The blue exo-planet

For the first time the colour of a planet outside of our solar system has been measured, and its blue! HD 189733 b is a planet 63 light years away, orbiting the star HD 189733. The planet is Jupiter sized and similarly is a giant ball of gas. The colour of the planet was discerned using a spectrograph onboard the Hubble space telescope. During an eclipse of the planet light reflected off the atmosphere was found to be blue however as the planet is a gas giant that blue colour is unlikely to be due water.

It is thought the blue colour may come from silicon clouds in the atmosphere. Another possibility is light scattering caused by hydrogen in the atmosphere.


Blue planet HD 189733b around its host star (artist’s impression) from HubbleESA on Vimeo.

RIP Doug Englebart

Doug Englebart died yesterday in his sleep. Now he may not be as famous as some other major figures in computing but his impact on computing and the way we live now was profound. Basically if you are looking at this or most computer screens these days you are looking at interfaces and concepts he first devised.

Basically the WYSIWYG concept of computing, use of the mouse and multi-windowed user interfaces,  hyperlinks, video conferencing, multimedia documents, instant messaging, keyword searches... Why not just see the demo he made in 1968 of these concepts, it really did change everything.

The Altair 8800 Clone

If you want to try out the very start of home computing then a clone of the iconic Altair 8800 is now available! The Altair 8800 emerged in 1975 powered by the Intel 8080 microprocessor (the clone emulates the 8080 which is no longer in production) and sold in the thousands (surprising everyone including the inventors!) Microsoft's first ever product was BASIC for the Altair. I don't think that is included with the clone though you can probably get it from somewhere.

In search of Valentina Tereshkova

The BBC have an interesting article and audio slideshow on the first female cosmonaut (and first civilian in space) Valentina Tereshkova. She is apparently reluctant to say much about her pioneering mission aboard Vostok 6 herself so the BBC reporter goes to her hometown and try and find out more about her.

Vostok 6 was the final mission in the programme, the first manned (or womanned) spacecraft. Tereshkova made 48 orbits of the Earth, staying in space for 3 days.

Photo from RIA Novosti archive

Working Apple 1 demo

Only 6 Apple 1s are thought to be still be working and 1 of those is going to be auctioned for what is expected to be a heap of cash! Last year another working Apple 1 also went up for auction and this video was made of it in action. Update : it sold for $671,000!

Another satellite hit by space debris?

It is feared the nano-satellite Pegaso (NEE-01 Pegaso), the first satellite owned by Ecuador, could have been damaged by space debris. It passed very close to the remains of a Soviet rocket still in orbit but it will take up to 48 hours to find out if the satellite has been damaged by the collision, any collision may have been a glancing blow.

The debris was from the upper stage of a Tsyklon-3 rocket.

The changes to Flickr

Flickr is my favourite social media site (though i think it firstly as a photo archiving and sharing site) so obviously the major redesign as unveiled yesterday was of interest. The changes have not gone down with long-time users of the site with thousands registering their dismay of the changes on the official forum (the news media didn't bother checking this on the whole, they just regurgitated the Yahoo press release about it being "awesome").

I don't like the changes that much but will adapt, hopefully feedback will be listened to and the changes can be tweaked though i do not expect there to be too much in the way of change. The main thing would be a bit more white space restored, the overall feel of the site is a bit oppressive and heavy now. I suspect the vision Yahoo have for Flickr differs somewhat from that of long-time users and pro users (the pro accounts are being phased out in any event).

No Flickr is not aimed at the pro anymore but will become yet another social photography sharing site. That is a shame as many users (including myself) have invested a lot of time and effort cataloging and curating our photography collections, sorting them into sets and collections, geotagging and labelling them. The new user interface either hides or does away with much of this organisation.

I guess this could be another step in the dumbing down of the internet and life in general. Organisation and choice lost and replaced by something glitzy you can't customise. Care and effort lost to be replaced by passive consumption. What i will probably do is make greater use of blogs to organise images and use Flickr more a repository. Of course that means one is relying on one's blog platform not disappearing, but maybe its time to explore a few other platforms to hedge one's bets...