Back in April I wrote about the dire situation the budget sequestration in the USA has created for the amazing citizen science project CosmoQuest. They not only bring much needed science education to American schools, but also run online courses, science projects everyone can participate in and, of course, a whole lot of podcasts and hangouts. Now much of what they do could be in danger of extinction soon because they are funded by a government grant which is going to be cut soon – but they’re not giving up yet!
For this reason, CosmoQuester Pamela Gay and Nicole Gugliucci have decided to hold a fundraiser and do it in their own style: as a 32-Hour Marathon Hangout on Google+! They’re going to have a lot of fantastic guests ranging from scientists to artists to astronomers – there’s also going to be a Virtual Star Party, a live recording of Astronomy Cast and much, much more. Pamela and Nicole both have Google Glass now, so there should be a lot of amazing stuff happening. This is going to be a fantastic event bringing together many fascinating people. [Update 15.06.: See also the video introduction from Pamela Gay, who explains it all much better in only under two minutes!]
The hangout will start on Saturday, June 15th at 12pm EST or 6pm/18:00 CEST and will be split in six parts, which are all linked to on the main event page – there’s also a schedule available which is still in the process of filling up. Everything will, of course, be archived on Youtube as usual, so even if you don’t have time to view it all live (which would admittedly be rather difficult), you can always view the recordings later. All you need to watch is a computer, tablet or smartphone on which you can view Youtube videos and streams on – and a Google+ account if you want to leave comments, because there will be a lot of interaction! If you want to watch on an Android device, see my article from last year on how to watch Google+ Hangouts under Android.
While the Hangout-A-Thon is not a pay-per-view event and watching is free, the whole reason for this amazing event is to raise money for CosmoQuest. So if you like what they are doing and care about science and astronomy education not only in the USA but worldwide, please consider making a donation – I’m sure that even small amounts are going to help and even I am going to send them a little something of $20 or so. I think it’s only fair after having watched so many of their brilliant hangouts!
[Update 17.6: The fundraiser was nothing short of epic and they raised over $20.000, an amazing achievement! Everything has been recorded and is available on Youtube, and donating is, of course, still possible. But… what a ride! :-)]
Note: CosmoQuest logo borrowed without permission, but I’m sure they don’t mind. I’m not affiliated with CosmoQuest, at most I’m an unsolicited volunteer – I just believe in what they do and want to help spread their cause.
The Australian singer and songwriter Meri Amber keeps interrupting my long-prepared Music Monday list, but I just can’t help sharing her wonderful songs. This time she has written a little song called My Heart Is Yours resembling the works of Messrs Simon and Garfunkel and even much earlier English folk tunes. She has also filmed a great video for it where she takes on the whole of Sydney playing chess!
On Wednesday evening, the European Space Agency shot this inconspicuously-looking vehicle into space – it’s the fourth of their space freighters, the Automated Transfer Vehicles, which deliver cargo, fuel and other goods to the International Space Station. Number 4 is called fittingly Albert Einstein and will arrive on the station on June 15th. The night launch from the ESA spaceport in Korou was perfect and the vessel is now in orbit catching up to the ISS – and waiting for another unmanned Progress freighter to leave the station so it can dock.
The ESA has made some amazing videos of the launch available: the Launch Highlights are even more exciting than the live broadcast because more camera angles have been used and there are some words from ESA astronaut and space station inhabitant Luca Parmitano at the end. Even more amazing is the on-board video provided by the experimental Sterex camera built by a German company, not only showing the launch, but also the separation of the stages. You’ve got to hand it to the ESA – their media operations have dramatically improved and the broadcast from the launch and their videos have become even better than those from the NASA.
The launch of ATV-4 would perhaps not gotten any attention in the news, if it wasn’t for the fact that it carries some italian food specialities. Actually, there has been an article with the title Luca’s lasagne on the ESA blog for months now, talking about the problems of food preparation for astronauts. There’s going to be a feast when ATV-4 arrives on the station next week for sure – there’s no publicly available shipping list, but several news articles write about lasagna, risotto, parmesan cheese and tiramisu. Hopefully the freeze-dried versions taste as good as the fresh thing. If there’s one thing that would keep me from traveling to space it’s the food situation!
I also managed a bit of a feat yesterday – I managed to take a photo of the ISS flying over Mülheim just in the moment the ATV was launching from Korou! As usual, in addition to the posting on my own photography blog, I shared the photo on Facebook and Google+ – and on the latter network, to my complete and utter amazement, my photo got re-shared by the ESA in their stream. And it wasn’t even such a great photo, the one from yesterday was much better. But still… wow :-).
Continuing the weather theme from last week, my choice for this Music Monday is Jeff Lynne’s 2012 version of the 1977 ELO classic Mr. Blue Sky – set to a wonderfully animated video! Let’s hope that this will really improve the weather, posting Stormy Weather last week wasn’t maybe such a good idea…
Last night’s Soyuz launch to the ISS with Karen Nyberg, Luca Parmitano and Fyodor Yurchikhin has made a new record, taking only 5 hours and 39 minutes from rocket ignition to the station. It was only the second time the faster launch method has been tried with astronauts on board, but it was a full success and the three new crewmembers did not have to endure nearly two days in the cramped Soyuz spacecraft like before. Now the ISS is again fully crewed with six people – the two NASA astronauts Karen Nyberg and Chris Cassidy, ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano and the three russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov, Alexander Misurkin and Fyodor Yurchikhin.
The star, so to speak, of the ISS Expedition 36 is Volare, the fifth long-term ESA mission to the station with italian astronaut Luca Parmitano. He is one of the newest and youngest astronauts inhabiting the space station – the former italian airforce pilot had only been selected in 2009 for a group of astronauts called The Shenanigans and his mission is his very first space flight. Both Karen Nyberg and Fyodor Yurchikhin have been in space before, the russian cosmonaut was even part of a long-term ISS mission in 2010.
Here are some links to the videos from the launch, docking and crew welcome:
• The launch from last evening – there’s also the complete ESA coverage.
• Approach & docking – spectacular views of the Soyuz at the station!
• Hatch opening, welcome and press conference – a really warm and even funny welcome.
Apart from the “official” channels, there’s also the ESA blog of Luca Parmitano’s Volare mission, where he also often writes himself. He’s also on twitter as @Astro_Luca as is Karen Nyberg as @AstroKarenN, who has already written a short first tweet from space – and I’m sure that Luca Parmitano will follow soon.
It’s going to be very busy on the ISS soon, not only because of all the science experiments – the station is going to be a real spaceport with ESA’s ATV transporter Albert Einstein arriving on 15 June, the first flight of Orbital Sciences’ Cygnus 1 following later that month and the Japanese HTV-4 and a Russian Progress freighter coming in August. The next Dragon transporter from Space X will fly in December and there will also be a whole new station block, the Russian Nauka Multipurpose Laboratory Module added to the ISS at the end of the year.
Last month, I was all excited because both Google and Opera had announced to work together on a new fork of the Webkit engine called Blink and I assumed that a new version of the Opera browser would be just like the old ones with the rendering engines switched out. Now Opera has released Opera Next 15, which is not exactly billed as a beta nor a preview, but as a kind of development version. It is the much anticipated first version of the desktop browser with the Blink engine, but unfortunately it turns out I was wrong with my assumptions because there isn’t much left from the previous versions.
[Update 3.6.: I now think that most of the worries expressed in this post are mostly unfounded… the first impression was simply wrong and based mainly on a misunderstanding that Opera Next 15 is a finished product. It is most definitively not and Opera has said in a posting today on Google+ that they are working on re-integrating many of the popular features. They also said that simply switching from Presto to Blink was impossible, because the user interface is too tightly interwoven with the user interface. They’re actively working on building up the new browser and they are listening to their users.]
But first the very good news: the Blink and V8 rendering engines are fast as blazes even on my old work notebook. I had been using Google Chrome for Google+ and Facebook in the last months because Opera’s old Presto engine was simply slower than Webkit in these cases. Opera Next 15 is still faster and seems to consume much less memory, making it a more streamlined and not so bulky version of Chrome – working with it on Google+, Facebook, Twitter and even in WordPress is very smooth compared to Opera 12. This is the one most impressive feature of Opera’s new version and there’s absolutely nothing to complain about the speed of the browser.
The bad news is that the user interface is actually just a clone of Chrome – there is absolutely nothing left from Opera 12. This has produced a huge backlash on the social media sites like the Google+ announcement and even on their own blog posting there is a lot of understandable anger. While this version is clearly labeled as a development build, removing everything that made Opera great before – the bookmark system, the sidebars, the high customizability, the download manager and many other things – is shocking to say the least. There isn’t even a proper bookmark system, the user interface is not customizable and the preferences are only a shadow of the previous version. I really hope that this release is really meant only as a demo for the new rendering engine, otherwise Opera will become totally redundant by just becoming Chrome with an Opera logo on it.
The problem here is that Opera is not very communicative about the new version – if they would have said that it is just a test version to show the engine, it would have been okay. But this version, while impressively fast and really usable as a browser itself, completely lacks the individuality of an Opera browser. I can see the need to build up a new user interface after all that time and the first steps are okay, but if this is an indicator of a finished product, Opera has got a huge problem. I hope that the developers will come to their senses and put all the great features of the previous versions back into Opera 15 – otherwise many people will have to stay with version 12 and just use 15 or even Chrome as a secondary browser.
I have actually switched from Google Chrome to Opera Next for some resource-intensive sites, but Opera 12 stays as my main browser until I can import my bookmarks into 15 and at least the most important features of the older versions are implemented again. I’m not giving up on Opera, but I’m a bit worried about the direction this could be heading.
There must be literally thousands of interpretations of Harold Arlen’s and Ted Koehler’s Stormy Weather out there and even the great Ella Fitzgerald has recorded the song several times. For this week’s Music Monday, here’s a wonderful version from 1975 – Ella without an orchestra, just brilliantly accompanied by jazz guitarist Joe Pass, with whom she had made a couple of albums in the 1970s.
Of course I totally forgot that today is Towel Day, the annual celebration of all things Douglas Adams and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I usually put up some related reviews over on DVDLog, but I haven’t had a chance to translate the articles to English yet, so I’ll give it a pass this year. But because I like the radio series most of all Hitchhiker-incarnations, heres an amazing trailer for the stage version of the original cast! Bonus: another different trailer. Now there are some hoopy froods who know where their towels are!
Last week, Google kicked its own social network Google+ at least five years into the future with a huge makeover – it didn’t please everyone and there are still some issues to be worked out, but overall it’s a great evolution of a social network which has always been far ahead of its competition. But there were two other huge updates in the mobile world this week: first Google updated the Google+ Android App and then Opera followed with the completely new version of Opera Mobile. Both are pretty substantial updates and show that the companies are not sleeping when it comes to porting their programs to Android – especially compared to some other tech giants, who can’t seem to get their act together. But these two are doing it right and are first and foremost listening to their users.
Google+ version 4.0 is actually not such a huge update like the jump from 3.5 to 3.6, because this time Google has just implemented the changes from the new version of the website in the mobile app. The new layout introduced with 3.6 was actually the basis for the website redesign, so there are no huge surprises here other than the integration of hashtags and trending topics into the stream. But there have been some huge improvements under the hood: rendering speed is now much better and while loading still sometimes takes a few seconds on low-end devices, there are no more problematic slowdowns. The biggest improvement is, however, the ability to access and manage the Google+ photo albums, which means that it is now possible to share photos that not only have been taken with the internal camera directly from a mobile device. Unfortunately it is not (yet?) possible to share images from the device’s sd-cards or even from an external server, which should really be implemented. Otherwise the new version now feels much more mature and makes working with Google+ on mobile devices very comfortable.
Opera Mobile has been the best browser I’ve encountered so far on Android, but the user interface of version 12 was clunky and not really suited for larger tablets. When Opera had announced a while back to switch their mobile and desktop versions to Webkit, I was somewhat concerned about the performance on my low-end tablet, but the beta versions of Opera Mobile 14 with the Webkit engine had proven otherwise. I had already completely switched to the new version and gladly updated to the final – I was, however, a bit miffed when I discovered that not the beta 14 was upgraded, but my installation of the old version 12. Luckily, all the bookmarks were imported in a legacy folder in the Speed Dial system, so nothing was lost. I didn’t miss the old version in the least, especially when I discovered that the final release, which was updated once more on Thursday, had become even faster and more stable than the betas.
The user interface is extremely minimal and the final version has switched to a fullscreen mode in which the address-menu-bar scrolls off the top – exactly the feature I was waiting for! No bookmark system has been implemented, only the speed dial, history and a somewhat useless “discover” page with links and news are available. Opera has not yet managed to connect the new browser with its own Opera Link service, only providing a link to the web interface. Also, there is still no progress indicator, which makes the actually faster loading times seem longer. Unfortunately, Flash is no longer supported – but that was expected since Adobe also has ceased to support Flash on Android. If Opera fixes the user interface a bit and gets a real bookmark system going, Opera 14 for Android could become the best browser for the platform – it’s already 90% there and Opera has just said today that they’re listening to their users and are working on it.
[Update 28.05.: Opera has made the previous version 12.1.4 available again in the Play Store as Opera Mobile Classic. If you have upgraded to the new version, you are not able to bring the bookmarks and other settings back unless you have a backup of /data/data/com.opera.browser – if you have one, just install Opera Classic again, start it one time and copy the files to /data/data/com.opera.browser.classic to bring everything back.]
Today’s Music Monday choice is a followup to my first posting from three weeks ago: the amazing singer-songwriter Meri Amber from Australia has now made a wonderful video for her latest song Share My Time. It has reached the top of the charts of the music initiative website triple j unearthed this week, where she had originally debuted the song. There’s also an early unplugged version on Youtube from last year and she has performed the song live on two Google+ Hangouts recently, once even in a duet with her dad!
