The last Pluto image before New Horizons went silent and got down to the business of taking close-up fly-by pictures showed the "heart", or as it is being re-imagined, the "dog Pluto":

( Read more... )

Everyone keeps talking about the four dark spots on Pluto. Is it just me, or is it more like a single dark region overlain by lighter stripes?

( Read more... )

I dreamt I saw Mrs T last night ( Read more... )

In MS Access 2003, I have a table with entries of the form ( Read more... )

When I got home and parked the car last night I heard meowing in the street, and on investigating I found a small scared young tabby cat at the far end of the street. Since it was about to rain heavily, I took the (almost) kitten in and put it in the bathroom with litter, food, water and a newspaper-lined carrier with some of the boys' old toys in ( Read more... )

Now the Hugos have been awarded at Denvention, it's time for the annual moaning about the ageing of science fiction. Using nhw's data, I graphed the birth dates of Hugo and Nebula winners before, and I've graphed the median ages here:

( Read more... )

despotliz wrote in a post about the 2008 Oscar nominations in instant_fanzine:Saoirse Ronan in Atonement was brilliant.
And I couldn't resist making this:

( Read more... )

I read this BBC news article saying "The average UK person will this year have a greater income than their US counterpart for the first time since the 19th Century, figures suggest." Now this may be true, but I would point out that "GDP divided by population" is not the same as "The income of the average person". The first is the mean, the second ( Read more... )

With the ESA satellite COROT nearing its first 300 days in orbit, I hear that a truckload of new extrasolar planets are due to be announced to the world soon. These detections will be based on planetary transits, which means this may be the last time my graph of exoplanets detected by doppler spectroscopy (based on data from exoplanet.eu) represent ( Read more... )

( Read more... )