Tonight (6th), shortly after sunset if your sky is dark enough around 9:30pm (UT*), you should see Saturn, Mar and Regulus all lined up in the western sky. Below them and to the left will be a crescent Moon (around 18% showing).
Tuesday (8th) sees the first peak of the Capricornids meteor shower. It has a ZHR* of 5. Not ideally suited for the high northern latitudes (the UK) being very low down in the south/south-east.
Wednesday (9th) sees Jupiter reach opposition. From the UK Jupiter is very low down in the south.
Thursday (10th) has Mars passing within 40 arcminutes of Saturn in the western sky. For comparison the full Moon has an angular size of around 30 arcminutes (or half a degree).
The southern sky as seen from the UK:
* UT is Universal Time and is exactly the same as GMT (1 hour behind BST).
* ZHR is the expected number of meteors you could see under perfect conditions with the radiant (point of origin) directly over head.
June seems to be the month for baby birds in our part of the world. The starling population exploded from what we counted last month (six to thirty). Jackdaws, greenfinches, dunnocks and song thrushes have all had their fledglings out. Seeing the adult and two fledgling song thrushes was good but not as exciting as seeing the great tit family. Five of them in total visited our peanut feeder one evening.
We didn't see any goldfinches, linnets or robins this month but did see the great tits, a wren and a pied wagtail, none of which we saw last month. So still fifteen different species spotted during June with the total number of individuals rising to 107! There are swallows and house martins swooping around outside as well but they never stop in our garden.
And the anal graph part time:
We had a good session last night, well up until the point BP lost his connection. Unfortunately it happened near the end of the adventure - another twenty minutes and we would have been done. On the other hand it was a convenient cliff-hanger. One character caught in a snare and swinging gently upside down a few feet above the ground and another character held from behind with a knife to his throat. They sure pick the right moments to stop :-)
I'm still not convinced by the combat rules and they still need a bit of work. The players seem happy with the principle though so that's good. I've removed damage rolls and instead award damage based on well the character's hit. The higher the hit roll, the better the hit, the more damage done. They've also caught on to the fact that double-teaming an opponent makes the opponent easier to hit. So they definitely like the new rules I just need to get a better balance between damage, health and chances of hitting.
"Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled."
When it comes to the internet and big business why must we all suffer because of the stupid way the US law is set up to favour big business at the expense of individuals and privacy? We all know it's the corporates that run the US government. Which other civilised country has laws that say your personal details are owned by companies and not you? That 5% dictating to the other 95% again.
Seriously though, this is nothing more than a scare tactic to get more money from the public. They've been using piracy as a feeble excuse for bumping up their prices for decades now. And the mass public generally follow. I guess I might have to think twice before buying anything with Viacom attached to the package. It's about time we all said NO to this nonsense!
Any scientific knowledge relating to each of the planets is typically resigned to the last three or four pages of each chapter. For the rest, the author has tried to write a kind of story relating to the planet concerned - rather loosely related at that. The chapters on Mercury and Venus for example talk about the mythology of the Greek/Roman gods.
In summary, it's a load of waffle with not much substance.
Hmm, I'm not really sure what to write about this book. It was partly interesting without being overly interesting. Does that make sense? Probably not. To use a sporting phrase, it was a book of two halves.
The first half of the book talks about the physics before, during and after Einstein's publication of his theory of relativity. That was the interesting part in a general sort of way.
The second half of the books was supposed to be a biography of the man himself. For me though, it just seemed to lack a specific insight. There was nothing nitty or gritty about it. The author seems to have only concentrated on the public image of Einstein without revealing anything substantial about his personal life. As an example he apparently had several affairs, something the book only mentions in passing.
As I said no real insights into what motivated the man, the driving force behind his ingenuity.
I've been looking around Vox for a good role-playing group and there doesn't seem to be any. So I figured I would create my own. I'm sure I'll be on my own here for a while but build it and they will come :-)
This group is predominantly for round-the-table role-playing games - although these days the table has been replaced with a headset, a computer and Skype. I'm interested in sharing ideas about campaigns, adventures and characters with people. I might also be interested in joining a new group if there are any others that RP over Skype.
I'll get around to making some posts about the various campaigns, adventures and characters when I have time - hopefully this won't turn into just another dead Vox group! For the moment though, here is a summary of what I currently run as a GM with my group:
- X-Campaign - a fantasy adventure loosely based on the X-Files. As for the rules, well it's a bit of everything. It started off with DnD 2nd Ed rules with some parts of ADnD. A few rules from other places crept in making it a bit of a hodge-podge. I recently re-wrote the core rules - well still in the process of writing them - so it's now a bit like some things but completely unlike anything else (at least that I've played).
- Fall of the Empire - a Pendragon campaign starting in Roman Britain. My idea was to have a very long, long, long campaign covering several generations of player families. The first few adventures have been based around historical events but I don't get too hung up on the historical accuracy.
- Novae: A Trip into the Unknown - I haven't done much with this campaign. It was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek space-opera style game. I put it aside while I was rewriting the rules for X, I figured I could use the same system for this as well.
- Old School - first edition DnD with one-off adventures from published sources. We have the recurring characters but no recurrent theme. It's kind of used as a throw-together-at-the-last-minute kind of thing when we don't have time to work on anything else.
One of the other players also runs a DnD 3rd Ed campaign:
- Holy Winter - fantasy adventure set in a world of eternal winter. I think the ultimate goal of the campaign is to fight the icy hordes and bring back the Sun god. I could be completely wrong, lol. I play Tufty, a Gnomish Monk who believes all machines have souls.
We two that currently GM are still trying to persuade the other players to take a shot at it. Not having much luck so far, lol.
A new study reported in Nature magazine suggests a new theory for the difference between the northern and southern hemispheres of Mars. The northern hemisphere is mostly one large lowland basin while the southern hemisphere is a mass of crater-pitted highlands.
The previous best theory suggested that the difference was due to massive volcanic activity. This new study seems to suggest that Mars was struck by a very large asteroid of around one-half to two-thirds the size of the Moon (very very large then!). The time-scale would be put in the same era the early Earth was struck by a roughly Mars sizes planetesimal that resulted in the formation of our own Moon. That's towards the end of the planet forming process.
Fascinating stuff. I don't think this sort of collision is restricted to the planets those. Many of the moons of the gas giants suggest large impacts on their surfaces as well. Our solar system has been (and still is) a very dangerous place to live.
It's been just over a week since my Virgin.net broadband started and I'm not impressed with their customer services, or lack of to be more precise. Come on is it really that difficult to think about your customers rather than making money? Oh wait. Forgot this is big business we're talking about. They don't give a monkeys about real people.
I can't fault the connection I have and it's all been reliable so far. However, they couldn't get my address correct on the sign up form. I can't change it from the website, instead they want me to call a premium rate number to "move address." I emailed their customer services about it. A week went by with no response. I emailed again yesterday and received a response today. What was the response? Go to the online account summary and select edit changes. If you have problems call our technical support.
Erm... what? I can't change the address details online, stoopid. You want me to call a premium rate number where I sit on hold for 15 to 20 minutes paying £50,000 for the privilege of telling them to fix a mistake they made?
I guess this rant goes with the free internet one, lol
"Gordon Brown has defended the use of CCTV, ID cards and the DNA database - saying they protect civil liberties." - BBC
I'm sorry, what? How is being treated as a criminal in every case involving DNA protecting our civil liberties? How is carrying an ID card which will be needed to gain vital services (health care for example) protecting our civil liberties? As for CCTV, well they are waste of bloody space. The only time we've been victims of a crime, the CCTV were "looking the other way" according to the police. Right, every one of the hundred million CCTV cameras covering a busy city-centre just happened to be looking the other way. No Mr Policeman you were just too damn lazy to plough through hours of footage. In fact, it seems you are more interested in selling the footage to "documentary" shows about binge drinking.
Mr Brown, just f*$% off. Please. The sooner the better. You're an embarrassment.
On a similar theme, we've been watching Tony Robinson's show on the history of the law. It's amazing how many parallels he drew with history and what is currently happening with the number of "for the safety and security of our nation" laws that are being made. They weren't popular in the past and they damn well aren't popular now.
