You want to read about scientific news that will be reported by general media outlet about a week or so in the future? Read the New Scientist magazine. When I was travelling to tennis yesterday I was reading last week edition of the New Scientist about the possible new great ape in DRC (actually they think it is another specie of chimpanzee). Guess what? BBC reports it today and Slashdot picks it up as well. And this is not a recent phenomenon. I’ve noticed this trend of the general media lagging the trade media since I started reading the magazine over 10 years ago!
Black Sky
I watched the three hours/two episodes of Black Sky on Discovery channel yesterday. Great documentary about the once secret space program, Tier One, by Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites. I now appreciate more the risks the team had taken for the reaching for the stars and winning the X-Prize, despite the fact I knew those are test flights at their purest form.
A must watch for space and flight enthusiasts, and highly recommended for everybody else just to appreciate the historic significant of what they had achieved!
Next ecto
Progress on the next version of ecto has been slow these last couple of weeks. I’ve only worked on the application for couple of hours yesterday after I came back from tennis. It doesn’t help that at work, we were asked to work longer hours in order to meet the project deadline in early November. So for the last week I had been working 11-12 hours shifts for three nights, and will continue until November.
Having said that, this new version is coming along nicely with lots of nice features that would be really difficult to implement in the current release version. I’ve shown early screen shot to a small group of people and the feedback are pretty encouraging so far. Let’s hope that I manage to find more time to work on ecto for the next few weeks.
Broken string
My friend T.J. and I had been trying to play as much tennis as possible before the weather goes cold. But our tennis session today (actually it was yesterday now) was cut short when my racket string broke when I returned a serve. And this was the day I didn’t bring along my spare racket which I normally do, so we had to stop playing right there and then. We did practice serving and I managed to get some resemblance of a normal serve 🙂 Ironically, I did think about bringing along Leah’s new racket this morning just before I set off but I decided against it. Oh well, just need to get my racket re-strung tomorrow at Paragon. T.J. and I will probably play some more next Sunday.
And now that Leah is taking tennis lessons, she may even join us. Next spring perhaps? With a third player, I can even take my camera with me and take some photos of us playing! I am sure Leah can be persuaded to take some action shot of myself 😀
Gordon Cooper
And on this historic day for space travel, one of the original seven Mercury astronauts Gordon Cooper dies at the age of 77.
[composed and posted with ecto 2]
Lost in Colonisation 