Nick's new girlfriend

I'm pleased to be able to offer this world exclusive photo of Nick's new girlfriend. Not bad mate!



Well, it's a rosy-lipped batfish actually but i'm sure you gathered that.

Hover car please!

Good news everyone! There's a decent chance we'll have hydrogen-cooled hover cars in a decade or so....not to mention the possibilities for space exploration. Full story at the Oracle that is New Scientist - http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125681.400-relativity-drive-the-end-of-wings-and-wheels.html?DCMP=ILC-tabView&nsref=mg19125681.400

System Reboot

Well that was fun! Back at the grindstone now after a week recovering from a minor cardiac moment - there's nothing like machines that go 'ping' reassuringly rather than 'beeeeeeeeeeeep' or 'pingpingpingpingpingpingpingpingpingpingpingpingpingpingping' as they were a week and a half ago.

Still - that's what you get for not getting enough sleep, and working too hard. I know - me working too hard, what's that about?!? Current medical opinion is "Err....a virus?" which is doctor speak for "Buggered if I know mate but you look okay now" 24 hour ECG to come in a week or so but now I'm better that will probably not show anything!

But there's only so much LOTR and TOCA you can play in a week so I guess it's no bad thing to be back.

Shabba!

Jesus and His Jet Boat

GRRRR!

Hmmm... seem stuck in Classic template mode hence have lost everyone's links.

Have followed the instructions provided by Blogger but there's a crucial button that just don't appear.

Serves me right for meddling I guess!

Normal service will be resumed once I've finished beating my laptop to a pulp.

A note...

Having enjoyed the track White Winter Hymnal by Fleet Foxes very much when I heard it on BBC 6Music I decided to throw caution to the wind and invest nearly £7 in the self-titled album.

What a fantastic record. If you enjoy Band Of Horses, Simon and Garfunkel, Pet Sounds era Beach Boys or The Shins then this album will slide seamlessly into your favourites pile. To play entirely safe I'd start off with track 2 on the album (the aforementioned White Winter Hymnal) and then run through and play the first track last. By then any possible doubts as to the quality of this record will have evaporated.

Go and buy it, you'll be well rewarded. The only album that even comes close in terms of value for money was the mighty £6.75 I paid for Vampire Weekend's debut - if you don't have that then you really need to get it!

Thousand Ruby Galaxy

This is a real image - not false colour.

How pretty....

A composite image of Messier 83 reveals the shining stars and red hydrogen gasses of the "Thousand-Ruby Galaxy." The image was captured by the ESO/MPG 2.2-meter (7.2 feet) telescope in Chile's mountainous Atacama Desert on August 25. UV radiation, created by newly formed stars in the galactic center, ionizes Messier 83's hydrogen and causes its reddish glow. The dramatic pinwheel galaxy is some 15 million light-years from Earth, but appears in many ways much like a smaller version of our own Milky Way.

Space....brilliant.

Right. Found these and had to share them - sorry Wak but please feel free to enter into "nice space pics" wars!



Sheets of debris from an exploded star swirl in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) galaxy in this Hubble Space Telescope image. At a distance of about 180,000 light years, the LMC galaxy is a relatively close neighbour of the Milky Way. It can be spotted from the Earth's Southern Hemisphere without a telescope. Apparently. Nick?




This false-colour view of the Cartwheel galaxy was created by combining images captured by four space telescopes: Galaxy Evolution Explorer, Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope, and Chandra X-ray Observatory. Astronomers think a smaller galaxy, possibly one of two galaxies seen here (bottom left), passed through the center of the Cartwheel galaxy about 100 million years ago. Bet that was a messy one.....


A Hubble Space Telescope image shows unprecedented detail of the Antennae galaxies, an intense star-forming region created when two galaxies began to collide some 200 million to 300 million years ago. The bright, blue-white areas show newly formed stars surrounded by clouds of hydrogen, which are colored pink. A similar collision is expected between our galaxy, the Milky Way, and the nearby Andromeda galaxy in several billion years....see previous posts for how much I'd like to see that!