I’m a sucker for a cool space picture; galaxies make me giggle and satellites make me smile. So this picture brought a huge smile to my face; it’s a composite photo of the Chandra Deep Field South shot by the new Very Large Telescope from the European Space Observatory. What does that mean? It means that most of those little smudges is an entire galaxy, complete with billions of stars. And there are a lot of galaxies in there; I looked at the full sized image and counted over a hundred in a small portion of the top left of the image. So that’s thousands of galaxies (at least), each with millions or billions of stars. Dang, this is a big old universe…

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Just spent some time playing around with Shazam, a new iPhone app that samples music, identifies the tune and “tags” it for you, downloading the cover art and providing a link to buy the song from iTunes. The idea is that you hear a song you like, tag it and can then buy it later. The results of my informal testing are good; out of 10 random tracks from my (somewhat eclectic) iTunes library, it managed to identify 8. The ones it had trouble with were:

• Fugue on a theme by Albinoni in B Minor, BWV 951 by J S Bach
• The Siren Songs by Thomas Feiner

It did manage to identify tracks from Jefferson Airplane, Scott Walker, Al Stewart, Radiohead, Paul Simon, David Sylvian, Prefab Sprout and Suede (I did warn you about my eclectic music tastes).

I can understand it not knowing about Thomas Feiner (it’s a new album on a small label), but the Bach one surprised me. On further investigation, it seems that Shazam pretty much fails on most classical music; it failed to tag Mozart (the Introitus: Requiem aeternam from the Requiem), Beethoven (the Ode to Joy from the 9th Symphony), all from widely available recordings. It did, however, manage to tag The Lark Ascending by Vaughn Wiliiams, so perhaps it is not completely biased against the classical world.

The final test I put it through was to put it next to my snoring dog and see what it came up with. However, it seems that “snoring pug volume IV: the late evening nap tapes” is not in its database…

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This is an incredible image: a photo of the Mars Phoenix Lander about to land on mars taken by the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter. A Martian satellite taking a photo of a Martian lander. On Mars. Think about that for a second; one satellite in orbit took a photo of another small lander that’s travelling through the atmosphere at high speed, from a distance of about 360 kilometers away, while the people supervising them both were several million kilometers away; about 15 minutes away by radio signal.

This is an incredible feat of engineering and celestial mechanics. I’m in awe of the coordination and engineering know-how that allowed this image to be taken. Hats off to the NASA engineers who thought this up and made it happen…

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Well, my name is, at least. I (and a few million other close friends) signed up for the Planetary Society’s send your name to Mars project, where they stuck the names onto a DVD that was attached to the Phoenix Lander. The Phoenix lander has just sent back the first photo that shows the disc on the lander, so I am now officially on Mars.

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I’m a Twitter user, but I tend to use it only occasionally; my life is generally so uninteresting that I doubt that even the most ardent fans of Twitter would be interested in things like “got up; raining” or “The grumpy pug threw up on the bed. Again“. Fortunately, there are far more interesting Twitter users, such as the Phoenix Mars Lander that will be landing on Mars later later today.

It’s an official thing that’s done by the lander’s masters at JPL, but they’ve made the odd choice of writing it in the first person; “If I survive landing, the mission lasts 90 days. During Martian winter, I’ll freeze up.” I wonder how they will handle this if the landing doesn’t go well?

“I seem to have crashed and am now a smoking pile of debris on the Martian surface. Oh dear“?

“I’ve vanished; my signals aren’t reaching the earth. So how am I writing this Twitter post. Who knows“?

UPDATE: The Phoenix Lander landed safely, and it was announced on Twitter with a simple “Cheers! Tears!! I’m here!“

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Norwegian Cat breeder Richard Norton built a wheel where his cats have to work to get their treats; see the video of it in action below:

I’m completely down with the concept of this; make the cats earn their keep. I think I’ll look into attaching a generator to something like this, then selling the electricity back to the power company. At least that way I’d get some return on the money we lay out on cat food.

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I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I tend to be something of an inconsistent listener: I subscribe to a lot of podcasts, then I’ll listen/watch several episodes at once when I get the time. I/tunes, however, disapproves of such behavior, regularly giving me a message that says “iTunes has stopped downloading this podcast because you haven’t listened to any episodes for some time“. And when it does this, it stops downloading my podcasts.

Listen, iTunes, who’s the boss here? That’s right; me. I listen to podcasts when I damn well choose to listen to podcasts, and I want you to keep downloading them until I specifially ask you to stop. Got that? I’m the smart one here; I make the decisions.

What’s that? There’s no option to change this setting? Some programmer at Apple decided to hard code this setting? The only way to change this is to manually run an AppleScript every now and then or to pay $7 for a shareware program called CastAway that fixes the problem? Not good enough, my friend. Not good enough at all; please add this as an option before I decide to take my podcasting subscriptions elsewhere…

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