We have three weblogs rattling around here at Cornerhost and all have been inundated with automated comment spam over the past couple of weeks. About 700 an hour have ended up in moderation on blivet alone. Well, I ass-u-me they were all spam. When there are several thousand in the queue I don’t check for false positives, I just hit ‘delete.’
I am happy to report that Bad Behavior (currently at version 2.0.6) seems to have stopped the bots in their little automated tracks. I activated it last night and the log says that 2,800 automated attempts have been blocked in around 10 hours. Yes!
NASA announced Tuesday that it will go ahead with one final space shuttle mission to repair and upgrade Hubble after months of debate over the risks of such an endeavor.
“We are going to add a shuttle servicing mission of the Hubble Space Telescope to the shuttle’s manifest to be flown before it retires,” announced NASA chief Michael Griffin at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Baltimore, Maryland, where Hubble engineers and scientists gave him a standing ovation. “This is a day that I’ve wanted to get to for the last 18 months.”
Griffin has long said that he would support a proposed Hubble servicing mission provided its risk did not exceed that already accepted for other shuttle flights. The mission will add years onto the Hubble’s lifetime and will help prepare the space telescope for its ultimate, but controlled, plunge through the Earth’s atmosphere.
“Hubble is one of the great observatories,” Griffin has said. “It has revealed fundamental things about the universe of which we had no idea.”
Griffin said today that the upcoming servicing mission will likely launch aboard NASA’s Discovery orbiter between construction flights to complete the International Space Station (ISS), and is expected to feature no less than four—and preferably five—spacewalks to upgrade Hubble’s optics and make other repairs.
“We’re trying for early May of 2008,” Griffin said. (…)
Astronomers hope the decision means Hubble could still be in operation by 2013 when NASA’s next great observatory—the James Webb Space Telescope—is slated to fly. Hubble’s visible and ultraviolet observations will not be duplicated by JWST, which will scan primarily in the infrared wavelengths, researchers said.
Because Nevada has provisions for early voting (touch screen with paper backup), Audrey and I did our civic duties and voted today. The state and local Judgeship (Supreme, District and Family Court) races are officially non-partisan so you can’t know the players without a program. With information from the state Democratic committee and the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada we had a good foundation to evaluate who to cast our vote for. (more…)
I was unaware of the advent of DST in 2007 moving up three weeks.
And Fall Back: [via Slate’s Today’s Papers Textcast]
The papers remind you, so TP does, too: Daylight-saving time ends tomorrow at 2 a.m. Turn those clocks back one hour. Before you know it, it will be time to spring forward again. Thanks to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, clocks will revert back to DST on the second Sunday in March instead of the first Sunday in April, three weeks earlier than they have since 1966.
According to Callas, Spirit was operating normally until the onset of the Martian winter, whose shorter days and frigid temperatures typically mean a slower pace for exploratory rovers. “We began getting the occasional transmission along the lines of ‘ANOTHER SOIL SAMPLE OF THE EXACT SAME COMPOSITION AS THE LAST ONE,’” Callas said. “Most of the time, she’d power down and not transmit much of anything, which, at the time, didn’t particularly concern us.”
But as the winter lingered, Spirit began producing thousands of pages of sometimes rambling and dubious data, ranging from complaints that the Martian surface was made up almost entirely of the same basalt, to long-winded rants questioning the exorbitant cost and scientific relevance of the mission.
“Granted, Spirit has been extraordinarily useful to our work,” Callas said. “Last week, however, we received three straight days of images of the same rock with the message ‘HAPPY NOW?’”
And really, who could blame it? “Spirit is convinced that [sister rover] Opportunity has found water and isn’t telling anyone.”
It’s new release time. The latest in our venerable 2.0 series, which now counts over 1.2 million downloads, is available for download immediately, and we suggest everyone upgrade as this includes security fixes. We’re breaking the tradition of naming releases after jazz musicians to congratulate Ryan Boren on his new son (and first WP baby)…
[later:] Aaaand we’re updated. If things are wonky (in the technical sense) please let me know.
OK, I am illiterate concerning cross-platform options for video chat. Grandma and Grandpa have a new computer and a new video camera. Audrey and I have done this quite a bit, but that’s been Mac to Mac. They have PCs.
On our end, .Mac, IChat 2.1 (OSX 10.3.9), an iSight and a broadband connection. On their end, Windows XP, AOL (twitch), a Logitech Quickcam Messenger and a broadband connection.
I’m hoping that there is just some open source solution for their end. Googling terms that I think should be good (”cross-platform video chat” “PC Mac video chat”, etc.) comes up with an Ask MetaFilter thread saying that AIM works across the divide.
Comments and/or suggestions (preferably helpful) are welcome.
Scientists claim they have created a totally new alloy of hydrogen and oxygen molecules by splitting water.
It takes high-energy X-rays and an extremely high pressure, but the end result is a solid mixture of H2 and 02 that has never been identified before, they say. The discovery could change our understanding of the complex chemistry of water.
The new alloy is “a highly energetic material”, says Wendy Mao at Los Alamos National Laboratory, US, who led the research. “It may help us find a way of storing energy.” (…)
The discovery that molecules of oxygen and hydrogen can form an alloy opens up fresh avenues of research, including new possibilities for studying molecular interactions between oxygen and hydrogen, the researchers say.
“The existence of this new alloy is very interesting but not hugely surprising,” says Sean McWhinnie, at the Royal Society of Chemistry in London, UK.
“Given high enough pressures, even hydrogen will behave as a metal. All, the other heavier elements in hydrogen’s group of the periodic table are metals,” she points out. Science (vol 314, p 636) [more]
I really wasn’t much of a big fan of the Dixie Chicks, though I did know they predominantly featured banjo and fiddle work and not so much pedal steel and drums. A big plus was that they played their own instruments. Really well. So, I was amazed when the darlings of the CMA made that infamous remark while on tour. I did think Not Ready To Make Nice was spot on. We bought two of their CDs as gesture of solidarity.
I used to really like Country Music, I grew up with it in a small town in eastern Kansas. There was even quite a bit of crossover in “Southern Rock” bands like Marshall Tucker, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Wet Willie. There were other bands and mostly West Coast performers like The Byrds, Linda Ronstadt, Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Pure Prairie League, yadda, yadda. Then there was that whole Bluegrass/Newgrass thing that was happening from about 1970 onward. I was 16 in 1971, so that’s the milieu for my influences.
My Grandfather (Mother’s side) had a rack full of Johnny Horton, Bill Monroe, Porter Wagoner, Flatt & Scruggs, George Jones, The Stanley Brothers, Johnny Cash — if they were Country and ‘big’ in the 1960s, he had at least one of their records. His tastes and biases was a big influence on me as well. Made me aware of a difference in music coming out of Nashville (and the Grand Old Opry) vs. Memphis. In his (and my) mind that was Nashville = good and Memphis = overproduced and thus, not so good.
I took refuge in what passed for commercial Country music during the musical wilderness of “the Disco Years.” Then Mark Knopfler’s guitar work on Sultan’s of Swing told me that rock ‘n’ roll was back on the radio. Somewhere around 1981 (when I got my undergraduate degree) I kind of dropped out of popular culture altogether. I’ve since realized that the Country music I like is now called ‘Roots’ and ‘Alt Country’.
