Vorlon's Blog » Science

Network Security Breaches at NASA

vorlon — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:08:24 +0000

Bruce Schneier points to an article at BusinessWeek about repeated attacks on the NASA networks and successful intrusions. The article also mentions a possible connection of the problem of ROSAT pointing too close to the sun in September 1998 to such attacks.

Ma(r)x Planck!?

vorlon — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:30:50 +0000

Yesterday was the 150th birthday of Max Planck, one of the probably most famous physicists. But was his name really Max or was it actually Marx, as Spiegel Online reports. According to an old church book, it appears to be Marx, which is said to be common for the latin name Marcus. Let’s wait what even more experts say… and the Max Planck Society, which reportedly only heard about it by a phone call from Spiegel.

Personally I don’t consider this such a big issue, but a funny story

UPDATE:
Searching the web for “marx planck” or even “marx-planck-institute” gives actually quite a few results from non-german sites/publications mentioning Max Planck institutes. That makes me actually wonder how new this ‘discovery’ even is or if it is just some kind of a typo or something on those sites.

UPDATE II:
The director of the archive of the Max Planck Society comments on the name question in a press release. Really no big issue here.

Aurora

vorlon — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 19:34:30 +0000

Just got a mail saying that

a fast CME is passing Earth right now.
So there is a good chance to see aurora from now on.

SpaceWeather.com put an “Aurora Alert” note on their frontpage, so everyone have a look…

Astronomy Picture of the Day

vorlon — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 09:50:59 +0000

Immer wieder schön und daher auch mal eine Erwähnung wert, das Astronomy Picture of the Day. Jeden Tag ein neues Bild aus dem Bereich der Astronomie mit einer kurzen Erkärung.

RSS feeds from arXiv and NASA ADS

vorlon — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 12:50:43 +0000

I’ve been using a RSS feed aggregator for blogs and news sites for quite a while and I have also been doing the same queries on ADS regularly as well as looking at the updated listings for astro-ph on arXiv.org. So I’m finally using RSS feeds for my standard queries on ADS… simply scroll to the bottom of a result page for your specific search and you will find a link to the RSS feed. On arXiv I’m not using the feed from http://arxiv.org/rss/astro-ph, well I’m actually using http://arxiv.org/rss/astro-ph?mirror=de so that the links point to the German mirror. More info can be found at http://de.arxiv.org/help/rss and http://doc.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs_doc/help_pages/results.html#RSS_Feeds

Sonnenfinsternis am 29.03.2006

vorlon — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 09:20:15 +0000

In gut einer halben Stunde sollte hier nun die partielle Sonnenfinsternis beginnen, leider ist Göttingen zur Zeit etwas bedeckt, da werden wohl auch die (angekündigten) Teleskope auf der Dachterrasse vom Institut nichts helfen. Naja… hoffen wir mal, dass es noch aufklart.
Weitere Infos gibts z.B. auf:

Auf der o.g. NASA Seite sind auch einige Links zu Webcasts gelistet. Auf http://www.exploratorium.edu/eclipse/2006/index.html gibts z.Z. einen 300 kbps Feed mit Live-Aufnahmen eines Teleskops in der Türkei sowie auch einen kommentierten Feed.

ESO-MIDAS on Gentoo

vorlon — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 21:04:30 +0000

Just got ESO-MIDAS 06FEBpl1.0 installed on my amd64 Gentoo system Last time I tried it didn’t work too well…