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Friday 23 May 2003
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My membership application to Mensa has been accepted and my first Mensa Magazine arrived this morning.
6:01:27 PM  Google It!
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There are rumours sites and then there are rumours sites. I just came across this site, which falls into the latter category. Here's a sample:Sources indicate that just two months after being elected to Apple's board of directors, former Vice President Al Gore is already getting on people's nerves."He sat in my seat," said fellow board member Jerry York, President of Micro Warehouse. [Crazy Apple Rumors Site]
5:03:15 PM Google It!
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 The Hubble Telescope has provided astronomers with yet more puzzles. Nebula Henize 3-1475, 18000 light years away in the Saggitarius constellation, is ejecting two S-shaped streams of matter like a garden hose. The jets are streaming outwards at over 4 million kilometers per hour and according to one scientist there is some sort of nozzle mechanism at play but they don't know what it is. Still, it makes for a fantastic picture. [Space.com]
4:52:13 PM Google It!
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XCOR does not appear to be interested in the X-Prize but is still working on Xerus, a reusable space plane for sub-orbital flights. [SPACE.com]
4:09:05 PM Google It!
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I've already mentioned Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne entry for the spacetoday.net reported that the craft had made its first 'captive carry flight' attached to the underside of the carry vehicle, White Knight. SpaceShipOne remained attached to White Knight for the duration of the test. The next step, according to a spokesman for Rutan's company Scaled Composites, will be drop and glide tests. While Rutan has declined to set a target date for making his X-Prize attempt, the BBC quotes insiders as saying he is aiming for December 2004, the centenary of the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk.
3:41:29 PM Google It!
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Blogged from Boing Boing: 
Someone morphed a bar of Zest into a digital camera, then auctioned it off for cash on eBay. I love it when people turn the eBay auction process into a wacky, post-modern form of online performance art. It's not the object, it's the auction itself that becomes the art/prank/fun online thing. Link, Discuss , (Thanks, Eli the Bearded)
[Boing Boing Blog]
1:39:23 PM Google It!
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Back in 1978, Fred Hoyle and his then student Chandra Wickramasinghe proposed in their book Lifecloud: Origin of Life in the Universe that life on Earth had been seeded from organic material falling to Earth from outer space. In 1979 the pair collaborated on a follow up entitled Diseases from Space in which they posited that many of the world's pandemics were of extraterrestrial origin. This may sound like science fiction, but the key foundation of their arguments, that interstellar dust was organic in nature, was later found to be true.
Hoyle died in 2001 but Wickramasinghe is back in the news. He and his colleagues at the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology, a part of Cardiff University, have written to The Lancet, suggesting that SARS could have come from space. The notion has been dismissed by many other researchers. The full story by Kristen Philipkoski is in Wired News.
1:36:10 PM Google It!
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© Copyright 2003 David Stewart.
Last update: 24/06/2003; 20:58:05.
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