Penny Arcade are now taking votes on which of their three ‘treatments’ they should continue with:
As it was the one I was most taken with when I first read it (and it seemed to finish the most abruptly) I went for Lookouts, but I’m half-wishing I’d gone for Automata…
Even though this story‘s old news by now I’m just listening to last week’s Mike Harding show on BBC iPlayer and it’s the last snippet of news before the show starts and as a story it really annoys me.
Astronomers calculate there is a tiny chance that Mars or Venus could collide with Earth – though it would not happen for at least a billion years.
Mars or Venus could collide with Earth. At its closest Venus is 41 million km from Earth, Mars about 56 million. Things are already looking a little suspect.
Writing in the journal Nature, a team led by Jacques Laskar shows there is also a chance Mercury could strike Venus and merge into a larger planet.
Professor Laskar of the Paris Observatory and his colleagues also report that Mars might experience a close encounter with Jupiter – whose massive gravity could hurl the Red Planet out of our Solar System.
Mercury is something like 50 million km from Venus on average (Mercury has the most eccentric orbit of any planet so it’s hard to say) and Mars is something like 550 million km from Jupiter. And this story is saying that one or more of these planets may at some point billions of years in the future collide with an adjacent planet. But it could go either way. As in Mars’s orbit could decay bringing it 50 million km closer or it could end up going about 500 million the other way. Wow. Glad to know we’re on this one.
The researchers carried out more than 2,500 simulations. They found that in some, Mars and Venus collided with the Earth
And I think we can assume that there are a few more than just these 2,500 outcomes. So what we’ve learnt is that in a billion years the orbits of the planets within our Solar System will have changed and as such there’s a very small chance that some of them may collide and/or get caught in each others gravity. The part that annoys me most is that this became a national news story – not that science research shouldn’t be news, it should, I’m just not sure something that’s not especially likely to happen and even if it does it won’t be for at least a billion years really counts.
In addition, I think if you’d’ve asked me to predict what was going to happen to the orbits of our planets in a billion years time I reckon I probably would’ve come up with outcomes along similar lines. I haven’t read the full article in Nature but I hope it has a bit more to it than was reported on.
From a GOOD article about overuse of the word ‘syndrome’ (and underuse of the word ‘snorkel’):
…1661 syndrome (someone, usually a woman, who looks 16 from the back, 61 from the front)
Made me chuckle.
Hopefully Glen’s tattoo went well this afternoon – chatting about tattoos with both Glen and Alexis has made me think a bit more about whether I want a tattoo (which I’m pretty sure I do) and if so what I would want (which I am fairly clueless on).
Whilst scouting around for ideas I came across this interview with Horiyoshi III:
I think if I was to get a tattoo I wouldn’t quite have the balls to:
That aside his work is pretty amazing – reminds me of a guy I once saw in a Kyoto bathhouse.
More of his work from his website:
It appears you will also soon be able to buy Horiyoshi III clothing.
From my work blog:
I’m currently toying with how big or small to make the header bar (and at the risk of John coming back at me with own words regarding header size, the fold and scrolling here goes…)
My current predicament is the Header Bar, specifically how big it should be and what it should contain. In the current skin something that was criticised was the chunky header – my defence was twofold: firstly it looked good even if it was a little impractical, and secondly, so many of our pages lacked content that actually the more I could eat into the content area the better the limited content would look.
The new skin is going to be opening up a vast content area what with the admin column biting the dust and the header shrinking, which brings me back to the problem at hand: how small should it be? In the screenshot above you can see that it’s tiny, it’s just two lines (discounting the toolbar at the top) – this is of course because it hasn’t been styled – but I do like how it brings content to the fore. As a minimum I’ll need to put the SU logo in there but how big should it be? What amount of pixel space does it need? And what about the ad banner? As a source of revenue it’s important so that sets our header height to at least 70px but then what if the banner went elsewhere?
The options available seem to be:
I think ultimately it doesn’t make a difference – the first two still don’t determine whether how big the logo should be and if it’s at least the height of the banner these alternate locations ultimately waste space so I think the only option is really the last one (which is how it was in my initial mockup – which I should really post here!). I do like the idea of having the Warwick SU navigation tab as the logo though…
There’s a lot happening in the next couple of weeks, next week is Birmingham’s Ball and the Final Fling, both of which I will be cocktail waiting at (though possibly a little more like this) and Saturday is the first Lions Test, which if I had to call my Test 22 right now I’d go for:
Byrne, Bowe, BOD, Roberts, Fitzgerald, Jones, Phillips, Jenkins, Mears, Murray, Wyn-Jones, O’Connell, Croft, Wallace, Heaslip // Rees, Vickery, Hines, Williams, Ellis, O’Gara, Kearney
Then the week after is AMSU conference (for which I need to reinvent Agenda magazine’s online persona) and then Glastonbury.
In amongst all of that I also need to: