All posts by Chris

The Good Space News

Space

If you haven’t heard of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, take a few moments to peruse their newly-updated Web site. SDSS has been painstakingly mapping a big chunk of the known universe – every star, every galaxy, everything we can see with telescopes.

Best of all, they’re releasing all their data to the public – about 6 terabytes so far (or as Steve Jobs would put it, “two million songs”.) That translates to lots and lots and lots of really neat eye-candy, plus a bunch of fun science projects made possible by this much data.

[Feb 2006 UPDATE: Fixed the links to point to the main Sloan site; deep linking seems to break whenever a new version is launched.]

Gettin’ hitched is all the rage

Law

It looks like the mayor of San Francisco picked up the gauntlet I threw down in a previous posting. As a result of his bravery, San Francisco issued its first marriage license to a gay couple today. Whee!

I love that Phyllis and Del have been together for 51 years. Somehow I don’t think they’re the RNC’s top choice for gay marriage poster children. Go, you wild octogenarians!

A related quote, brought to my attention by Alan: “An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. “ – Martin Luther King, Jr.