately Warwick lost, but it was a very interesting game - well worth going. I took some pictures of the wonderful Oval so expect these to be posted at some point soon.
For more info see: [BBC Sport]

To coincide with first lunar landing back on July 20th, 1969 Google have launched a new section of their website. This is termed Google Moon and is basically using the software they use for their maps pages. It is damn impressive though.

Oh and the FAQ section of the site for this brings back their April fools of 2004. :-)
"4. Is Google Moon a result of your Copernicus initiative?

Glad you asked, and yes, the development of our lunar hosting and research center continues apace. We usually don’t announce future products in advance, but in this case, yes, we can confirm that on July 20th, 2069, in honor of the 100th anniversary of mankind’s first manned lunar landing, Google will fully integrate Google Local search capabilities into Google Moon, which will allow our users to quickly find lunar business addresses, numbers and hours of operation, among other valuable forms of Moon-oriented local information."

A legend has passed on, I guess he has been beamed up. I noticed someone on the BBC site had commented "May you continue to boldly go where no man has gone before " which I thought was quite fitting. For more see: [BBC News]

It appears that someone has a bit of a problem with Manchester United. They went and played around with the neon sign outside of their Old Trafford Stadium to display a rather interesting message. See here. LOL. The full article from the Manchester Evening News can be found here.

During my exam revision period back in May I decided it was about time I built myself a brand new PC so I could play all the latest games. I finally have built it. The interesting thing is when I decided to do this - during my exams! Guess what I wasn't doing at the time. Revision for me as always been accompanied by lotsof computer games. You just need to have a break.
Anyway back to my new machine. I have a smart looking white case with some cool lighting - I will take some pictures and post these later. My old machine is being turned into my new linux box. In fact there is not much wrong with my old machine and I bet many people wouldn't moan at having its specs. It is just not up to top level game playing though.
The specs of my new machine are:
Motherboard: Asus A8V Deluxe Socket-939 VIA/KT800Pro - ATX Sound Gb-Lan IEEE1394 USB2 800FSB with WIFI
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (NewCastle) 2.2ghz L2-512kb 939p
RAM: 1024MB DDR PC3200 400MHz
Graphics Card: XFX GeForce 6800 GT 256MB DDR3 AGP
Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar SE 120Gb 7200rpm 8mb Cache
Cooling: 3 x 8cm Case Fans, 1 x Exhaust Fan
Oh and the DVD+RW that I took out of my old computer.
Overall this computer is built to be a games machine and so far with tests it hasn't prooved me wrong! Looks like I am going to have lots of late nights playing games!

Tonight I went to see the Wedding Crashers which stars Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn. It was actually quite funny, which is something I expected since it had this pair in. It was a bit long and ended up in being a love story but what the heck it was still fun. It also had quite a few attractive young women in, something I never mind being in a film :-). Actually the stunning Isla Fisher also stars in this, which is another good thing about the film.
Before I got to the cinema I had the fun of having to negotiate the regions of town that had been blocked because of anti terroist actions by police. The main region of activity was Snow Hill station. I had to walk behind it and for a second or two I was a little intimidated but I thought screw this and so carried on like normal. Still though, all this activity makes you take a second thought about your safety; something that we should not have to take. Argh.

What is getting into me, today for the first time in probably 4 years I found myself listening to dance music.

Now this is odd. I either must be really bored or just in a chill out mood. I don't know where this chill out mood came from though. I am not stressed. I don't fell stressed and so do not need to chill. I cant even claim thats its the summer weather making me feel like this - its bloody raining again. I think I will blame FIFA 2004. I played this the other day which has a few dance track in I like and I think I must have decided to give some a listen to. Indie where have you gone, in the words of Pato Banton "Come back, baby come back." :-)

Time for some astronomy. I have to say the more I see the amateur images taken with webcams and similar the more I wish I'd spent my money on that hobby and not on my computing one! :-) I think my next to get list will have to be astronomical based.

Ok, onto the Astronomy!

Dumbbell Nebula M27

This image was taken by Jim Thommes who is a very prominent member of QCUIAG (QuickCam and Unconventional Imaging Astronomy Group). He has taken some wonderful images, especially with the equipment he is using. This one is a great example, but probably not his best work.

M27 (NGC6853), "Dumbbell Nebula" is a noted planetary nebula in the constellation of Vulpecula just south of Cygnus. Its odd shape has given this nickname. The nebula is bright and large and so can easily be seen with binoculars. The nebula is about 970 light years away, and luminous owing to a white dwarf star at the center with magnitude of 13.

The original image and info on how the picture was taken can be found [here]

Trifid Nebula M20

Again this image was taken by Jim Thommes. I have to say this guy has become somewhat of a legend to me. He takes some absolutely stunning pictures with, at times the most basic of equipment. Well anything is basic in comparison to the Hubble which takes probably the best images.

Charles Messier discovered this object on June 5, 1764, and described it as a cluster of stars of 8th to 9th magnitude, enveloped in nebulosity. The name `Trifid' was first used by John Herschel to describe this nebula.

I actually posted similar to this on another site and a friend mentioned to me how close the lagoon nebula is.

M8, M20 and M21

Taken from the Digital Sky Survey Messier collection of Bill Arnett [more info here]

The Lagoon Nebula (M8) is almost dead centre, the Trifid Nebula (M20) is at the top to the right of centre, and bottom left corner is the open cluster (M21). The field is 3 degrees which if I remember right is good for binoculars. If anyone wants more detailed instructions on how to find this with binoculars just say but this is quite low in the UK.

For more images taken by Jim Thommes see his great website [here]

I posted some wonderful images of these objects yesterday - take a look at this though, this will blow your mind!





I have never seen these objects with my own eye as they are a bit too low in the UK but I wish I could. This whole region is quite spectacular. I'm not entirely sure who to give this photo credit to as I got it off what I think is a Chinese forum (sorry if I got this wrong my knowledge of foreign languages isn't what it should be). [Here] is the original in all its glory and larger size.

This rather interesting collection of images was pointed out to me earlier. Gosh it is interesting. Some of the combinations people have come up with are so odd and rather impressive in terms of their photo manipulation skills. Some are definitely much more impressive than others but here are a few I personally like:




Maybe we will one day see similar creatures on alien worlds....or am I being a bit too scifi there!
For more see: http://www.worth1000.com/cache/contest/contestcache.asp?contest_id=3695

I came across this rather stunning image of the Moon with a tree in the foreground. Some excellent
photographic work by the author Ann Chaikin - who I hope doesn't mind me posting it here!





The original can be found [here]

Enough said. Well maybe not quite. This is Nasa's first manned space mission in two-and-a-half years. It still is a glorious sight:

The original (and more info) can be found at [NASA]

I finally got my laptop repaired. It was under warranty from PC World, well their PC ServiceCall Customer Support. I have to say that on both occasions I have had to deal with them they have been great. The first time was a bit crap since the guy on the phone wasn't the best and even sent the person to collect it to the wrong address after I explicitly checked that he had my student address as collection. This was over a year ago - turns out that what I thought was wrong was (it was a cylinder in the hard drive).

This time was a different story. I decided to use a different tactic when I called up and I explained exactly what I had done, how I diagnosed it and the steps I'd taken to repair it. So quite quickly the guy agreed with me that it was a faulty DVD-ROM drive. He organised for an engineer to pop by today. I was expecting him not too turn up till late and not to have a phone call off him telling me his ETA (this is what I was promised). I got what I was promised the engineer called me to tell me he would be around just before 11. He was. In ten minutes he had swapped the drive and reset the BIOS and it now works. It is actually working much better than it has for a while so I reckon the drive was causing a secondary problem - not entirely sure what though. I think it is now time for it to be wiped though and a fresh install of Windows will only do it good, though I will have all the random crap that PC World like to put on it.

Oh and they even emailed me to confirm all the details once I had called them, not bad. Overall I am very pleased with their customer service and the call centre wasn't an expensive number either - that's another job done.

This actually does something rather useful (maybe a first for my blog!), well to me anyway. It returns the distance modulus (the logarithm of the ratios of apparent to absolute brightnesses, equal to the difference of absolute magnitude to apparent magnitude) using an approximate method for calculating the luminosity distance (the distance at which an astronomical body would lie based on its observed luminosity in the absence of any unanticipated attenuation) so that numerical integration is avoided. The approximate method essentially is to use a CDM Universe. Since I don't need this to be the most accurate this method should be fine however if I find this isn't suitable I will have to go back to the lambda CDM and do the numerical integration. Anyway here is the SQL code I have used for this task (the useful line begins with a CAST):

SELECT

objID AS objID, plate AS plate, mjd AS mjd, fiberid AS fiberid, z AS Z,

CAST ( -5.0000000 * LOG10(8450700000 * ((1 + z) - (SQRT(1 + z))) / 10 ) as float) as D_MOd


INTO mydb.z_2


FROM mydb.z_1

I just signed up to http://bloginspace.com. My website is now, supposedly, being transmitted into outer space, groovy. :-) I'm not sure if I should be pleased with this or not. As an astronomer I should be against "junk" E/M signals but as a human being I want the Alien's to read my mind as I write it - it sound much better than being probed for the information.

Now this is worth playing around with.





[Church Sign Generator]

The second "text" generator of the day. Now you don't have to pay out when you go to Egypt to get your name wrote out for ya.








[Write Like an Egyptian]

I think they aren't going for the Robo cop look, shame that.



[BBC Article]

Another generator, my posts are a bit 1-D at the moment. This one is truly text though. It takes an image and outputs ASCII. I came across this when I was looking at some source code (that if I am honest I don't have much of a clue about since I don't know much about ASP.NET) on [The Code Project].


For an example I took an image of my mate Tom (looking like a gangster) and converted it (there are loads of options):


Image:





The output ASCII as dots (ok they are small and I guess not far off pixel sizes - well probably quite a bit but give the same effect only on a large scale), it is an image because the ASCII was very large and this was the faster option for displaying on my site (it also didn't display correctly due to my style sheet, if you don't believe me just give it a go):





Oh and here is the site: [ASCII-Generator]

I think somebody should remind Ready, Steady, Cook that a vegetarian doesn't eat fish! Well I guess it is not them that they should remind but the contestant who said she was a Veggie and then when Mr Harriott asked if she ate fish she said "sometimes". After they made a big deal about this going to be a veggie meal she pulled out fish. Ok she eats fish fair enough thats upto her but if you are a "proper" vegetarian then you don't eat fish. I get to have this argument with people about vegetarians eating fish all the time. It pisses me off. If someone eats fish and calls themselves a true veggie (to the point at stating it on television where there will be people watching you) then they are a hypocrite. Sorry if this has become a bit of rant but, argh! I've had enough of this argument for 6 live times and I've only been a veggie for 3 years!

Here is the definition of a vegetarian (and no not mine the [Vegetarian Society's] one!):

A vegetarian is someone living on a diet of grains, pulses, nuts, seeds, vegetables and fruits with or without the use of dairy products and eggs (preferably free-range).

A vegetarian does not eat any meat, poultry, game, fish, shellfish or crustacea, or slaughter by-products such as gelatine or animal fats.

Believe me yet? Veggies don't eat fish! I was actually thinking that they might have produce an interesting recipe that I could eat, but alas no. I just checked what they made: Mushroom risotto (how inspiring, not), Haddock wrapped in spinach with sweet and sour red pepper dressing (FISH!!) and Herb crusted haddock with mushroom and soy vinaigrette (FISH AGAIN ARGH!).

This makes me thing back to the Vegetarian Society's "Fishconceptions Campaign". And as they stated a fish is: "a cold blooded animal, living wholly in water" [Oxford English Dictionary]. Take a look at the site, it has some rather odd and interesting material on there.

I'm not sure how I got this, but I did...must have been my confused answers:



Tinkerbell


Who 's Your Inner Sexy Cartoon Chick ?
brought to you by Quizilla

I went to see this today, I hadn't been impressed with the trailers but we all decided it would be entertaining. I would say it was, though it wasn't fantastic I know it wasn't ever gonna be scientifically understandable, but it really annoys me when they use terms incorrectly. The guy heated up to 4000K and the scientist said "that's as hot as a supernova"...umm yeah right. Its as hot as the chromosphere of the Sun and the interior is in the millions of K. Argh. Come on graphite's melting point is about 3948 K. Apart from that and some other guy mentioning that the machine didn't have enough critical mass (are they just putting scientific terms in at random here?) it was good. It was fun, humorous and overall enjoyable - just gotta forget any science you know... hard to do that when you are about to start a PhD!

Interesting, oddly funny, not politically correct, probably a good thing to do and probably fake. Take a look at this sign:

This came from: [RRBBS]

Well maybe not quite but it there has been a few recently. Nothing really big though the one today injured 12 people and took out a curry house! "why oh why" the wicked witch cried as her chances of a narn bread and a vegetable balti for £4.99 went up in the air!


For more take a look at: [BBC], [Scotsman.com], [The Age]