Sean Carrol over at Cosmic Variance has a nice post linking to a Nina Simone video on YouTube. Excellent stuff.
Archive | General
What laws did he break?
All the news outlets are full of stuff about the French bank trader, Jerome Kerviel. The French police are looking for him in relation to fraud. What I don’t understand is how he is supposed to have been fraudulent? The reports say he didn’t get any of the £3.5 Billion he lost on the markets for himself. How is this fraud? Surely it’s just a case of someone being very, very bad at their job. He should be fired. So should the people he reports to in the bank for letting it happen. When does being crap at your job become a police matter? Am I missing something here?
Update: Apparently he is being questioned about “fraudulent recording of banking records”. Which is probably fair enough. Given that the money is the savers and investors and not the banks, employees probably have a duty of care to safeguard it.
Get my new car tomorrow
I collect my new Honda Civic Hybrid today. At 11:00. Can’t wait 🙂
Song of the Day: Lyra – Kate Bush
New Kate Bush song! Lyra from the The Golden Compass soundtrack.
UPDATE: I listened to a lot of Kate Bush songs on the flight back from San Francisco last week. 79 tracks in total 🙂
The frozen north 2
A previous post contained some pictures of frozen northern Canada. These were taken in the northern hemispheres summer. I flew the same route this weekend in winter time. The GPS system in the flight entertainment system is wonderful for tracking the flights progress. I had a look out the windows at the back of the plane when over the Baffin Sea just past the town of Godthab in Greenland. The sea in this area was frozen. However there were huge. long cracks in the ice. I wonder if this is normal for this time of year? If anyone knows drop me an email or post in the comments.
I forgot to take my camera on board with me on this flight, so no pictures of the cracked ice.
Click picture for larger view of map
Another one gone
So there goes another year 🙂 So what does that actually mean? The Bad Astronomer tells all.
Happy 2008 to everyone!
New toy: Roland electronic drum kit
I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a set of electronic drums for a while. For use with EZDrummer Midi samples and also as a form of aerobic exercise. Not sure how good drumming is as a form of exercise, but I’ll find out.
Click Picture for larger view
World of Geeks
Geek city. I match 5! Which categories do you match?
Click the geeks for larger view
via Pharyngula
Signed up for Amazon Associates program
I’ve just signed up for the Amazon UK Associates Program. In the interests of disclosure please be aware that I will be putting my Associate ID into the links I provide to the Amazon Uk site from the Soapbox. This means that I will get a 5% kick back if anyone follows a link and then buys the linked book, DVD, game etc. If you follow this site you’ll know I link to a lot of books on Amazon. The addition of the Amazon ID, and its potential financial kickback, won’t make any difference to that. There won’t be any more or less links to Amazon. If there are any kickbacks as a result of links then that’ll just be a bonus. Any funds generated will be paid to me in the form of Amazon vouchers to buy more stuff.
Revolution
I’m currently reading The Living Cosmos by Chris Impey. I’m only about 20% into it but so far it’s an excellent book on the subject of astrobiology. It contains and interesting tidbit about the adoption of the work revolution to mean changes, paradigm shifts etc. It stems from Copernicus’ book On the revolutions of the celestial spheres, in which Copernicus outlined the evidence for the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun, and not the other way around. This was such an Earth shaking change in humanities thinking that Revolution came to be used to describe great changes.
Click picture for larger view