The ESA's SMART-1 Moon mission has been surveying the lunar surface, with a little help from a solar flare:

The D-CIXS instrument on ESA's Moon mission SMART-1 has produced the first detection from orbit of calcium on the lunar surface. By doing this, the instrument has taken a step towards answering the old question: did the Moon form from part of the Earth?

[...]

In January 2005, SMART-1 was high above Mare Crisium when a giant explosion took place on the Sun. Scientists often dread these storms because they can damage spacecraft but, for the scientists responsible for D-CIXS, it was just what they needed.

The D-CIXS instrument depends on X-ray emission from the Sun to excite elements on the lunar surface, which then emit X-rays at characteristic wavelengths. D-CIXS collects these X-ray fingerprints and translates them into the abundance of each chemical element found on the surface of the Moon. Grande and his colleagues could relate the D-CIXS Mare Crisium results to the laboratory analysis of the Russian lunar samples. [...]

I love this sort of story: a device the size of a toaster, gradually accumulating data that helps astronomers and physicists piece together a picture of events a billion years ago. Isn't science great?

[Via Slashdot]

Chris at QwghlmBlog has said exactly what I was thinking about the Monarch Airlines incident:

[...] Some might say it is a victory for the terrorists, but in actual fact it's a victory for spineless fuckwits. It is they who run the country now:

"It became apparent that the reason that some of the people didn't board the plane was because somebody had overheard the gentlemen in question speaking – I think it was Arabic."

And how the fuck would you know what language it was? You've just spent two weeks in Malaga: you probably didn't utter a word of Spanish the entire time you were there. Oh, the irony: British tourists, to whom nearly all the definition of being multilingual is being able to speak English slow-ly and LOUDLY, are now suddenly experts in all things linguistic. And even if it was Arabic, rather than Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu or Welsh – so what? A quarter of a billion people speak it, for fuck's sake. Even the most stupid amongst you sheep must realise that they're not all terrorists? [...]

Worth1000's Animal Crossbreed contest prompted some really freaky responses: the Frippo, the Polly wants a bone, and my favourite the Orangu-phant.

I almost lost my entire evening to browsing the Worth1000 archives. I especially liked Proportions from the Eyewitless News: Save Pluto contest: the author should have used "Jovians" instead of "Jupiterians", but the concept is so nicely executed that I'll forgive that minor detail.

One last Worth1000-related entry: a couple of old uk-po5 hands who read this site will be unsurprised to read that I found Jennifer Love-Chocolate utterly irresistible. Yum!

[Animal Crossbreed links inspired by Gordon McLean, who linked to a site that displayed a selection of images from the original Worth1000 contest.^†]

^† No criticism of Gordon McLean is intended – after all, he was only linking to the page he'd found – but as Worth1000 ask that images published on their site not be reposted without their express permission and there's no indication on the site Gordon linked to that such permission had been given, I thought it more appropriate to link to the original competition at Worth1000. Besides, there are even more freaky animal images at Worth 1000!

No doubt inspired by the release of some killer snake movie, Salon published an interview with herpetologist Jesus Rivas:

How do you find these large snakes in the swamps of Venezuela?
I know the kind of places where they live — usually in shallow waters with a lot of vegetation. I go shuffling through the water, feeling with my feet for them and poking with poles in the mud. Normally I find them by stepping on them.

You're kidding. You step on it and then you reach into the water to grab it?
Yes, that's when the fun begins. You know, when you step on something it could be anything. Could be a turtle, in which case there's nothing to do — you're going to feel the shell. You feel something hard, but you need to reach with your hand to really define what it is. Sometimes you can reach and feel something hard but scaly, in which case it could be a caiman, which is a smaller cousin of the alligator. When I say smaller, it's 7 to 20 feet and with a very big mouth.

Read the rest of the article for Rivas' account of what happened when he did take some snakes on a place.

[NB: Non-subscribers to Salon will have to view an interstitial ad before gaining access to the entire article.]

Architectural Fragment by Petrus Spronk.

These Star Trek Inspirational Posters are right on the money. There's:

CAPTAIN JAMES T. KIRK
I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the
sound of how awesome I am.

Or:

TALOS IV
Why does this place get such a bad rap? All these guys want is the whole of your physical and emotional existence. That's no different from working for a corporation, except instead of Casual Fridays these guys give you virtual sex.

And my personal favourite:

YOUR LAST BATTLEFIELD
You don't suppose this episode is meant to be some sort of allegory about 20th century earth, do you?

Good, geeky fun.

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

David Foster Wallace's Roger Federer as Religious Experience isn't just for tennis fans:

Journalistically speaking, there is no hot news to offer you about Roger Federer. He is, at 25, the best tennis player currently alive. Maybe the best ever. Bios and profiles abound. "60 Minutes" did a feature on him just last year. Anything you want to know about Mr. Roger N.M.I. Federer — his background, his home town of Basel, Switzerland, his parents' sane and unexploitative support of his talent, his junior tennis career, his early problems with fragility and temper, his beloved junior coach, how that coach's accidental death in 2002 both shattered and annealed Federer and helped make him what he now is, Federer's 39 career singles titles, his eight Grand Slams, his unusually steady and mature commitment to the girlfriend who travels with him (which on the men's tour is rare) and handles his affairs (which on the men's tour is unheard of), his old-school stoicism and mental toughness and good sportsmanship and evident overall decency and thoughtfulness and charitable largess — it's all just a Google search away. Knock yourself out.

This present article is more about a spectator's experience of Federer, and its context. The specific thesis here is that if you've never seen the young man play live, and then do, in person, on the sacred grass of Wimbledon, through the literally withering heat and then wind and rain of the '06 fortnight, then you are apt to have what one of the tournament's press bus drivers describes as a "bloody near-religious experience." It may be tempting, at first, to hear a phrase like this as just one more of the overheated tropes that people resort to to describe the feeling of Federer Moments. But the driver's phrase turns out to be true — literally, for an instant ecstatically — though it takes some time and serious watching to see this truth emerge.

Even if (like me) you're one of those whose tennis watching is limited to Wimbledon fortnight, the odd highlight from the latter stages of the other grand slam tournaments, and the occasional Davis Cup tie, Wallace does a marvelous job of explaining just why what Federer does is so special.

Well worth a read.

Marina Hyde on battling superstars:

In days of yestercentury, enormous importance was placed upon the Race to Berlin. These days, you have no hope of being a celebrity superpower unless you're involved in the Race to Africa. Clearly, the Soviet commander in this unseemly scramble is Angelina Jolie, whose occupation of Namibia is almost total, and to whom we'll return in greater detail later. Swooping in from another front like some exhibitionist Eisenhower is Madonna, who has earmarked Malawi for reasons we shall also come to shortly.

And now, approaching from the north – did we run out of allied generals? – is Gwyneth Paltrow.

I say "approaching" (you get the feeling she's masterminding the push from a gated bunker somewhere in Primrose Hill), in that last weekend she was unveiled as the star of a new ad, which in minuscule print features the website of an African charity, www.keepachildalive.org. But mainly, it depicts Gwyneth, arguably the most WASPish looking woman in Hollywood, facing the camera in a beaded tribal necklace with a dash of blue warpaint across one cheek. The caption? "I AM AFRICAN."

Finally, a reason to care about the continent.

[...]

This clip of an Australian lyrebird was voted the favourite moment from all of David Attenborough's natural history documentaries. An amazing display of mimicry, though I'm not sure it'd have been my choice as the best thing Attenborough's ever shown us.

Trouble is, the man's spent the last fifty years showing two or three generations of TV viewers the wonders of the natural world: how can anyone pick a single clip from all the wonders he's shown us? That said, I think that if you put a gun to my head I'd have to go for either the famous encounter between Attenborough and a family of mountain gorillas from Life on Earth or the "baitball" segment from the third episode of The Blue Planet.

(The latter sequence features a shoal of mackerel being herded by dolphins, then attacked by shearwater gulls diving several metres to grab their share, then the giant tuna arrive to get their share. All of a sudden you find yourself looking at four different species – one of which normally lives above the waves – looping and diving around ten metres under water, a beautifully photographed scene of utter carnage turned into a sight to take your breath away. As far as I'm concerned, that sequence justified that year's TV license fee all by itself.)

[Lyrebird clip via Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society]

Christopher Buckley (whose Thank You For Smoking I'm two-thirds of the way through, having recently enjoyed the film adaptation) brings us Stations of the Mel:

Mel Is Condemned by the Press. Mel is pulled over by a centurion for driving his chariot at great speed, and accused of having a blood-alcohol level exceeding that mandated by Tiberius. "Arrest me not," he telleth the centurion, "for I owneth Malibu. And thou lookest a bit Jewish unto me." Sayeth the centurion, "Tell it to the procurator."

Mel Is Fingerprinted and Has His Mug Shot Taken. Mel calleth his lawyers, agents, and celebrity crisis managers and sayeth unto them, "I have opened my mouth and stirred up the Jews." His lawyers, agents, and crisis managers sayeth, "Yet we are Jews." Mel sayeth, "Thou didst not look Jewish when I was besotted with drink. Even so, gettest me out of this place of desolation."

Mel Falls the First Time. ABC, one of the sons of Disney, a Jew, cancelleth Mel's documentary on the Holocaust, a fiction wherein the Jews claim to be pestered by Germans. ABC announceth, "Whereupon we hath interest in this project, we thereupon now hath none," and refereth all calls to its press agent, another Jew, for Hollywood is full of them.

[...]

[Via Emdashes]

Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown:

Charlie Brown is on the run from the Peanuts Gang after the Great Pumpkin puts a bounty on his head in this wild animated student short by Jim Reardon.

Twisted, yet fun.

[Edited to update link to video, due to impending closure of Google Video. JR 17 April 2011]

[Via Daring Fireball Linked List]

This bug may not be the most serious one extant in Windows, but it's surely one of the strangest:

Hair color of the "person" icon for a user group becomes gray if the group contains more than 500 users

SYMPTOMS
If a user group contains more than 500 users, the hair color of the "person" icon for the group changes to gray. This does not affect the functionality of the group or the users for whom the hair color of the icon changes. This issue affects built-in groups, local groups, and global groups.

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

Further to this post from earlier this week, Darren at LinkMachineGo has found even more stories about 'Mad Jack' Churchill:

As the raiders prepared to leave Vaagso and Maaloy, a British demolition charge exploded so close to Churchill that it "blew him up," in the words of one account. Another story says that a demolitions man "thoughtlessly blew down a wall he happened to be leaning against." Still another version, which sounds eminently Churchillian, relates he was celebrating the raid's success with a bit of liberated Moselle wine when the charge went off and a chunk of broken bottle slashed into Churchill's forehead.

Whatever happened, Churchill had another wound—or at least a sort of wound—to show for his successful leadership at Maaloy. As he himself joked later, "I had to touch it up from time to time with Rosamund's lipstick to keep the wounded hero story going." He also had his second Military Cross.

[Via LinkMachineGo]

Gary Farber has found a sneak preview of Mel Gibson's next film.

The Recording Industry Association of America has reconsidered its decision to harrass the grieving relatives of the late Larry Scantlebury:

In response to the uproar surrounding the situation, the RIAA has decided to drop all proceedings against the estate. In a statement, RIAA spokesperson Jonathan Lamy said that "out of an abundance of sensitivity, we have elected to drop this particular case."

Curious timing. It wasn't until the story blazed a trail through the news media and across the Internet that the RIAA discovered this unexpected "abundance of sensitivity." As Cory Doctorow points out, it looks like the RIAA's sensitivity is directed primarily at its own image, rather than a grieving family.

"An abundance of sensitivity", eh? Not the first description to come to mind…

The Book Covers weblog is devoted to exactly what you'd expect: pointing out distinctive, well-designed book covers. For example, this fine cover by Kathleen DiGrado for Debra Marquart's The Horizontal World.

Of course, one problem with following this weblog is going to be that those books that do show up on this side of the Atlantic will as likely as not be published under a different cover. (Which I suppose points to a gap in the market for a UK version of the Book Covers weblog, but I'm not the man to do it.)

[Via Fimoculous.com]

The Washington Post has a very nice obituary for Bruno Kirby, who died earlier this week just three weeks after finding out he had leukemia.

Whilst Kirby will probably be remembered by most of us for his comedy work – particularly his role opposite Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally – he had a tremendously varied career. For example, until I read the obituary, I'd completely forgotten that he was in The Godfather: Part II, playing the young Clemenza.

[Via Needcoffee.com]

I'm going to have nightmares tonight after reading this:

A woman who ripped off her ex-boyfriend's testicle with her bare hands has been sent to prison.

Amanda Monti, 24, flew into a rage when Geoffrey Jones, 37, rejected her advances at the end of a house party, Liverpool Crown Court heard.

She pulled off his left testicle and tried to swallow it, before spitting it out. A friend handed it back to Mr Jones saying: "That's yours."

Monti admitted wounding and was jailed for two-and-a-half years.

[...]

Yes, I am sitting here with my legs firmly crossed. Why do you ask?

(I think I can safely say I'm not the only one…)

[Via GromBlog]

I don't suppose that the 10 Mile Spiral is an especially practical proposition, but it looks so cool that I wish someone would build it anyway:

In their recent and immensely enjoyable book Tooling, New York-based architects Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch propose, among other things, a "10 mile spiral" that will "serve two civic purposes for Las Vegas":

First, it acts as a massive traffic decongestion device… by adding significant mileage to the highway in the form of a spiral. The second purpose is less infrastructural and more cultural: along the spiral you can play slots, roulette, get married, see a show, have your car washed, and ride through a tunnel of love, all without ever leaving your car. It is a compact Vegas, enjoyed at 55 miles per hour and topped off by a towering observation ramp offering views of the entire valley floor below.

[Via cityofsound del.icio.us feed]

This Coca Cola ad in the style of Grand Theft Auto is simply marvelous.