Sorry, couldn’t think of anything else. Apparently American astronauts have joined in the protests against the destruction of the Hubble Telescope. There really has to be some way of making a reprieve, and I admire the astronauts who are willing to continue risking their lives in the name of science.

I’m especially annoyed because I heard yesterday that fundies on Bush’s staff are pushing to get rid of the Hubble because it provides too much evidence about the actual age of the universe…. Grrrrr….

It may sound odd, but I’m not too keen on the Bush administration’s new space initiative. On the surface it may seem like everything I’ve asked for from NASA (a coherent direction, emphasis on permanent Moon/Mars colonies). Unfortunately, at its core it suffers from the Bush syndrome: too much pork and not nearly enough direction or funding.

This Space Daily article sums it up much better than I could. I can only hope that once Kerry gets into office he’ll take the rhetoric and make it into a real space program.

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.]