The Beach House

Whoa! Watch this frozen lake attack houses in slow motion. Like a B-grade scifi movie.

2013-05-14T08:37:00.004+10:00

Whoa... What would you do if a frozen lake started rising up and across the shore,overwhelming your house?

That's what these people faced when the Mille Lacs Lake, Minnesota did just that on 11 May 2013.

(A language warning if you are showing the kids, about two-thirds into the first clip.)

And after that, it just kept on coming, pushing in doors and windows:

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Commander Hadfield does Major Tom and wins the internet today, hands down.

2013-05-13T14:02:00.000+10:00

Commander Chris Hadfield handed over the reins to the International Space Station overnight to Pavel Vinogradov , and will be climbing into the Soyuz capsule together with Tom Marshburn and Roman Romanenko for a wild three-hour ride back to Kazakhstan later today.

Prior to his departure, he tweeted the following musical number. What else, but David Bowie's Space Oddity! And like so many of his posts, it created a social media sensation! Understandably: this was an outstanding post. Enjoy!

I found myself thinking that his singing voice was not what I expected—a lot higher pitched. But then I remembered that the ISS atmosphere is thinner than on Earth, noticably changing vocal pitches.

I do wish the one scene where he sang:
"Floating in a most peculiar way..."
was flipped 180 degrees so he was hanging from the 'ceiling'.

Nice to see towards the end that the guitar was caught just before it crashed into anything. That is going to be one incredibly valuable guitar once it's back on Planet Earth!

Hadfield's return to Earth will bring to an end what I'm sure was the most shared and publicly followed six months in ISS history. When I started following him on Twitter while he was still training for this mission, he had a few thousand followers. As he is leaving the ISS he has an amazing 777,000 followers!
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Holy crap! This trailer for the movie Gravity will scare the bejesus out of you...

2013-05-10T16:23:00.000+10:00

So you've got your application in for the MarsOne one-way trip have you?

Watch this trailer for the upcoming movie Gravity, and tell me it doesn't make you pause for a moment...?

Go full-screen and turn it up!

Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, the International Space Station, October.

I can't wait. I think...

Whoa! What happens when you stall a 747 straight after take-off...

2013-05-01T10:12:00.000+10:00

On Monday, a US commercial cargo 747 took off from the Bagram airfield at Kabul, Afghanistan, climbed too steeply into a classic stall, apparently worsened by some cargo shifting rearward.

This is what happened then, as captured from a dashcam of a person I'm sure is very thankful they didn't set off 10 seconds earlier that day...

All seven people on board died. All were US citizens.

I always have a sense of wonder that such enormous things can stay up in the sky. But it's even more stunning to see one fall so precipitously.

There's a little more information over on Russia Today.

Gorgeous wing-tip vortices from an airliner landing in fog

2013-04-23T13:03:00.001+10:00

This short video is a sleeper...

It's only 50 seconds long and you start wondering whether it was worth the click through.

Then...wow.

I am so going to have to take the camera out to the Canberra Airport next foggy morning...

It's a Swiss Air A340 landing in Zurich, and was published in January this year by Andy Ruesch. And it's a pretty good example why formation flying is kind of dangerous.

(Via @CatherineQ, @scimomof2 and The Laughing Squid)

This is not a movie trailer. This is a real space mission pitch.

2013-04-17T07:50:00.000+10:00

Scientists are often accused of doing great science, but not doing very good at selling their science.

Perhaps this very cool 'trailer' is a sign things are changing around that?

It's for LISA—the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna—a European proposal to put three laser-equipped spacecraft into an Earth-trailing orbit and configured in a triangle with each side measuring one million kilometres. It uses lasers between the craft to measure separations down to picometres.

The goal? To detect that elusive phenomenon the gravity wave.

I like it!

This is how the mission purpose is described on the project website:

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Elysium trailer looks the honest to dog goods!

2013-04-16T23:16:00.000+10:00

After the horrible letdown that was Prometheus, one can be forgiven for being wary about getting excited about awesome scifi trailers. So this one about the upcoming movie Elysium has really really hoping that the movie goes close to the promise of the trailer. Because what's in the trailer looks totally freaking awesome...

Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, and direction by Neill Blomkamp, who did that amazing surprise package District 9.

Public stargazing this Friday night—Mount Stromlo. I'll be there. Will you?

2013-04-16T22:23:00.003+10:00

The members of the Canberra Astronomical Society will be back up on Mount Stromlo this Friday night for the second of this year's joint ANU/CAS public stargazing nights.

After the full-cloud washout from last month, if the skies are clear this week, we expect a huge turnout. 500 people is normal, and on one pretty busy night last year, I was sure every one of 500 people checked out Saturn through our telescope...

It will be the first public outing for my new telescope and the big wide-field eyepieces I bought especially for these public viewings. I've been setting it up to control the new equatorial mount via bluetooth straight from Stellarium on a notebook PC, and using a wireless gamepad for steering. This process uses programs called ASCOM EQMOD and Stellarium Scope.

It would be nice if I could get some clear sky to actually test it first…There's one crucial component that I haven't tested yet—the sky alignment program Alignmaster. :-/

Please make sure you check the Mt Stromlo All-sky Camera before you set off, to see whether anything is visible:

Here are the details posted by ANU. Note the 'warm clothes' advice—it does get cool and windy up there! Ski jacket is my standard gear…

The Mt Stromlo Observatory in conjunction with the Canberra Astronomical Society invite the Canberra community to attend our public observing night.
Come and see the rings of Saturn, the craters of the moon as well as beautiful star clusters and nebulae. On the night attendees will be taken on a ‘tour of the universe’ with talks by astronomy experts and observations on several telescopes.
This event is free and open to the public. No bookings are required.
Warm clothing is recommended. In the event of cloudy weather, star gazing will be cancelled. You can check out the weather at Mt Stromlo using our all sky camera.

That "rare meteor shower" on April 22? Not so much... I explain why.

2013-04-15T21:30:00.000+10:00

Have you seen that email getting around about the Lyrid meteors on April 22 being a "rare meteor shower"?

Yeah about that. Not so much...

Rare? Not unless you count annual as rare. Not unless you count all the other meteor showers each year as also rare. This is an extract from the highly-recommended Astronomy 2013. It's published every year and contains a wealth of information about what each month's viewing holds in store. About $25 through astronomy clubs and suppliers, more in book stores. Click on the picture to zoom in. 33 significant meteors showers, with six predicted to have 20 or more per hour, three with 100 or more.

So...not very rare. How about spectacular? Well that would depend on the Moon. So here's the extract on the Moon viewing:

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Life with the NBN: my live interview on ABC Radio

2013-04-12T13:55:00.000+10:00

This week I was interviewed by Genevieve Jacobs on Canberra's ABC Radio 666 about what it was like to get the NBN connected.

The interview was a flow-on from my account here of our installation, which has been an incredibly popular article. At time of posting, it has had more than 3800 views, the second most popular post I've done.

A late cancellation of another piece the ABC had planned meant that my interview went on for more than 20 minutes—the longest live to air piece I've had—with questions coming in from listeners during the piece. The interest was magnified a heap by the release the afternoon before of Tony Abbott's and Malcolm Turnbull's Tin Can Plan—or #fraudband as the Twitterverse has branded it!

They've subsequently posted an article and the audio.

You can listen to it here.

One clarification on something I said during discussion of 'phantom power consumption', which I subsequently read in the NBN instructions: NBN Co recommend that the power supply is NOT turned off on a regular basis, although it is okay for extended absences like holidays. So if you are hooking gear up to one of the 'green' power boards I discussed, keep the NBN power supply out of the loop. They also say that it only uses the equivalent of a 10-Watt light bulb.

Afterwards, I got a lovely message from Genevieve:

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My blog has hit 100,000 views? Wow!

2013-04-10T19:18:00.000+10:00

Thanks to incredible interest in my account of our recent NBN connection, the blog has flown through the numbers this last week.

The NBN connection post has had over 3500 views alone since posting it late Thursday night, leading to newspaper articles and a 30-minute live interview with Genevieve Jacobs on ABC 666 Radio this morning.

But it's not all about NBN. Over the last year, you kind readers have come on a journey with me as I learn more and more about photography, science in general, and astronomy and space in particular. I've been jamming a lot of information into my head over the last year or two, and it's been fun to share the nuggets with you along the way.

Plenty more to come, about a lot of things other than the above too. So stick with me and thanks for your support.

Such a cute short video about a robot casting interview: Gumdrop

2013-04-08T23:40:00.000+10:00

Cute, whimsical, a little funny. Just because:

Podcast: I take Cheap Astronomy stargazing on Mount Stromlo

2013-04-07T18:08:00.001+10:00

"Astronomy without a telescope" is a catchcry of the podcasts by Canberra's Steve Nerlich called Cheap Astronomy.

The CAS Meade 14-inch telescope
on Mt Stromlo

Recently I was planning a night's viewing and astrophotography through the Canberra Astronomical Society's 14-inch Meade telescope, and invited Steve along for some astronomy with a telescope. The CAS telescope is housed in a permanent small observatory (known as 'The Tardis') on Mount Stromlo in Canberra, itself the home of the Australian National University's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Steve recorded our session and turned it into a podcast episode. I have to say, it came out pretty well.

Listen here.

By the way, if you are a Canberra region resident and join CAS, you can get trained to use the 14" scope—included as part of the annual membership fee, a princely $30, or $40 for a family! So astronomy with a top notch telescope is entirely feasible without lashing out on expensive gear yourself.

And CAS is currently considering buying a selection of additional adapters, eyepieces and filters that will allow people with any of the more popular DSLR cameras to start off with their own astrophotography.

Loading up the new NBN connection...

2013-04-07T11:18:00.000+10:00

So far, my account of getting connected to the National Broadband Network has had almost 2000 views and is the third most viewed article on my blog. Soon it will pass the Russian meteorite post, but a long way to go until it catches the walrus on a Russian submarine, with almost 7000 views.

But (shameless plugs done) what can this NBN thing deliver?

I was watching ABC iView, streaming a show I missed, and decided to see if it could handle a bunch of YouTube clips running at the same time.

Four high definition* YouTube clips and ABC iView all live streaming at once. Not the hint of a buffer.

Not that I'd multitask like this, but I could be watching a streaming show, while editing a video and keeping an eye on emails and social media. Toss in some software or podcasts downloading in the background and other users in the household, and that's a realistic scenario. Now possible with NBN.

But Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull reckon you don't need the NBN. Vote for Tony and wireless for everyone.

* Not high density like I said in the clip. D'oh...

Why you should not buy anything from DW International... @DWIAUS1

2013-04-05T10:53:00.000+11:00

While so many people are visiting my blog to read about the NBN installation, let me take a moment to warn you away from an internet trader with whom you should avoid doing business.

I invite you to share it with your friends too please so they can also avoid being burnt by this mob. Please make sure you link back to them so they can see it.

Why you should not buy *anything* from this company:
DWI Digital Cameras (Digital World International)
This is my latest post on their Facebook page:

"Meanwhile I have been without a phone for two weeks while they screw around!
I bought a phone you said works on the Telstra network. It didn't. I spent hours with Telstra, with Telstra's Samsung experts, and with Samsung—as instructed by Atech. No good.
I sent it to Atech as requested. They tested it all right—on Optus and Vodaphone!! They sent it to Hong Kong who also (go figure) can't test it on the Telstra network because they are in—you know—another bloody country!
And still I get screwed around.
I need a phone. And I need my money back so I can buy one.
You have almost $700 of my money and I have nothing.
I will not let go of this!
Give me my damned money back!"

But Facebook was only the start. Then it was Twitter. And now my blog. Next up is Google+. And the followers there are all techy people like me—the sort of people likely to buy camera gear and more online—your target clients.
And then I'll start on the reference sites. Like Getprice.com.au eh, the one that pointed me to you in the first place? Let's see if we can't rectify that absurd 10/10 store rating...

You see I work in social media for a living. It can inflict real damage on a company that does not deliver on promises. And as every day goes by, you are forcing me to do my damnedest to prove it.
I gave you chance after chance to come out of this misadventure relatively unscathed.
Now it will be all about damage limitation. Every new day that ticks by will see me take my story out onto a new forum.
Your move DWI.

http://www.dwidigitalcameras.com.au/astore/Default.aspx
https://www.facebook.com/DWIAUS

UPDATE: They advertised a couple of mobile phones today on special, so I added the following:

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We are now connected to the NBN. Here's a run-down on the install. And the speed!

2013-04-05T00:39:00.001+11:00

Today was the long-awaited connect to the National Broadband Network day. Yay!

After being involved for years in the community campaign to get Gungahlin's parlous internet access upgraded, it was lovely to be able to see the end result.

We've been paying Telstra the same price as someone in Sydney pays for an ADSL2+ service running at 20Mbps, but getting only an 8Mbps service. Except what it really ran like was this (speedtest.net):

And that was at a good time, with low congestion.

We went looking a while back for the NBN package that seemed the best-rounded solution of the well-respected major providers, so we'd already changed our internet and phone service to iiNet in preparation.

So as soon as we knew the NBN was ready in our area we got the install booked through iiNet, for "between 8 and 10am" today. The process of the install kicked off well, with a reminder call the day before from the contractor, who I found out later has been brought in from Melbourne because NBN Co has been having troubles with their prime contractor. I'll explain the whole process here so you know what is involved and can plan your conversion without surprises.

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Bonkers! Watch this crazy bicycle ride from the top of Rio and tell me you didn't cringe?

2013-04-01T18:17:00.000+11:00

Guarantee you will gasp at multiple spots through this!

From the famous Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and down through laneways and tunnels that would make Kathmandu proud.

I can't tell you much about it because it came from a foreign-language Facebook page.

I once rode a bicycle from the top of Hobart's Mount Wellington to the Constitution Dock and didn't have to pedal the whole way. But that's about the only comparison with this crazy route!

The Pale Blue Dot - beautiful words, beautiful timelapses...

2013-04-01T17:30:00.001+11:00

Take the words of Carl Sagan, some beautiful timelapses, and perfect musical accompaniment and you have a pretty compelling combination.

Try to focus on Sagan's words. They are just as important and hopeful now as when he first shared them years ago. Then share.

EARTH: The Pale Blue Dot from Michael Marantz on Vimeo.

Well done Michael Marantz!

Sunrise from the roof this morning

2013-03-28T11:29:00.003+11:00

What's not to like about climbing up on your roof first up in the morning to catch a gorgeous sunrise?

Just a quick post with three nice pictures from this morning. Loved the reflection off the solar panels.

Wide shot, looking over Goorooyaroo Nature Reserve and Burnt Stump Hill:

Medium distance:
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How much water really is there on Spaceship Earth?

2013-03-26T06:12:00.001+11:00

We're told that all the water on Earth came here via comet impacts. That's a fact that's pretty hard to reconcile. I mean there's just so much water right?

Not when you look at it all balled up and sitting next to the planet...

And not when you compare it against all the liquid water in Saturn's moon Titan - not even compared to the water on Jupiter's moon Europa.

The heavy bombardment period must have been a pretty serious time to be around...

What I've been reading lately

2013-03-25T21:48:00.000+11:00

Just an archival catch-up of recent The Beach House Weekly—my Paper.li auto summaries—of an interesting few weeks in science, space and Australian politics.

From rockets to meteorites, Roxon to Rudd, novas to Nobels, planet hunters to metric hunters.

25 March 2013
18 March 2013
11 March 2013
4 March 2013
25 February 2013
18 February 2013
11 February 2013
4 February 2013
28 January 2013
21 January 2013
14 January 2013
7 January 2013
31 December 2012
24 December 2012
17 December 2012
10 December 2012

Intriguing to look back through actually. Something in there for everyone.

This Cosmoquest Hangout is an absolute cracker! Live on air with a scanning electron microscope.

2013-03-25T21:10:00.000+11:00

Scanning electron microscope picture of
a fly's eyes. (Screengrab

Courtesy of Cosmoquest, in this Google+ live Hangout recording you are taken on a guided tour of the nano world by Dr Jon Hillier, an electron microscopist in the Nanoscience & Technology Division at Argonne National Laboratory, US. As Cosmoquest describe the Hangout:

Jon’s research includes the development of state-of-the-art electron and ion beam instrumentation for materials and nanoscale research. He is most well known for his work in 3 dimensional Focused Ion Beam (FIB) tomography and complex sample fabrication for electron microscopy. His characterisation of diamond thin films has lead to the development of the artificial retina.

Watch some pretty amazing live on-air demonstrations of scanning electron microscopy.

The hosts are left speechless during the demos. Understandably so. One of the coolest Hangouts I've seen yet.

And Hillier promised to come back from a reprise with an even better microscope...

Can you imagine doing more than 100kph in a yacht?

2013-03-16T23:15:00.000+11:00

How about a lot more?

This extraordinary vessel is called a Vestas Sailrocket. And there really isn't any advertising licence being used in that name, because this this really does move like it has a rocket on board. But it's 100% wind power.

Watch it achieve the outright sailing world speed record:

65.37 knots. 1.852 kilometres per hour per knot makes that an amazing 121 kilometres per hour!

But it doesn't always go that well:

Find out more about their record chase.

Oh my. This puts it all in perspective wonderfully...

2013-03-07T17:45:00.002+11:00

So just how big is the Sun?

Pretty hard to go by this gorgeous picture for summing it up in one:

Yes—those little specs right over on the left side are the four terrestrial planets.

It was done by Bob Riddle, and he has a bunch of related information over on his blog.

Via Brad Snowder (@skywise88).
On the topic of comparisons, did you know that the mass of Jupiter is some 2.4 times the combined mass of every other thing in our Solar System—excluding the Sun. Every planet, moon, ring, asteroid and dust mote. But even that pales next to the Sun. But wait: even the Sun pales next to the size of red super giant Betelguese, which is in our skies at present, in the Orion constellation. If Betelguese was where our Sun is, its surface would be right out past Jupiter's orbit (which is 5.2 Au, or 5.2 times the distance from Earth to the Sun, or 816,520,800 kilometres). Betelguese's radius varies between 950 and 1200 million kilometres. Now that's big...

Canberra bashing. We are over it. My response to Fairfax and @feed_the_chooks

2013-03-07T15:52:00.000+11:00

The Melbourne Age has run a piece by Martin McKenzie-Murray (@feed_the_chooks) that has raised a lot of ire among Canberrans. It's insidiously more than the usual Canberra bashing we expect from Sydney and Melbourne journalists in the way it tries to portray it is somehow different and more rational than the usual dumpings.

To compound the offence, the Age's stablemate The Canberra Times has followed up with a defence—not of Canberra, but of its journalist...

I want to write a piece deconstructing the original article line by line. But in the meantime, here is my response to the Canberra Times defence, as lodged via their Comments function:

We know out city is not perfect. Politicians make mistakes. Transport and land use planners make mistakes (boy do they make mistakes). But the strength of WBG's vision is that the city has largely withstood the worst efforts to derail (light rail pun intended) its innovative alternative to squishing everything into one choked CBD.

But what we are utterly sick of is Melbourne and Sydney journalists scoring cheap points by indulging in the usual Canberra-bashing "stacks on" that repeatedly gets churned out of tabloid and tabloid-esque media.

It's not an over-reaction. It's a reaction to the entire piece. Cherry-picking a few of the more measured phrases Megan, and a few of the more OTT reactions, does not negate the negativity being promoted by the piece as a whole. Not that it is just plain wrong.

Newspapers once controlled the feedback via their iron grip on the Letters pages. But no longer. We now have social media and we have blogs with surprisingly large readerships. We can now fire back when we've had enough of being dumped on by some fly-by-night visitor who didn't venture outside the Inner South. We have had enough. And we expect a better defence from our own newspaper.

Update: Decided not to bother with the critique of the original article. The author was obviously milking the backlash for all the exposure he could by teasing it along on Twitter (blatant click-baiting), so easier to let it die...

The Beach House

Whoa! Watch this frozen lake attack houses in slow motion. Like a B-grade scifi movie.

Commander Hadfield does Major Tom and wins the internet today, hands down.

Holy crap! This trailer for the movie Gravity will scare the bejesus out of you...

Whoa! What happens when you stall a 747 straight after take-off...

Gorgeous wing-tip vortices from an airliner landing in fog

Related articles

This is not a movie trailer. This is a real space mission pitch.

Elysium trailer looks the honest to dog goods!

Related articles

Public stargazing this Friday night—Mount Stromlo. I'll be there. Will you?

Related articles

That "rare meteor shower" on April 22? Not so much... I explain why.

Life with the NBN: my live interview on ABC Radio

My blog has hit 100,000 views? Wow!

Related articles

Such a cute short video about a robot casting interview: Gumdrop

Related articles

Podcast: I take Cheap Astronomy stargazing on Mount Stromlo

Related articles

Loading up the new NBN connection...

Related articles

Why you should not buy anything from DW International... @DWIAUS1

We are now connected to the NBN. Here's a run-down on the install. And the speed!

Bonkers! Watch this crazy bicycle ride from the top of Rio and tell me you didn't cringe?

The Pale Blue Dot - beautiful words, beautiful timelapses...

Related articles

Sunrise from the roof this morning

How much water really is there on Spaceship Earth?

Related articles

What I've been reading lately

This Cosmoquest Hangout is an absolute cracker! Live on air with a scanning electron microscope.

Can you imagine doing more than 100kph in a yacht?

Oh my. This puts it all in perspective wonderfully...

Related articles

Canberra bashing. We are over it. My response to Fairfax and @feed_the_chooks