A fantastic precis on fark today of a story about Pope Benedict XVI in Australia calling upon ‘all faiths to unite against violence’

fark trails this as “Pope urges all faiths to unite against violence, apparently not realizing that they are the main cause of the problem in the first place“

Neatorama displays this jaw-dropping video of the moon transiting the earth filmed from 50 million kilometres away - with the following background information supplied by Bad Astronomy, the site where this image originally appeared -

First, the setup. The Deep Impact spacecraft was the one that smacked a chunk of copper into a comet so that we could see what materials were below the surface. After the impact, the spacecraft kept going (with the mission renamed EPOXI), and it’s being used to do all sorts of interesting observations.

In late May, 2008, it turned its cameras back to Earth and observed us over the course of a several hours. During this time, from EPOXI’s point of view, the Moon passed directly in front of the Earth! The images were put together into, well, one of the most astonishing animations I have ever watched. Ever.

This is a view that is literally impossible from the ground. Only a spacefaring race gets the privilege of this view from a height.

Here’s a kindly old American Grandpa advocating the electrocution of Christians - seems like a pretty good idea to me

But, for fuck sake, don’t try this at home

In a post on 24 March 2007, I wrote the following -

If you look at the bottom of the right hand margin you will see a sort of ‘hit-counter’ which is now recording that some time earlier today the 100,000 hits mark was passed. That is 100,000 hits since I moved the blog from Blogger to WordPress in June last year.

I do not record this out of any sense of boastfulness because I’ve no idea whether the figure is large, medium or small in terms of what other blogs get. I merely record it to mark the passing of a landmark figure - the next one which will be worth mentioning will be 500, 000 and I will clearly be long gone before that happens

It had taken 9 months to clock up 100,000 hits and I figured that it would be about March 2010 before we got anywhere near half a million.

I am both staggered and gratified that according to the wordpress stat counter in the left hand margin we have arrived at half a million hits today.

Once again, thank you to all readers for visiting - a particular thanks to all who have taken the trouble to add comments - I love reading them, please keep them coming.

The blog continues to be primarily for my own amusement, but if it incidentally gives some entertainment to visitors then I am very well pleased.

For reasons which will become clear, in the next week or two I am going to have to seriously curtail my blogging activities, at least in the short term, but maybe permanently. I will let you know - but many thanks to all for the half million hits.

This is one of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century.

It was taken in November 1963 when this child was 3 years old.

On 16 July 1999 he died when a plane which he was piloting crashed in the Atlantic Ocean near Martha’s Vineyard.

16 July 1945

The photograph may look like one of these cute snow-shaker globes that are all the rage at Christmas.

In fact it is a photograph taken on this day 63 years ago approximately 0.016 seconds after detonation of the first nuclear device, codenamed Trinity.

The detonation was conducted by the United States on July 16, 1945, at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in a remote section of desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico on what is now White Sands Missile Range. Trinity was a test of an implosion-design plutonium bomb.

The photograph thus shows the very birth of the Atomic age.

Before this test took place, no one knew whether it would work. The race had been on to develop an atomic weapon ahead of the Germans (and Soviets) who were desperately trying to acquire this decisive war-winning bomb.

But the scientists, perhaps the creme-de-la-creme of human intelligence, were not certain what would happen when the bomb was detonated. In theory they knew that it should cause a big fucking explosion, but in practice………??? Who knew?

In what passed for light-hearted humour among the Los Alamos physicists, they had started a betting pool on the possible yield of the bomb. Estimates ranged from zero (ie it’ll go phut) to as high as 45,000 tons of TNT. Enrico Fermi, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1938 for his work on nuclear fission, offered side odds on the bomb destroying all life on the planet.

The detonation, when it came, staggered everyone who witnessed it, and moved Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan project (the project to develop the atomic bomb), to utter his famous apocalyptic quote from the Bhagavad Gita, “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the mighty one. Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.“

T. F. Farrell, a brigadier general on the staff of Major Gen. Leslie Groves, the Manhattan Project’s military commander, wrote:

The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.

The blast, which sent a mushroom cloud boiling 38,000 feet into the sky, was both visible and audible for hundreds of miles around. The heat generated at the blast point was described as being 10,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun. Even at 10 miles removed from ground zero, witnesses said the resulting heat wave was like standing directly in front of a roaring fireplace.

In other words - it worked !!

Yee-hah.

Less than 3 weeks later, on August 6 1945, an atomic bomb (’amusingly’ code-named ‘Little Boy’) was used to destroy the Japanese city of Hiroshima, followed on 9 August 1945 by the similar destruction of Nagasaki by means of the equally wittily named ‘Fat Man’ plutonium bomb. At least 148,000 people perished instantly with another 200,000 dying of delayed effects, hours, days, months and years later.

(thanks to Wired and Wikipedia from which most of this was drawn)

There’s a great article on boingboing (in turn referring to the source at ACLU) about the United States Terrorist Watch List.

The list contains the names of people suspected of being terrorists or helpers of terrorists.

The list of names is secret (ie not in the public domain).

The criteria for listing people are secret.

Once you are on the list, it is impossible to get off it.

It is known that the list includes Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other ’suspicious characters,’ with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith.

ACLU describes people becoming “trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape“.

Once on the list, you will spend your days being harassed, denied the fundamental right to travel, and punished for having a name vaguely like the name once used by someone who may or may not be a terrorist.

But of course States have the right to protect themselves and their citizens from the depredations of terrorists. And, it is of course a fairly fundamental freedom not to be killed by some mad bastard with a bomb.

The reason I mention the USA’s watchlist is that the number of names on it

NOW EXCEEDS ONE MILLION

As the financial markets head towards global meltdown, we start to hear about more and more exotic companies (usually American) hitting the buffers.

Bear Stearns ?? Jesus.

If someone had asked you about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac a couple of weeks ago, you would’ve thought it was some kind of porno film (remember the master-stroke of the BBC calling a costume drama ‘Fanny by Gaslight’ - huge audience figures to begin with, tapering off markedly when the true nature of the production became clear).

But Freddie Mac is the common slang term for The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, while Fannie Mae is the equivalent term for The Federal National Mortgage Association.

In other words the names are acronyms invented by people with dyslexia.

Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee about half of the U.S.A.’s $12 trillion mortgage market. As a result of the mortgage crisis over the last year Fannie and Freddie are fucked.

The US government is having to take action to prevent the collapse of both corporations, with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson echoing the commonly held belief that “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac play a central role in our housing finance system“, and therefore could not be allowed to fail.

It seems that, in a reversal of the usual trend, all your Fannies have turned out like doughnuts.