Well, I got myself a bit addicted to Xtranormal, and am now making videos.  They’re mostly experimental for now, but I hope to make more about science in general.  Check out my channel.  Xtranormal is a service that allows you to make computer animated movies in minutes.  You type the script, direct the actions, and a video is rendered in a short time.  You can also choose from a few different accents and languages.

But here’s my latest video:

Please comment on here or on the videos.

I’ve known about this one Youtube user for a while now, and her videos just make me want to slap my forehead and shake my head.  She seems to think sundogs are manmade.  She also thinks that rainbows from a sprinkler are from HAARP, as they supposedly never appeared 20 years ago.  Well, I remember seeing those rainbows 25 years ago.  I also understood the physics behind them.  Rainbows and sundogs are similar concepts, refraction of sunlight through water drops or ice crystals.  She thinks the ice crystals in the atmosphere are created by the government.  She thinks that it’s some sort of UV shield that the US government created, or something like that.  Just watch.

You can also check out her channel.

What?? Just watch.

This is ridiculous.  An educational non-profit organisation is suspended from Youtube?  Youtube is completely losing their minds.

Update:  Just saw this on the JREF website.  They’re aware and checking on it.

Recently, there was a votebot attack on many atheist videos on Youtube, where all videos on some channels were voted down from 4.5 or 5 stars to 2 or 2.5 stars with many 1 star votes.  The aim of these attacks are to make the videos less likely to come up in searches, resulting in a kind of censorship.  Well, the votebot had the opposite effect.  Watch this video.

Isn’t that wonderful?  It just made those channels more popular, and the video ratings are back up to where they were before, because so many people watched and voted!  Votebot censorship doesn’t work.  It just backfires.

I was just killing time reading on Wikipedia, when I happened upon the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King page.  In the criticism section, it said that some critics complained about the conclusion being too long.  Well, too bad, it’s part of the story.  Whenever I read books, I expect a proper conclusion.  I almost always get one.  Movies, however, like to have the climax, then have either a 1 minute conclusion or shorter.  To me, this is an incomplete story.  It’s my major criticism of movies.  A conclusion is supposed to provide closure.  While some movies do have proper closure, in which we find out what happens with the bad guys or see what the good guys are going to do next, many end without any information about what happens next in their lives.  Back to LotR:RotK.  If it didn’t have the proper conclusion that it does, it would not be complete, and would not be faithful to the book.  For the most part, Lord of the Rings is very faithful to the book.  If it didn’t have that conclusion, it would have been very, very disappointing.  Honestly, the conclusion was one of the most emotional things I have ever seen in a movie.

I think most critics want all action, no story.  And I want closure in stories.

I just read over at Universe Today that the crew of the ISS is evacuating to the Soyuz spacecraft just in case debris hits the station.  The chances of it getting hit by the debris are low, but they are doing everything they can to make sure the crew will be safe.  Check out Universe Today to keep up to date with this development.

Update – According to Nancy_A’s twitter, the danger has passed, and life is returning to normal on the ISS.

Sorry for my lack of posting lately.  I’ve been very busy, and haven’t been very interested in doing much typing.  Of course, I keep track of things that are going on in the world of science and space.  I just want to mention a couple of things.

First, Kepler has been launched on the search for Earth-sized exoplanets by using the transit method.  I know the first results won’t be available for a while (they need repeated transits to confirm a planet), but I’ll be keeping tabs on it.

Second, the launch of Discovery keeps getting delayed.  It’s supposed to deliver more solar panels to the station for the anticipated increase to 6 crewmembers.  When the new solar panels are attached, it will be the 2nd brightest object in the night sky, brighter than Venus!  I’ll be looking up quite often, I think.

Sorry I haven’t been posting lately.  But I thought I’d just leave you with some humour I remember seeing when I was an undergrad studying astronomy in university 13 years ago.

I saw this on a bathroom wall in a building that teaches mainly chemistry, so you know it’s a science major that wrote this:

lim(GPA->0) B.Sc. = B.A.

Not everyone uses the same abbreviations, so a little translation here.  It’s a calculus joke, I’m sure you can guess.  The limit as Grade Point Average approaches 0 of a Bachelor of Science degree equals a Bachelor of Arts degree.  Get it?

Ok, so this isn’t about space or science, but more of an irritation I had when I was on yahoo.com.  See this? This was linked to from the main yahoo page.  Why?  It’s juvenile commentary on what an Olympic athlete happened to wear one day.  I don’t see what’s wrong with it.  They call it a fashion faux-pas.  I call it clothes that she probably feels comfortable wearing.  The photos on that website are commented on by some kind of fashion “journalists” who have too much time on their hands, so they say negative things about what celebrities are wearing.  Who cares??  Are these journalists adults?  They seem absolutely devoid of any intelligence.  I’d like to say it again….who cares?

My biggest question is why in the world is something so incredibly stupid and useless on the main page of yahoo?  It’s supposed to provide news.  This is not news.

I’ve posted about current space probes and planned space probes earlier this year, but there are some things I feel are missing.  I know that the budget is limited for the various space programs in the world, but if we had a larger budget for space exploration, there are some ideas I’d like to see happen.  Some of my wishes below have already been considered and are possible plans in the future, but they are not approved (yet).

Mercury has an orbiter going to it now, but I’d like to see more.  How about a lander?  Of course, the lander should be at a pole, as Mercury’s slow rate of rotation would expose a lander to incredible temperatures at lower latitudes.

Venus needs another lander.  But one that can survive the heat and pressure of Venus’ atmosphere for a few days/weeks.  I want more surface pictures.  I want geological work done by the lander.  I want atmospheric measurements done.  And I want a seismometer!  Venusquakes would show that Venus is geologically active in some way.

For Mars, I want that flying probe that can fly around the planet, taking close up pictures of anything.  It’s just cool.

For Europa, we need a lander.  Of course, it should be very carefully built and stored so it doesn’t get contaminated by Earth microbes, in case there is life in Europa’s ocean.  Drill through the ice and see what’s down there.

For Ganymede, same thing as Europa.  We need a lander.  It’s also the solar system’s largest natural satellite, larger than Mercury.  It’s like a planet, basically.  Let’s get a probe there.

Titan needs another probe, but it needs an orbiter for detailed mapping, as well as an atmospheric flyer.  I want more clear images of the surface to search for more evidence of geologic activity.

Enceladus needs its own lander for similar reasons as Europa and Ganymede.  The presence of water there is something that needs to be investigated.

Uranus needs a probe of its own (please don’t read that with a dirty mindset).  Let’s study this oddball sideways planet and its satellites.  I especially want to see more about what’s going on with Miranda.  What happened to it?

Neptune also needs a probe.  It has a remarkably active atmosphere that needs more studying.  But it also has Triton, which is probably a Kuiper Belt object captured by Neptune.  It’s geologically active, and we only have pictures of one hemisphere.  We need to see the entire world.

Eris needs a probe, too.  Pluto’s got one, so how about one for the biggest dwarf planet of all?  Yeah, I know it’s very far away, and I’ll probably have grandchildren by the time a probe reaches it, but I still want to see all about Eris.

Finally, Haumea is an odd shape for such a large world.  I just want to see it.  That’s all.

Now it’s your turn.  What would you like to see?  Please leave a comment with your wish list.