Researchers had a spectacular encounter with a rare Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus), much deeper and far south of its normal range.
During a standard dive (but never a dull event, as the researchers mention), the shark carefully (and gracefully) checked out the submersible giving the video specialist plenty of time to shoot high qualityfootage (QuickTime et Windows Media Vomit). More information on this shark can be found over at Arctic Kingdom.
I find it a kind of weird: the first Chinese manned spaceflight was a great succes when the Chinese astronaut was proudly shown to the media after touchdown.
However, most media only have a handful of pictures and a just a couple of lines of text. Reuters only has 2 sentences in its news item. CNN comes with a longer story, but that’s basically because they generally manage to add more irrelevant text to their newsitems. Striking part:
“Earlier this week state-run CCTV cancelled plans to broadcast live television pictures of the launch on the advice of “space experts.””
I see that it’s making headlines, but all newsagencies are reporting that China has started its manned spaceflight project. Right now at this very moment. There’s hardly any news coming through, since the official Chinese news agency appears to be tightlipped about the whole event.
So 42 years after the Russians sent a man into space, the Chinese have managed to do the same. And for some kind of reason, I keep thinking about those thousands of games of Civilization I played. The space race? Who’s the first to launch a ship to Alpha Centauri?
Last night, the SpaceChannel had their Star Trek Marathon, which essentially ended up in a non-stop exercise of viewing Star Trek movies. Only movies I to VI were shown ordered by popularity.
If I recall correctly, the best one was Star Trek II (The wrath of Khan), which was followed by StarTrek VI, the Undiscovered Country. Personally, the ‘Undiscovered Country’ would have been my favourite one. SpaceChannel had some interesting fragments from actors who played in the first Star Trek series, or better yet, who were lucky to make an appearance. Or should I say, that Captain Kirk was quite a charm those days?
Also note, that the movies as directed by Nimoy (‘Spock’) were significantly better than the ones directed by Shatner (Kirk). Still fun though watching those movies, but pretty tiresome so once in a while.
This year’s Thanksgiving, we think of Mom. Additionally, we were visited by two stranded visitors from Mars. Imagine the scene!
An 
entry over at Corsac reminds me of the CD collection I used to have before I decided that it was time to chase my love. Most of them are mentioned over here (recovered from an old Excel file). During those days of preparation, I decided to sell most of the CDs to a colleague, but upon compiling the list, I left out the stuff I wanted to keep myself, or (where appropriate) marked them as ‘sold’. Additionally, some ‘popular alternative stuff’ (Smashing Pumpkins, Alanis Umph-Umph-Umph and so forth) I gave away for NOP to the neighbour upstairs. One of my sisters offered to store some (most) of the leftover CDs [Note to her: you promised to send them back so now it’s the time to make up with me]. But again, I remember taking precautions, by asking my other half to store the classical ones, collector items and Jazz CDs.
Not that I really care about those CDs, but naturally, they were part of history that spanned 7 to 8 years of my life. Crucial years. Sweet memories. Sweet nothings.
Audiotapes. Walkmans. 
Do they still exist? Yes, apparently they do . For some kind of reason, I think that’s pretty amazing. As a seventies kid, I was one of those who had a ‘Walkman’ and went through puberty buying too many blank tapes and too many records. And then the CD boomed, and I remember that was only because everyone was in love (or got in love) with the ‘jewel boxes’.
So 20 years later, after I bought my first Walkman (from the Erres brand, and yes, those things were huge then: that’s why they had a handy beltclip) and carrying it along with me to school, I wonder where time has gone. Slogans like ‘Sony Walkmans keep us walking’ have been replaced with ‘Rip and Burn Forever’. Nothing beats growing older.
Is this coincidence, 
I wonder, when Alfons recalls veering up when he hears Piaf during the Dutch movie ‘Phileine zegt sorry’, while at the same time the BBC was commemorating the singer (October 10th, it was the 40th anniversary of her death)?
In light of the anniversary, The Telegraph has an interview with the writer of the song ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’.
“I played the notes and Vaucaire just started saying ‘rien de rien’ and it became a song about the triumph of love, the everlasting hope of love. That is the mystery of songwriting. And fate.”
Not completely related, croissants for breakfast. Life is good
The Nova Scotian Utility and Review Board has given Nova Scotia Power two weeks to file a report about its handling in the aftermath of Hurricane Juan (earlier and more earlier). The Board says that public deserves a review of the company’s handling of the power outages but stressed that it doesn’t imply any wrongdoings.
“However, a natural disaster of the magnitude of hurricane Juan can provide valuable insights into improvements which can be made to the overall restoration program in preparation for future outages.”
Apparently there are still around 1,000 customers without electricity, that is, almost after two weeks. Also, NS Power has indicated that the electrical system is still vulnerable as recently damaged trees may succumb in the coming Winter.
During last week’s power outage I frequently phoned ‘home’. During one of those conversations with relatives oversea, someone mentioned something about the troubled state of the Dutch monarchy: apparantly one of the sons of the queen was intending to marry a human rights activist. Which was basically OK, until the press found out that the woman (Mabel Wisse Smit) apparently had had an intimate relationship with a notorious Dutch gangster, something she had denied earlier before. Today prince Johan Friso announced that he’s giving up his succession rights so he can marry his controversial girlfriend, after the Dutch prime-minister said he was not going to ask the parliament for permission for another royal wedding.
And another simple reminder to a tale that has to be told, thanks to the ever surprising Gothamist. At the end of 1999, probably around this time, Alf and I stayed in London for a couple of days: Kurt Weill’s centenary was celebrated in the city’s South Bank Centre. The day before we left to London, I was in Nova Scotia, but that’s another story.
Anyways, on one of those days of exchanging money at a bank, (Barclays) probably around King’s Court (I think it was called), I was given a 5 pound coin that was apparantly released to commemorate the late Princess Diana. It was brand-spanking new, so I was eager to get rid of it so I could buy some extra postcards or stamps. Fate prevailed: nobody wanted to accept that coin, so I was basically stuck with it. If I remember correctly, I gave it away to Gayle’s daughter.
Regarding that visit to London: it was half a joyful event and half a nightmare: the music was great but London life is terribly expensive. I have no idea why everything had to be expensive, but even the cheapest of the cheapest food (‘Fast food’) was unaffordable.
Holding the shift key while restarting
our old MSX home computer made sure that all disk based initialization routines were skipped or ignored, leaving us with that extra bit more of memory needed to execute BASIC or assembler programs.
I can’t remember it actually being documented somewhere. Just like the famous poke commands on other computers, these were instructions for the hobbyists (I almost said nerd). So I had to smile when I read the item about the smart (well, knowledgable) student who suggested that pressing the shift key defeated copy-protection measurements because it is a Windows feature. But I had to laugh, when I heard the guy was being sued for reminding us of this great Windows feature. It’s a ridiculous world, if you’re just trying to be honest.
Update: Via Cleverhack the last update that the company has dropped the idea of a lawsuit
Being rejected hurts a lot. A team of researchers at the UCLA say so. In the October 10th issue of ‘Science’ (Imagine captain Picard saying ‘Science. The next frontier’) they report that two key areas in the brain respond to the pain of rejection in the same way as physical pain.
They used a neat way to provoke these hurt feelings: undergraduates (sic!) were sometimes included or sometimes excluded from playing a ‘virtual ball tossing game’ with a partner. Hey wait:
“It’s really the most boring game you can imagine, except at one point one of the two computer people stop throwing the ball to the real player”
The researchers theorize that the pain of being rejected has evolved because of the importance of surviving together, particularly in mammals. What would be more interesting to know is how humans have learnt to deal with this pain. Being rejected is so common nowadays that it looks like nobody cares about others anymore.
