On Taglines…
The BBC News page trumpeted the story as follows:
Arctic ice ‘is at tipping point’: The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic is now the second smallest on record, scientists reveal.
“I don’t believe it,” says my brain, as I click on the link. I was greeted with the same title, but a different tagline:
Arctic sea ice has shrunk to the second smallest extent since satellite records began, US scientists have revealed.
I don’t know about you, but I find these types of sensationalist taglines brutally misleading. The satellite record is certainly not our only record of sea ice, making the original, sensationalist tagline a blatant lie. In fact, we only have 30 years of satellite data.
I guess that the truth—the area covered by sea ice in the Arctic is now the second smallest in 30 years—just doesn’t garner the same kind of readership.
This is NOT a Palm Pilot
(Yes, I know they stopped calling them “Palm Pilots” around 1999. No. I do not care.)
The Jesus phone has its quirks. Most of them are DRM-related, I’m guessing.
Before I started accumulating my life’s work on there, I thought it would be a good idea to try a bare metal iPhone restore—a factory restore, followed by a “restore phone from backup.” The first part worked fine. I restored to the factory image, applied the right firmware, and was prompted with the old Brick-o-gram: Add New phone to iTunes, or Restore from Backup.
Naturally, I restored from backup. The phone came up just fine—all my old content was there. iTunes, on the other hand, refused to acknowledge this as my old phone, choosing to offer up the same messages every time: Add New phone to iTunes, or Restore from Backup.
Eventually, I relented, and told it to add the damn phone. iTunes promptly wiped my music collection. (everything else is synced on the Mac anyway). Unfortunately, I don’t store all my music on the laptop. Most of it lives on the NAS at home. This means I do one big music sync when I’m there, and little ones when the bulk of my collection is offline.
As a result, I have to wait until I get home to get my full music collection back.
Nick—you chose a bad day to come back to Calgary. ;-)
Orbit
I am really starting to think that Canada should work on developing Launch Capability—I think we need the ability to put things in orbit ourselves.
At present, Canada depends on either the US or Russia to get our Astronauts (and most of our reasonably-sized payloads) into orbit. While this approach has worked until now, there are some potential difficulties down the road:
The US is retiring the Shuttle fleet in 2010. Orion—its replacement—is not slated to be done until at least 2015. As with everything in spaceflight, there’s no guarantee that Orion is going to work. This means we will be relying on the Russians for at least 5 years, and possibly more.
For reasons I cannot fathom, the US—Canada’s closest ally, both geographically and politically—seems to be pursuing a policy of military encirclement when it comes to Russia. Case in point: the recent missile shield agreement with Poland, talks to include Georgia and the Ukraine in NATO, and so on.
I’m not suggesting I know the best way to get there, but judging from examples like the shenzhou 5, Eve, and even Safir, it’s entirely doable.
We just need to start trying…