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Friday, June 22, 2007

Wanted: Non-smoking loners interested in Mars, 520 days to burn

If you are a European or Canadian with planetary vision, want to be on space exploration's cutting edge and don't get bored easily, the European Space Agency may be looking for you.

The agency needs volunteers for a simulated mission to Mars, one of the most challenging space experiments ever.

Despite rigorous conditions — up to 520 days in “extreme isolation and confinement” — competition will be stiff, with more than 2,000 applications received in two days for only 12 spots, project manager Jennifer Ngo-Anh said Thursday.

“The reaction has been really overwhelming. My mailbox is full,” Ms. Ngo-Anh said in a telephone interview.

Unlike the adventurous spirits attracted to the desert island prospects of reality TV, only the “serious” need apply for this pretend interplanetary voyage, the space agency said. The payoff is likely less glamorous, too. Pay is “in line with international standards” for clinical studies, is all that ESA says.

Candidates must be citizens of one of 15 European countries or Canada, be highly motivated and speak English and Russian, among other requirements.

Source: theglobeandmail.com

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Thursday, June 21, 2007

Hacker claims to have spoiler on last Harry Potter book

A computer hacker has posted what he or she claims are key plot details of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

The hacker, who goes by the name Gabriel, claims to have broken into a computer at London-based Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, which holds British rights to the last book in J.K. Rowling's series about the boy wizard.

Rowling has announced two major characters will die in the seventh and final book in the series, prompting intense speculation by fans.

But the details have been a closely guarded secret and Rowling publishers around the world have tried to keep the plot secure from spoilers.

A Bloomsbury spokesman declined comment on the hacker, but Kyle Good, a spokesman for U.S. distributor Scholastic Corp., warned readers to be skeptical about anything they read about the Potter book online.

Source: cbc.ca

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Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Stonehenge site for summer solstice celebration

Thousands of modern-day druids, pagans and partygoers converged on Stonehenge late Wednesday as people across the northern hemisphere prepared to welcome the summer solstice: the longest day of the year.

Thursday's sunrise will be welcomed by about 20,000 people expected to crowd around the ancient circle of stones in Wiltshire, southern England.

Solstice celebrations were a highlight of the pre-Christian calendar. People in many countries still celebrate with bonfires, maypole dances, and courtship rituals.

In more recent years, New Age groups and others have turned to Stonehenge to celebrate the solstice, and the World Heritage Site has become a magnet for those seeking a spiritual experience, or just wanting to have a good time.

Source: theglobeandmail.com

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Friday, June 15, 2007

Duality of Wikipedia

On one hand, it's indispensable; on the other, it's the ultimate resource on things that don't matter -

There was once an Englishman named John Locke, who had some interesting thoughts about political theory. There is also a character named John Locke on the TV show Lost.
Which one has the longer entry on Wikipedia?

To the surprise of nobody, it's not the enlightenment philosopher. This is what we call "wikigroaning": the art of highlighting Wikipedia's bias toward things that don't matter. It goes like this:

First, think up two similar topics, one being of genuine historical or social relevance, and the other being useless to everyone but a small coterie of fans. To cite the classic example, you might pick "Knights" and "Jedi Knights." Next, load up the respective Wikipedia pages of each pair, and notice their respective lengths. Hear yourself groan? There you go - you're wikigroaning!

Source: theglobeandmail.com

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Thursday, June 14, 2007

The Germans wore gray, you wore blue...

It was on this day in 1940 that the German Army marched into Paris. The French had surrendered the city a few days earlier. There was no violence when the Nazis came in. The German soldiers marched through the Arc de Triomphe, while Parisians watched from the sidewalks of the Champs-Élysées. And a few weeks afterward, Hitler himself made a visit. He came to the Eiffel Tower and the Opera building and visited Napoleon's tomb. Hitler said, in 1941, "I'm getting ready to flatten Leningrad and Moscow without losing any peace of mind, but it would have pained me greatly if I'd had to destroy Paris."

Source: writersalmanac.publicradio.org

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Wednesday, June 13, 2007

A Terrible Beauty is Born

It is the birthday of William Butler Yeats, born in Dublin (1865). He grew up at a time when Ireland was an English colony and most members of the Irish Protestant upper class were pro-British. The Catholic middle class was in favor of Irish independence. It didn't help them get along that Catholics were denied equal access to education and jobs and government positions.

William Butler Yeats was brought up in a Protestant family, so he should have been pro-British, but he was actually more interested in mysticism. A friend of his took him to his first séance in 1886, and during it Yeats's whole body began to shake. He felt himself thrown back against the wall. It was terrifying, but it also confirmed for him the existence of the spirit world. He became interested in the occult. His father wanted him to become a scientist, but Yeats wrote to his father in a letter, "The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write."

He began wandering around in an old, dark cloak, studying fairytales and mythology and Buddhism, playing the part of a mystic poet. A woman described him as wearing seedy, black clothes with a big, black bow at his throat, muttering verse to himself with a wild eye.

It all changed when he met an Irish nationalist named Maud Gonne, who was also the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and then he became interested in Irish nationalism in order to impress her. He organized rallies for Irish independence and wrote nationalist plays and poetry.

Yeats came to believe that if he could just get in touch with the mythic history of the Irish people, he could write about something that would tie the whole country together — Protestants and Catholics.

Maud Gonne married somebody else, a soldier who was a hero of the Easter Uprising in 1916. The Irish Free State came about in 1921, and Yeats served as one of the first members of the new Irish senate.

It was William Butler Yeats who said, "The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life or of the work, and if he take the second, must refuse a heavenly mansion raging in the dark."

Source: writersalmanac.publicradio.org

From the Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor. Available by e-mail daily

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Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Remembering Anne

It's the birthday of Anne Frank, born in Frankfurt, Germany (1929), who, on this day in 1942, her 13th birthday, received a diary as a birthday present. She was living with her family in Amsterdam. They'd gone there to get away from the Nazis, but the Nazis had followed them. And since 1940, Anne and her family had been living under Nazi occupation. Still her life was fairly ordinary when she got the diary in 1942, and her earliest journal entries are about her grades, her classmates, and the boys that she knew.

She didn't have any close friends at the time, so she treated her diary like a friend. She addressed it by the name of "Kitty" and said, "I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great support and comfort to me." Less than one month after she wrote those words in 1942, the Nazis began deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anne and the Frank family went into hiding in an attic above her father's offices where they lived for the next two years.

While she was in hiding, she wrote regularly in her diary, not so much about the experience of living in secret as about the ordinary details of her life: how much she hated potatoes, how her older sister was clearly her parents' favorite, the jokes that people made in hiding, her romance with Peter, the son of the other family living in the attic, and her first kiss, after which she wrote in her diary, "My head lay on his shoulder, with his on top of mine. Oh, it was so wonderful. I could hardly talk. My pleasure was too intense; he caressed my cheek and arm, a bit clumsily, and played with my hair."

In 1944, Anne Frank heard on the radio someone saying that people should hang on to their war letters and diaries. They'd be historical documents some day. And then she started to think about the diary as a literary work and thought about turning it into a novel.

Near the end of her diary, Anne Frank grew less optimistic about the future. She wrote, "I simply can't imagine the world will ever be normal again for us. I do talk about 'after the war,' but it's as if I were talking about a castle in the air, something that can never come true."

On August 4, 1944, the hiding place was raided by Nazi police. The Frank family was among the last Jews shipped out of the Netherlands to concentration camps, and Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen Belsen camp six weeks before it was liberated by the Allies. Her father was the only member of the family who survived. He came back to Amsterdam and found Anne's diary. He took several weeks to read it. He could only bear to read a little bit at a time. It was published in 1947. It was an immediate best-seller.

The Diary of Anne Frank has now sold more than 25 million copies. It's one of the most popular nonfiction books ever written, and it became the standard book used in schools to introduce children to the story of the Holocaust.

Source: writersalmanac.publicradio.org

From the Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor. Available by e-mail daily.

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