The International Space Station, currently the only human outpost in space, is going to be as busy as a railway station this week – it has happened before, but at the same time it is highly unusual to have more than six astronauts at the same time there. This is going to happen on Thursday, when a Soyuz spaceship launching in the night before brings up another three crew members, causing a rare overlap between the expeditions. There have already been some preparations as the Soyuz which will carry three astronauts back to earth on Sunday has been moved to another docking port, but the real busyness will only start later this week.

So, who is up there, who is coming back, and most importantly, who is keeping contact not only with Houston and Baikonur, but also with us ground-dwellers via social networks? Unfortunately all of the Russian astronauts are not in the loop (yet?), but almost everbody from the USA, Europe and Japan is.

Coming back to earth on Sunday are Karen Nyberg, Luca Parmitano and Fyodor Yurchikhin. Parmitano has been walking firmly in the footsteps of Chris Hadfield and while there has not been much singing or guitar-slinging this time, the italian ESA astronaut has been keeping in touch with his own blog and on Google+, Facebook and Twitter, where he has been posted amazing photos from space and the station almost daily and written amazing articles. His colleague Karen Nyberg from NASA has limited herself to her Twitter-Account at @AstroKarenN, but she also posts regularly.

Staying until March of 2014 are Mike Hopkins from the USA and the Russians Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazansky. Hopkins is also a regular on Twitter as @AstroIllini and always posts interesting photos and short status updates, but like Karen Nyberg he has no official accounts on either Google+ or Facebook.

The newcomers arriving on Thursday are Richard Mastracchio from the USA, Koichi Wakata from Japan and Mikhail Tyurin from Russia, all seasoned astronauts who have been in space multiple times. Both Mastracchio and Wakata have already been busily tweeting their preparations for their coming launch as @AstroRM and @Astro_Wakata and I’m sure they will continue once they have reached the station.

This unfortunately means that there will be no astronauts in space on Google+ for a while, but with the changeover from expedition 37 to 38 there will still be three active Twitter users in low earth orbit. Many of the coming ISS crew members are also on Twitter and sometimes even on other social networks – most notably italian ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, who is currently writing a logbook about her experiences in preparing for her November 2014 launch on her Google+ account – she’s also on Twitter as @AstroSamantha. Other soon-to-launch astronauts on Twitter are Reid Wiseman (@Astro_Reid) and Alexander Gerst (@Astro_Alex), who are right now also tweeting from the launch preparations in Baikonur.

I am sure I have missed mentioning some of the astronauts in this article, but I have also made my Twitter Astronaut List public if anybody wants to follow just about everyone who is, was and is going to be in space. I may be updating this list semi-frequently, I’m sure I haven’t found all tweeting astronauts yet! With this list, you can follow all the action over the course of the week, but there’s also NASA TV, its Youtube Channel and ReelNASA with great excerpts and summaries.

I’m not sure if Meri Amber really needs another introduction at this point. I have shared a lot of her videos and songs before and the best way to describe her is that she’s not you average Youtube girl with a guitar at all – she’s actually a very accomplished songwriter and musician with a lot of creativity and humour. She had published her first full album in mid-September, which she calls a Mini-P, but I think she is a bit too modest since Wandering actually contains ten songs with half of them new and the other half older ones in remixed versions.

I originally wanted to write a full in-depth review and I may still do it at some point, but for time reasons I’ll just say for now that all of the songs are absolutely wonderful and the album is really worth listening to and even buying. You can listen to the album for free on her website via Spotify, but you can also get it as a digital download in every major online music store including Amazon.de. The higher bitrates really make the songs sound much better than the comparatively low-fidelity streaming versions and I can really recommend getting the download version – it’s worth every cent!

And because it’s Music Monday, here is Wander Alone, the first track of the album for which she has already produced a wonderful music video – this time even with a full production crew!

Yesterday there were some pretty big announcements from Google about their own social network Google+ at the event they dubbed A Morning with Google+. Apparently the whole thing ran a bit late because of a power outage, causing a bit of sniggering from some people, but in the end Vic Gundotra was able to present the new updates to the Google+ system mainly revolving around photography. I must admit that I didn’t pay much attention to it since I don’t even use many of the tools, but when I watched the video later I was alternately fascinated and bored – and also felt a bit patronized.

The new features mainly revolve around things Google+ wants to make easier for the user – new video-editing possibilities with automatic enhancements and soundtrack creation, new auto-awesome animations for photos, an algorithm which automatically selects the “best” of your photos for you and much more. But this is really only for the ultra-casual user – Gundotra talks about how we take soooo many photos and we all have no time to sort through everything ourselves or do some necessary enhancements, so now Google+ will now do it for you. To be fair, the new online tools are only introduced as the first quick fix, because he also mentions the quite good Android photo editor Snapseed and for professionals the Nik Collection of filter tools, but the somewhat peculiar aftertaste is that Google wants to outsource creativity to the machine. I can understand Google’s motives and while I think the new features are impressive, they are not really for, let’s say, advanced amateur photographers like me.

But this is not what I actually wanted to write about in this posting. Another Google product manager, Otavio Silva, posted a much more important update: Google is rolling out real, name-based URLs for everyone right now. Up to now, only really important people were able to get a human-readable URL on Google+, everyone else just had a long number. Now you can finally get an address like plus.google.com/+YourName – maybe this will be the last straw that kept many people from using Google+. The only problem is that at the moment this doesn’t happen automatically, instead you have to wait for some sort of notification via email or a message in your profile – I’m still waiting, while some of my G+ acquaintances already got their “vanity adresses”. But maybe I’m just a little impatient, after all I think I don’t need to worry that someone else snaps my name away since I’m pretty unique all over the internet!

[Update 31.10.: Sometime last night the email arrived and there was also a big blue announcement banner in my profile settings. I’m not a number anymore, now I’m google.com/+GuidoBibra -the old adress still works, but this is much more convenient!]

Bottom line: Google+ is still lightyears ahead of everyone else when it comes to inventiveness and engineering, although not all new features may be useful for everyone.

This time I’m ready and won’t be surprised when the first podcast suddenly pops up! I’ve already noticed some weeks ago that Brian Cox’ and Robin Ince’s brilliant science-comedy radio show The Infinite Monkey Cage is going to return starting November 18th on BBC Radio 4 and, of course, after the broadcast as usual in shape of a podcast. No official word from the BBC as usual, but the news came from the Monkey Cage Twitter account and new episodes are already being recorded right now. And there are now 42 (yes, forty-two!) past episodes on the podcast archive site to download!

I can only highly recommend this show – Brian Cox and Robin ince are utterly funny and their guests are always fantastic. Besides, it’s even educational, despite most shows ending up somewhere completely different than they originally started – but that’s just the fun of it. As usual, major English listening skills and a healthy curiosity about science are required, but it’s actually quite easy to listen to. And, of course, if you like Brian Cox and/or Robin Ince, you’re in for a very special treat :-).

Vor kurzem hatte ich herausgefunden, daß der deutsche Verlag Markt & Technik, hauptsächlich bekannt für seine große Auswahl an Computer-Literatur, von der Muttergesellschaft Pearson Ende dieses Jahres geschlossen wird. Ich muß zwar zugeben, daß ich seit langer Zeit keine Markt & Technik-Bücher mehr gekauft hatte, aber es ist trotzdem traurig, daß so ein bekannter Name plötzlich verschwindet. Der Verlag war einer der größten Einflüsse in meiner frühen Computer-Zeit in den späten 1980ern und frühen 1990ern, als deren Bücher und Magazine noch die besten auf dem Markt waren.

Yesterday I found out that the German publisher Markt & Technik, known for its wide range of computer literature, is being shut down by its parent company Pearson this year. I have to admit that it has been a long time since I bought one of their books, but it is still sad to see such a big name suddenly vanish. Markt & Technik had been one of the major influences in my early computer history in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when their books and magazines were simply the best on the market.

Today, NASA is 55 years old – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration became operational on October 1st, 1958 and back then there were not many other space agencies around. Today, almost every country of the world has one and there have been many groundbreaking achievements by all of them – but NASA has every reason to be proud of itself. For the anniversary, NASA has posted a kind of laundry list of what has been made possible in the last 55 years. It’s not just Apollo, Space Shuttle and the space stations – from the beginning, NASA has always been and always will be about understanding the nature of the universe.

But what does NASA get for its birthday? It gets shut down!

Yes, that’s right – the US government shutdown also affects NASA. If you thought the sequester was bad, this is nearly end-times armageddon: NASA will stop just about everything except the bare necessities. Universe Today and Bad Astronomy have detailed articles about the situation, which is nothing short of unbelievable: 97% of all employees are being furloughed, meaning being sent home without pay. The rest also will have to work without pay to keep the shop running, which means keeping contact with the space station, controlling robotic missions and other essential things. On a more positive note, Emily Lakdawalla from the Planetary Society has said in an article that everything controlled from JPL and APL, which are private companies under NASA contract, will continue, which means that the initial news that the Mars rovers are going to be put in hibernation was false. But all scienctific operations at NASA have ceased and there is danger that future missions, like the coming launch of the MAVEN Mars orbiter, will be severely affected if they, like in this case, miss a launch window or worse.

Also, as of only a couple of hours ago, all the NASA websites have been taken down and redirect to a status page. NASA TV has also ceased broadcasting, and all NASA public outreach and education activity even on social media has stopped completely. Space journalist Amy Shira Teitel has called this an information black hole for space news, and she’s absolutely right – this is taxpayer-funded information, which should be accessible to everybody regardless of funding. Stopping to update the websites is one thing, taking them offline altogether is a whole new dimension – but I can imagine that NASA has done this not out of malice, but to show how essential they really are. The government shutdown could not have come at a worse time for NASA and it shows the utter disregard of a certain political party for everything which has remotely to do with science.

Of course, the government shutdown does not only affect NASA, but an unbelievable amount of people, institutions and services. Zoos, national parks and everything else not in private hands will simply cease to function, hundreds of thousands of people are not getting paid – something which is completely and utterly unbelievable from an European perspective. I think Pamela Gay’s posting on Google+ sums the situation up very well and I can’t possibly add anything more to it except… this is total madness. And that’s about as political as it’ll ever get on my websites.

Okay, if I write something about the LADEE launch, I also have to mention the other launch from NASA Wallops which has just happened today: Orbital Sciences has launched their first demonstration flight of their Cygnus freighter on top of an Antares rocket to the International Space Station!

So why is this so interesting? First, because Orbital Sciences is the only one of two commercial spaceflight companies who were awarded contracts from NASA to supply the ISS in the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program – the other one is of course Space X, who are already regularly flying to the ISS with their own Dragon transporter. Secondly, because it is the very first launch from Wallops to the space station – Space X is launching from Cape Canaveral, but Orbital Sciences has their launchport at Wallops. The first test launch with a dummy payload was in April, but now the “real thing” is on its way to the ISS, opening another cargo route to space. I think the Wallops facility can now really be called a spaceport in every sense!

The last reports are that the Cygnus transporter is fine, the solar panels are out and it’s on the way to the ISS! Orbital Sciences has a page with great photos, NASA’s Flickr album of the launch is also amazing, the launch video has also been posted and I’m sure there will be a lot more photos since the launch should have been almost as perfectly visible as LADEE. No word about any frogs hitching a ride, but there has been talk that the amphibians have been trying to invade the launchport at Wallops! :-)

[Update 29.09.: And today, after some delays caused by a now-fixed software glitch, the Cygnus space freighter today has been successfully docked to the ISS! In the meantime, on Wednesday a new crew has arrived on the station bringing the permanent residents in outer space back to six.]

I’ve been neglecting the Music Monday postings recently, so here’s a collection of songs about… accountancy? Well, the Australian songwriter Meri Amber, whose wonderful and witty songs I’ve posted before, is not only a really great musician, but also an economics student. She wanted to do something against the boring reputation of accountancy, so she wrote a whole mini-album called Love$Accy with seven short, but brilliant songs, which got a lot of recognition in the Australian business press and even with the accounting giant KMPG, which is the subject of one of the songs. She has made six of them into amazingly creative videos, which you can view in the embedded playlist – and the seventh may be coming soon! is now online, too! Today she also posted all the songs with their lyrics on her blog, and you can also get the whole album on Bandcamp.

Meri is also very busy at the moment preparing for the launch of her first CD named Wandering, which is going to be released this Friday in a concert event. She calls the 10-track album a Mini-P instead of an EP, because there are “only” five new songs, with the other half comprised of remastered versions of her previous songs. The event will be also streamed live via a Google+ Hangout for everybody not able to attend or on the wrong side of the earth. There are just 100 copies of the physical CD, but the album will also be available to download from all the major distributors including Amazon on Friday!The party is kicking of at 8pm Sydney time – this is unfortunately in the middle of the night or early morning for the USA, but 12 noon for Germany and 11am for England, so we Europeans are actually lucky. But Meri has also said that there will be the usual recording of the hangout available afterwards!

But first, some very special, funny and sometimes mysterious and strange love letters to accounting…

The post title says it all: it seems that Google is rethinking its stance against remote posting to Google+. A recent article on the main WordPress blog called Your Blog, Plus One: Connect and Share on Google+ announces that you can now share directly to Google+, link your blog to your G+ account, integrate comments and even embed G+ articles into WordPress posts. It’s the first one I’m very excited about, but at the moment all this still applies only to blog hosted on WordPress.com – however they promise that most of the features will also come to the Publicize module of the Jetpack plugin for self-hosted blogs. I just hope that most doesn’t mean that the sharing functionality will be left out!

The whole point of this is that I’ve become very fond of Google+ since I joined at the end of last year. At the beginning I was very reluctant to post because I couldn’t do it directly from WordPress, but over time I’ve found out that it works very well for me especially on the Photography Blog. The interaction between the users is what I like most – it’s not just about getting +1’s, the G+ equivalent of Likes, but really meeting other people, talking about what we like and what matters to us, and, of course, lots and lots of inspiration. Posting remotely from WordPress like I do on Facebook and Twitter will not change any of that – except that I may be able to plan better ahead when I’m actually able to post automatically. This is what Google doesn’t want to allow – but I don’t see anything wrong with e.g. letting the blog post an article and then later come back and see if there are any comments to answer. I’m certainly not going to abuse that, but it would make everything much easier.

I actually have one rule for myself: I will not post exclusively to Google+ or any other social network – everything that appears there will also be on one of my websites, with small exceptions like the occasional quick reshare and, of course, commenting. I may actually embed Google+ comments on my blogs in the future, because most people tend to comment on my postings over on G+ and hardly on the blogs itself – which I fully understand, because I’m also guilty of it myself. I would just like to link the WordPress postings to the comments on the corresponding Google+ article. But, in the light of what happened to CosmoQuest recently, I may decide against a direct comment integration – maybe just a backlink to the G+ article would be better if it can be done automatically.

But first let’s see what happens when the next Jetpack update comes – fingers crossed that this will really include posting from WordPress!

[Update 22.09.: There was a fairly large Jetpack update a couple of days ago with lots of Google+ connection stuff in there, but the Publicize module has not changed yet, so it’s still not possible to post from a self-hosted WordPress site to G+. They promised, however, that this is going to be implemented soon… but when is unclear.]