Is there life on Mars?

Wow! My mind has officially been blown. Cath and I went to the first evening session of a new course offered by the University of Glamorgan last night. Its part of their community outreach programme, and since it’s sponsored by the good old EU, it’s free.

The course is called “Alien Worlds”, and is going to cover all sorts of mind-blowing astronomy stuff. It will include field trips and the chance to use the University’s telescope – a 40cm telescope located on top of G block at the University – weather permitting of course! The “lecturer” (better description is the guy who chats about stuff related to astronomy) is Allan Trow, a PhD student and mine of fascinating information.

Some more detail on the course and the public lecture series are on the University’s web.

USA’s PBS site Nova has lots of scientific and astronomy stuff including web broadcasts; Heavens Above lets you get a copy of the night sky map from wherever you live; and NASA’s astronomy picture of the day has some truly amazing pictures, like the one at the top of this blog entry.

Link of the Week

A new searchable website has been launched which gives details of every person on a long-haul voyage from Britain after the 1890s. The website www.ancestorsonboard.com has been created in collaboration with the National Archives and records 1.5 million documents dating up to 1960. From this week the records from 1890 to 1899 will be available, the rest will be published in stages. This tranche covers a peak of emigration — an estimated 200,000 people left every year between 1890 and 1914 for the US, Canada and Australia.

It gives details of those seeking a new life in the colonies, and even the passengers on doomed vessels such as the Titanic are all included.

Many of the records from the Board of Trade (the precursor of the Department of Trade and Industry) also reveal passengers’ ages, addresses, marital status, occupations and nationalities.

NFL Notes

So the Eagles saw off the Giants 23-20 with the last kick of the game. That makes me 3-4 in week one of the playoff predictions.

That leaves the final 8 as:

AFC
Indianapolis at Baltimore (Saturday at 9:30)
New England at San Diego (Sunday at 9:30)

NFC
Philadelphia at New Orleans (Saturday at 1:00am)
Seattle at Chicago (Sunday at 6:00)

All the games are live on Sky. Now I realise why I pay my subscription – it certainly isn’t for the soccer or the live middle-of-the-night cricket either.

The predictions: Baltimore (its more heart than head, we just hate Peyton Manning), San Diego (much as it hurts me, LT and Rivers and Gates will be too good for the Pats to stop), New Orleans (although this one should be the closest), and Chicago (even though they don’t have any sort of QB).

So that’s the 4 home teams to win. No surprises I know. If I were to pick one upset it would be Philadelphia in New Orleans.