Derren Brown's Blog, page 20
July 19, 2011
Spacecraft Visits Giant Asteroid This Weekend
A spacecraft launched in 2007 will soon slide into orbit around Vesta, the solar system's second-heaviest asteroid.
Located 117 million miles from Earth, Vesta has a circumference of 329 miles. When NASA's Dawn spacecraft arrives over the weekend of July 16, it will be the first human object to visit.
"It has taken nearly four years to get to this point," said Dawn project manager Robert Mase of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a press release. "Our latest tests and check-outs show that Dawn is right on target and performing normally."
Dawn navigated toward the asteroid belt, a space rock-rich zone between the solar system's inner and outer planets, using gravitational energy from Mars and by firing its ion-powered thrusters. Its arrival at Vesta is expected at 1:00 a.m. EDT on July 16.
It will take 10 minutes and 30 seconds — the time it takes light from Vesta to reach Earth — for engineers to know if the operation succeeded.
Full Story at Wired
Trial, error and the God complex (video)
Economics writer Tim Harford studies complex systems — and finds a surprising link among the successful ones: they were built through trial and error. In this sparkling talk from TEDGlobal 2011, he asks us to embrace our randomness and start making better mistakes.
July 18, 2011
LulzSec Hacks The Sun Newspaper homepage
Looks like hacker group LulzSec is back in action, this time redirecting the homepage of the Murdoch-owned The Sun to a fake story about Murdoch's death from a drug overdose located on the UK Time's URL http://www.new-times.co.uk/sun. They then redirected The Sun's homepage to the @LuzSec Twitter account. (The original page is archived at http://freze.it/pX)
The fake story was meant to mirror an actual The Sun story about the latest development in the Murdoch/New Corp/News of the World mess, "Ex News of the World journalist found dead." After about 10 minutes of being up (and I swear the real Sun homepage was redirecting) the fake story was been pulled from the UK Times site.
Full Story by Tech Crunch
Climate sceptic Lord Monckton told to stop claiming he's a member of the House of Lords
The House of Lords has taken the unprecedented step of publishing a "cease and desist" letter on its website demanding that Lord Christopher Monckton, a prominent climate sceptic and the UK Independence party's head of research, should stop claiming to be a member of the upper house.
The move follows a testy interview given by Monckton to an Australian radio station earlier this month in which he repeated his long-stated belief that he is a member of the House of Lords. When asked by ABC Sydney's Adam Spencer if he was a member, he said: "Yes, but without the right to sit or vote … [The Lords] have not yet repealed by act of parliament the letters patent creating the peerage and until they do I am a member of the house, as my passport records. It says I am the Right Honourable Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. So get used to it."
Last year, the then clerk of the parliaments, Michael Pownall, wrote to Monckton stressing that he was not entitled to call himself a member, nor should he use parliament's famous portcullis symbol on his letterheads or lecture slides, as he has done for a number of years.
Full story at The Guardian
July 17, 2011
70 year old woman sued for "porn piracy"
For those who believe that using the BitTorrent protocol for piracy is a young person's game, you might want to know about a San Francisco woman risking a potential $150,000 fine for torrenting porn. She's 70 years old, you see.
Of course, she claims to not even know what BitTorrent is, but who can believe the word of a thief? Well, as you might expect, the case isn't exactly a slam dunk. The anonymous 70-year-old was named as part of a lawsuit against multiple users for illegally downloading adult material, but she believes that someone else was using her unsecured Wi-Fi to do so.
Refusing to pay the $3,400 settlement requested by the lawsuit, the woman plans to go to court and explain to the judge what's what.
Full article at Techland
July 16, 2011
July 15, 2011
Malaysia permits divorce by text message
Getting a quickie divorce has taken on a whole new meaning in Malaysia after it was decided that a man can divorce his wife with a text message.
The government's adviser on religious affairs, the man who counsels Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, said as long as the message was clear and unambiguous it was valid under Islamic Sharia law.
"SMS is just another form of writing," Dr Abdul Hamid Othman was quoted by the New Straits Times daily newspaper as saying.
The decision follows a Malaysian court's ruling on Thursday in favour of a man who served divorce on his wife via a text message.
Sharia judge Mohamad Fauzi Ismail declared that the divorce declaration was valid and that as such the marriage between the plaintiff Azida Fazlina Abdul Latif and defendant Shamsudin Latif was annulled, the Utusan Malaysia newspaper reported.
New Virus Jumps From Monkeys to Lab Worker
It started with a single monkey coming down with pneumonia at the California National Primate Research Center in Davis. Within weeks, 19 monkeys were dead and three humans were sick. Now, a new report confirms that the Davis outbreak was the first known case of an adenovirus jumping from monkeys to humans. The upside: the virus may one day be harnessed as a tool for gene therapy.
Adenoviruses are relatively large DNA viruses—as opposed to many other viruses that replicate using RNA—that commonly cause colds and respiratory infections in humans. They're also responsible for a variety of illnesses in cattle, dogs, horses, pigs, and other animals, but scientists thought the viruses and their ailments couldn't jump between species.
Full article at ScienceMag
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