Archive | April 2006

A tooth to be pulled

I just found out that I need to have a tooth removed, great, first time aswell – argh! The dentist said he was astonished I was not in absolutely agony.. well I guess that goes to prove that I am odd! 🙂

Sunset last night

Last night my walk from the bus home was quite stunning as the Sun was just dropping below the houses and giving off a glorious glow..

sunset

Forget Silent Hill, welcome to Centralia

I went to see [Silent Hill] last night, it was damn good, though very distrubing. I also couldn’t believe it was only a 15 as some of the scenes were very (and I do mean very) graphic! It was not hugely scary, in fact I was a little disapointed on that asepct, but in every other way it was a really good film. Full of action, great creatures that are played by actors. I hear that hardly any cgi was used, if any with the odd creatures… which is cool.

Anyway I mentioned Centralia, Pennsylvania. Now this is where a lot of the film inspiration (since Silent Hill was a game long before a film) comes from. It is almost a ghost town in the US where a huge underground fire burning. This sounds very similar to the film and is really quite odd. I suggest you take a look at [offroaders.com] which has some really interesting stuff and pics and, oh, of course there is always [wiki]

Oasis bottle…

odd_bottle
Why would I hold an Oasis bottle like this. I obviously wasn’t impressed by the great new taste… not that I particularly enjoy chemicals and not fruit.

V is for Vendetta, Z is for Mars

A wonderful pic was posted on [APOD] today… take a look at it [here]

Abell Cluster by an amateur

Images of clusters (of Galaxies) always interest me, I’m not entirely sure why though I think it must be something to do with seeing the grand structure / amazing size that the Universe has. I just sit back and go “woah” thats amazing most of the time, on occasion I have got to do some research on this subject matter, in fact I presented a poster at the [National Astronomy Meeting 2006] on this work. I will have to put the whole poster online at some point, but for now you can read my abstract [here], see entry N.16 An SDSS study – Are brightest cluster galaxies special?. I think the topic is quite amazing. Anyway back to the topic of this post and why I am going on about galaxy clusters, oh so you know a cluster of galaxies is essentially a big bunch (quite a lot) held together by one large central gravitational point. They are formed of groups, our own consists of us (the Milky Way), Andromeda and various smaller ones. Anyway they are really quite massive and big (which is a bit of an understatement). For a much better introduction to them take a look at [UoB ASR Group Pages] and [Chandra Pages]. Oh and the whole reason I mentioned any of this was because I cam across a cool pic taken by an amateur astronomer with a pretty cool setup (no 1metre telescopes here! 🙂 ), take a look: [arnholm.org]

Beautiful Comet image..

Take a look at [this] wonderful image of comet 73P Schwassmann-Wachmann. It really shows some nice colours, well done to the observer.

Things you might consider when building a scope

Earlier today I came across a very interesting website that discusses the building of a 250 mm Netwonian telescope, it is a rather interesting read so take a look at: [atmsite.org]

Cardinal backs limited condom use

I guess this is a little political.. How gracious that a cardinal deems that the use of a condom is “a lesser evil” when trying to stop AIDS. I sware the Catholic church are centuries behind the game here. People across the world are dying because of people not using a bit of rubber… and in some cases directly because of the BS coming out from idiots like this. I’m sure God doesn’t want people to die from such a horrific illness… oh and for more of this take a look at this [BBC News report]

Something important will happen on the 4th of May

this is rather cool…

On The 4th of next month, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in
the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. That won’t
ever happen again in our lifetime. In fact it will be approx. 400
generations before it happens again.
</blockquote