Paul Smith's Blog

Katie Melua in her song Nine Million Bicycles had a bit of bad science in the second verse: We are 12 billion light-years from the edge, That's a guess, no one can ever say it's true, But I know that I will always be with you Anyway, after a tongue-in-cheek article appeared in the Guardian about this she did another cut with some more accurate lyrics: We are 13.7 billion light-years from the edge of the observable universe, That's a good estimate with well-defined error bars, And with the available information, I predict that I will always be with you...

This is in response to Robert Peston's whinge on his BBC blog. Mainly about how his iPAQ isn't supported on Windows Vista, and how Outlook XP makes him type his password in. My HP iPAQ PocketPC will never be compatible with Vista, even though the software it runs is Microsoft software. Hey ho. That's an expensive and serviceable bit of kit written off prematurely. That iPAQ would be running a very old version of Windows Mobile then....

In a sort of follow up to my previous post about Windows Vista being the most secure operating system. Jeff Jones has totalled up the number of vulnerabilities that have been discovered in the first 90 days of the Windows Vista launch (end of November), and compared it to Windows XP, Mac OS X.4, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, Red Hat Linux Enterprise 4 Workstation and Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10....

I was going through some of the comments posted by people on BBC News' thread on non-proven drugs (popularly known as alternative medicine) being available on the NHS. Obviously they shouldn't be, NHS funds should only be spent on things that actually work. However certain aspects of society, like the Royal Family insist on promoting un-proven drugs. Un-proven drugs unlike clinically tested drugs have no evidence to show any effect, have not been tested for safety, for effects with other drugs, for the proper doses etc....

Here's the followup picture from my previous post. We can use the Sun to help highlight the geography of the Moon, as the Sun slowly rises other the lunar surface light flood into vallerys and crators, or vast shadows are cast by mountain ranges. You can see this on the closeup below, the terminator isn't smooth, its all bumpy, even over the space of a few hours you can often see quite dramatic changes along the terminator as the Sun floods into areas of shadow....

If you go outside right now (even if its daylight), Venus is a few degrees south of the Moon. That makes Venus possible to spot in daylight assuming you've got really transparent skies. You'll probably need binoculars but its possible. It also means the Moon is hanging around near Venus in the evening sky, here's a photo I took yesterday. I've got high-resolution versions and close ups of the Moon on my gallery....

I managed to take a few images of the lunar eclipse last week, I only used my camera with the standard 55mm lens. I was feeling too weak to drag the telescope outside and set it up. :) There's two more photos and the rest of my astrophotographs on my gallery.

For those who have had a play around with the preview of DreamScene, an Ultimate Extra you may be wondering how to enable sound. You can do this by using the Sound Mixer, an often overlooked feature, just unmute DreamScene.

Time for another BS check, I spotted this over on Barb Bowman's blog (who nicely covers why not to trust Cnet's reviews). Tom Merritt, executive editor at Cnet went over five reasons not to buy Windows Vista, so let's see what he managed to say. 5: Search is buried. Search is everywhere, every explorer window, its right in the Start menu. It takes one key press or one mouse click no matter where you are to get to search....

Microsoft have posted up a pre-release version of Windows DreamScene, check for new updates for it to show up in Windows Update if you need to. It ships with one video the aurora style one, based off the default wallpaper.