Blow up Chevies

Thinking of buying a brand new Chevy Cruze? It sounds like a good deal. A well sized car with enough room and a good price tag. Not horrible looking, either.

But wait... there might be a problem. GM is recalling around 475,000 cars because they might have the slight problem of catching on fire and exploding.

"Our engineers have found about 30 fires in total, most of them are related to oil or improper parts"

The Transit of Venus

"Once in a lifetime opportunity" is often an over used sentence, but it really applies to what's going to happen this June 6th: the planet Venus will appear to move across the Sun from our perspective. Call it a "Venus Eclipse" if you will, with the difference to normal eclipses being that the planet is too far from us to appear to block out the Sun.

Instead, we will be able to observe its small disk crossing in front of our bright star. 

The orbits of the Earth and Venus make this a rare event. It happens in a regular pattern, with two transits taking place within 8 years of each other, and then long gaps of either 121.5 or 105.5 years. The last one was in the 8th of June of 2004, and almost 8 exact years to the date we have the next one. If you miss this chance, you will have to wait until December of 2117, which might cause an inconvenience.

Where to see it?

Well look at this map and check if you will be able to observe it from your location. 

Make sure you know what you're doing if trying to view the Sun through any magnification device!

DO NOT LOOK AT THE SUN DIRECTLY!

Are you in the shadow zone of the map like I am? Well, we will have to settle for broadcasts. Many TV channels will certainly take an interest in such a rare piece of news, but if you're like me, you'll wanna follow this online. NASA will be covering the event in full, as well as many people streaming from their telescopes, for example, one of my favorite YouTube scientists, Thunderf00t.

Whatever you do to follow this, and you should, enjoy yourself and remember all the details.

Later in life, you will be able to say "I saw the Venus Transit of '12! Oh yeah I was there...!"

Solar eclipse tomorrow

Get your sun watching eyeglasses out. If you live in either East Asia (particularly southern Japan) or western North America you will get to see an annular solar eclipse.

The Moon's shadow will streak across the Pacific mostly, as our natural satellite will be positioned between the Earth and the Sun. People located in East Asia will see the phenomena the morning of the 21st of May, while those located in Western America will see it at the late hours of the 20th, right before sunset. Those in the penumbra will be able to see a partial eclipse.

However, the moon is currently close to it's apogee (when it's furthest to the earth), so its apparent size is not enough to cover the Sun's disk. The result is what looks like a bright ring on the sky, hence the name 'annular eclipse' (from the latin annulus, meaning little ring).

Although the Moon will cover some of the sun's brightness, it is not safe to look at it with naked eyes. It is advisable to get some purpose made glasses or filters, in case of observation with binoculars or a telescope.

This eclipse is a part of a series which has been going on since the year 984, every 18 years and 11 days, called Saros 128. Goes to show how much of a clockwork our solar system can be. The series has 73 events and will end in November of 2282.

Earth from Space in 121 megapixels

From Russia with love, we have this spectacular images of the earth taken from a geo-stationary satellite called Elektro-L No.1, orbiting above the Indian ocean.

With a camera that combines three visible and one infrared wavelengths in one shot, we get this 121 megapixel single shot of the planet, the best resolution yet for a single image. We also get some weird, warped colors because of this: the vegetation looks reddish instead of green. Don't worry, the trees are still there.

More high resolution images at Planet Earth

Recovering a failed hard drive. Part II, the solution

Getting SpinRite to start working is really easy. With the burnt CD inside the CD drive, all one has to do is turn the computer on, with the intended hard drive to recover connected, and wait some time. A welcome screen with clear options tells you what you need to press for which operations, and off you go.


SpinRite has different “levels” of operation, for different functions. The default and recommended level is level 2, which will scan the contents of the disk and attempt to recover whichever sectors are damaged or unreadable. I chose this option and let it go. At first, the scan seemed to go quite fast. Obviously the scanned parts were healthy and were duly being skipped. After about 12 hours of operation, the screen was telling me it was 2.89% done, trying to repair the first bad sector… at which point I understood it was going to take a while, lost interest, and turned the screen off. I let it work for around 12 hours before I checked on it again.