Chuffed today. The Leader replied to my email! I haven’t been asked to take part in the running of the country yet, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time

Oh, wow. This is some serious paranoia. And bigotry, I might add. They pick up Irony of the Day for:

We see the video as an insidious means by which the organisation is manipulating and potentially brainwashing kids.

This from a right-wing christian group? I suppose if anyone’s going to be an expert…

How disappointing…

Just been watching last week’s Desperate Housewives on the TiVo, so that I can watch tonight’s episode ‘live’. It’s good fun, that programme I liked the part with the bone.

Sooooo, I’ve been so busy doing website updates that I haven’t really posted anything of interest. Well, don’t hold your breath. I’m working at physics all morning and maths all afternoon (except today, when I hit educational walls of pure bronze and failed to get my head round anything of import) and have five gajillion things to get done. Like post my damn camera off to be repaired. And send back a hard drive. And stop my sister’s computer popping up silly messages on startup. And clean my car windscreen. And figure out if I need / can afford a car, come to that. And reply to various emails that have been sitting there for way too long…I picture people all over the world sitting at their desks hitting ‘Send and Receive’ in desperate hope…And find somewhere to take my A-Levels. And plan something for this weekend to stop me going nuts in the house. I could be doing all these things right now, but I’m not. I’m typing away and thinking about articles I can add to the wiki.

Ho hum. Physics today consisted of Simple Harmonic Motion, which confused me. Didn’t help that my textbook had one of the fundamental equations printed wrongly. Then it was trig identities in Pure 2. I have no problem with this normally, but when you’re trying to solve something like 2cos5xsin3x = 0 for 0 < x < 360 I never ever manage to find all of the possible solutions. I’ll get a couple easily, but it’s the 5x and 3x squashing the graph that winds me up. I always seem to halve the wrong value, or something. Still, hopefully I’ll get the hang of it eventually.

I bought How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb over iTunes the other day. Good stuff, I like it. I’ve also been listening to Keane, Elton John and the Scissor Sisters. Elton says: “I’m just rocking myself on this porch swing in Tupelo”, and most jolly it is too.

What am I going to do when I grow up? I should probably know by now.

[thinks a bit]

Nope, still don’t know. Oooh, I could be a trapeze artist. There’s still time.

Hmmm, the ‘recent forum posts’ on the right aren’t working in IE currently. They are in Firefox, though. That’s very strange, as the links are created in PHP, so the HTML output should be the same for every browser… Weird. I’ll get onto that tomorrow, my immediate fix just broke it in everything and I’m too tired now.

The Joinee Wiki was officially lauched this morning - I’m hoping it’ll go down well. I’m a little concerned that…how shall I put it…anti-Joinees (they’re continually posting reams of junk onto the Joinee forum) may attempt to take advantage of the anybody-can-edit wiki philosophy, but we shall see.

I’m starting Physics A2 this morning. My AS revision has gone fairly well, so I’m beginning the next half early. By all accounts the A2 is a little more complicated than the AS, so it might take longer. All fascinating stuff though, I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve learnt so far. I can’t really afford to finish any later than mid-April to give me time for revision (assuming I can find anywhere to take the exams, but that’s another post) so I’d best crack on.

I’ve just gone through and updated all the absolute links I can find. It should mostly be relative, now. I’ve moved all images to a proper location that makes sense in my directory structure, too. Sorry if you’d linked to any! If it’s a problem I can add a redirect. I’ve been kind and done this for my lollipop pictures, which continue to be extremely popular
The things I’ll do to escape my tax return…

More Huygens images are available, along with MP3s of the descent and after landing! Cool or what. Even better is that the acoustic properties can be analysed in order to obtain information regarding the structure of the ground! Oh, and ahem. Sorry, coughed a little there. Where was I? Ah yes.

The wiki is coming along nicely with new content being added every day. Just today there’s new information on Andrew Baker, Chris Rhodes, Southampton Uni, fox-hunting, the debate over vegetarianism (with Lil making some excellent points), german classes and Half-Life 2. Yesterday Ben’s car was added, along with Windfarm. So go add stuff, it doesn’t matter what

Guess what I’m doing? My tax return. It’s so much fun. If you’re not doing your tax return you shouldn’t waste this opportunity to celebrate that fact.

I fell in love in a dream last night, and woke up all happy. It’s interesting that that can happen. I suppose if you can experience abject terror in dreams there’s no reason that the other end of the scale would be excluded. It doesn’t seem to happen as often though. In hindsight, the woman in question bore more than a passing similarity to Natalie Portman’s character in Closer, which I saw last night. I think her name was even Anna. I have no recollection as to what she looked like, but I remember the personality clearly. My subsonscious obviously liked her a lot! She was the daughter of someone I won’t name, and I seem to recall that Ben was there and very bemused at my complete head-over-heels-ness (my english teacher would be so proud). And no, it wasn’t that kind of dream.

I’ve been feeling particularly happy over the last week, which makes a pleasant change. Actually happy as opposed to not sad. So that’s good. Maybe that affects what I’m dreaming about. At some point I’ll have to decide I’m ready to start meeting women again; maybe that’s what my brain is trying to tell me. Or perhaps that’s just pop-psychological kak. It was just a dream, after all.

The ESA website has the first images from Huygens. Pictures of the surface of Titan. Holy crap. Titan. This is so bloody amazing! This is the farthest away us humans have ever landed a probe. Sure, we’ve got low-res images of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, but nothing compares to this. It’s just incredible that this is even possible. What a good time to be alive.

w00t! The data collection period is now over, and Cassini is currently relaying back the data. Fantastic!

Quick request: Would you mind please pinging www.wandwaver.co.uk about once an hour for a while, then post once the IP changes to 66.116.175.81 from the old 193 address? Thanks muchly. Just trying to track the DNS changes. Depending on cacheing, you may need to run ipconfig /flushdns on occasion.

Go Huygens! Here’s the timeline:

(04.44) 05.51 — Timer triggers power-up of onboard electronics
Triggered by a pre-set timer, Huygens’s onboard electronics power up and the transmitter is set into low-power mode, awaiting the start of transmission.

(09.06) 10.13 — Huygens reaches ‘interface altitude’
The ‘interface altitude’ is defined as 1270 kilometres above the surface of the moon where entry into Titan’s atmosphere takes place.

(09.10) 10.17 — Pilot parachute deploys
The parachute deploys when Huygens detects that it has slowed to 400 metres per second, at about 180 kilometres above Titan’s surface. The pilot parachute is the probe’s smallest, only 2.6 metres in diameter. Its sole purpose is to pull off the probe’s rear cover, which protected Huygens from the frictional heat of entry. 2.5 seconds after the pilot parachute is deployed, the rear cover is released and the pilot parachute is pulled away. The main parachute, which is 8.3 metres in diameter, unfurls.

(09.11) 10.18 — Huygens begins transmitting to Cassini and front shield released
At about 160 kilometres above the surface, the front shield is released. 42 seconds after the pilot parachute is deployed, inlet ports are opened up for the Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer and Aerosol Collector Pyrolyser instruments, and booms are extended to expose the Huygens Atmospheric Structure Instruments. The Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer will capture its first panorama, and it will continue capturing images and spectral data throughout the descent. The Surface Science Package will also be switched on, measuring atmospheric properties.

(09.25) 10.32 — Main parachute separates and drogue parachute deploys
The drogue parachute is 3 metres in diameter. At this level in the atmosphere, about 125 kilometres in altitude, the large main parachute would slow Huygens down so much that the batteries would not last for the entire descent to the surface. The drogue parachute will allow it to descend at the right pace to gather the maximum amount of data.

(09.42) 10.49 — Surface proximity sensor activated
Until this point, all of Huygens’s actions have been based on clock timers. At a height of 60 kilometres, it will be able to detect its own altitude using a pair of radar altimeters, which will be able to measure the exact distance to the surface. The probe will constantly monitor its spin rate and altitude and feed this information to the science instruments. All times after this are approximate.

(10.50) 11.57 — Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer begins sampling atmosphere
This is the last of Huygens’s instruments to be activated fully. The descent is expected to take 137 minutes in total, plus or minus 15 minutes. Throughout its descent, the spacecraft will continue to spin at a rate of between 1 and 20 rotations per minute, allowing the camera and other instruments to see the entire panorama around the descending spacecraft.

(11.23) 12.30 — Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer lamp turned on
Close to the surface, Huygens’s camera instrument will turn on a light. The light is particularly important for the ‘Spectral Radiometer’ part of the instrument to determine the composition of Titan’s surface accurately.

(11.47) 12.34 — Surface touchdown
This time may vary by plus or minus 15 minutes depending on how Titan’s atmosphere and winds affect Huygens’s parachuting descent. Huygens will hit the surface at a speed of 5-6 metres per second. Huygens could land on a hard surface of rock or ice or possibly land on an ethane sea. In either case, Huygens’s Surface Science Package is designed to capture every piece of information about the surface that can be determined in the three remaining minutes that Huygens is designed to survive after landing.

(13.37) 14.44 — Cassini stops collecting data
Huygens’ landing site drops below Titan’s horizon as seen by Cassini and the orbiter stops collecting data. Cassini will listen for Huygens’s signal as long as there is the slightest possibility that it can be detected. Once Huygens’s landing site disappears below the horizon, there’s no more chance of signal, and Huygens’s work is finished.

(14.07) 15.14 — First data sent to Earth
Cassini first turns its high-gain antenna to point towards Earth and then sends the first packet of data.

I’ve converted the times from CET to GMT. Also, the above times are ‘Earth-received’, which is 67 minutes after the actual events have occurred - I’ve put the actual time in brackets. As much as the ‘actual time’ means anything, that is! When no information can travel faster than the speed of light I’m not sure you can talk about ‘actual time’, but, um, yes.

This morning Ben alterted me to a problem with my website - it was looking at the old IP address on his system. We figured it was simply the Oxford DNS servers having had a backup restored or something. Then the same thing happened to Nod, and a quick whois check showed that my old hosts had set the nameservers back to them!

I figure this is because of the UK IPSTAG system. Every UK domain has an IPSTAG and every hosting company registers their name as a TAG entry. Whichever company name is in the IPSTAG controls the nameservers. So, if you want to move hosts, your current host simply change the IPSTAG to the name of the new host, who can then go in and change the nameservers to point to themselves. My new hosts are in the US, however, which doesn’t have such a system, so Web-Mania, my current hosts, simply changed the nameservers to the new values. The problem is that the IPSTAG is still in Web-Mania’s name, so they can conceivably change the nameservers to whatever they like, and have. I wonder if it’s an automated system or something.

Sigh. Anyway, wongaWiki will probably not work right for then next 24-48 hours (limitation of the engine) until the domain changes go through *again*. wongaForum and wongaBlog should still be pretty much unaffected. If you’re desperate for the wiki then add the IP address to your hosts file under ‘wandwaver.co.uk’ (no www) and that’ll solve it.

(did you see what I did in the title? I’m so proud of myself)