There have been some server issues the past few hours, and while doing some repairs there have been some other flaky behaviors. For example, right now commenting is all screwed up. I’m working on it! Please be patient while I most likely make things worse.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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December 30th, 2006 at 10:53 pm
Test.
December 30th, 2006 at 10:54 pm
Apparently, it’s fixed.
December 31st, 2006 at 12:02 am
Test!
December 31st, 2006 at 12:36 am
It gave a strange response that made me think I just lost a very long comment, but it worked.
December 31st, 2006 at 12:56 am
I know what’s going on. Hal Turner (an extremist racist with his own radio show) has been offending people everywhere so people are trying to DDoS (Distributed Denial of service) attack on his site. When Hal Turner found out, he make a redirect from his site to his blog and used his blog as his site so DDoS attacks would go to the blogging server. The blogging server hosts many blogs (possiblly the BA Blog too) and so the DDoS attacks went to the Blog server and caused the server to be slow (blog servers have immense bandwidth so it doesn’t crash but when there is a heavy traffic load, it slows down)
In order to prevent the blogging company from suing Hal turner, he stopped the redirect and programmed his server to shut off when there was a spike in bandwidth.
December 31st, 2006 at 1:23 am
That is bizarre on so many levels.
December 31st, 2006 at 1:59 am
test comment only
December 31st, 2006 at 2:00 am
worked fine except the server thinks I’m a too fast cowboy
December 31st, 2006 at 6:10 am
Suppose BA and BAUT had a Cray-2 for a server?
December 31st, 2006 at 6:23 am
Don’t get testy, y’all!
December 31st, 2006 at 6:24 am
Works fine here! (’cept for the cowboy comment.)
December 31st, 2006 at 7:48 am
.here fine just working be to seems page comments The
December 31st, 2006 at 7:52 am
Test
December 31st, 2006 at 9:27 am
You mean that getting linked to from slashdot didn’t leave your server a smoldering pile of ashes?
December 31st, 2006 at 10:27 am
ah, that would explain why a comment I tried to post wouldn’t show up, yet when I tried to post again, it told me that I’d already posted the same comment?
December 31st, 2006 at 12:06 pm
All hail our /. overlords!
(At least that’s my guess as to the server problems.)
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/28/2254226
December 31st, 2006 at 6:17 pm
No, Lashdot and Digg are not to blame. Something else happened that generated Slrunaway processes on the server. Things have been running smoothly for about 24 hours now, so I’m hoping it’s over.
January 1st, 2007 at 9:03 am
Test again.
January 1st, 2007 at 9:39 am
Just wanted to wish you a happy New Year and thank you for brightening my morning every day of the year with your entertaining wit and educational content.
January 1st, 2007 at 10:35 am
Wow, thanks!
January 1st, 2007 at 2:08 pm
I hope I’ve posted this in the right place.
Firstly, may I point out that I am NOT a member of the tin foil hat brigade and don’t conform to every conspiracy theory put forward.
But given that we have lots of high power telescopes, on earth and out there in space, that can take a high resolution image of a gnat’s testicles on the surface of Pluto, wouldn’t it be relatively simple to take a piccy of the junk we’ve left behind on the surface of the moon and shut the conspiracy theorists up once and for all……..then again, they probably would think the photos were part of a new conspiracy!
Taffy Bach
(PS. As a former part-time – weekends only – member of the Secret Assassination Department – Government Intelligence Taskforce, I know that Princess Diana was murdered by evil reptiles working for MFI under orders from David Icke)
January 2nd, 2007 at 1:31 am
TaffyBach – This has been covered before; if you look around you should be able to find some posts on the topic, but basically, even the largest earth-based or low-orbit telescopes (such as Hubble) can only resolve objects several hundred feet across on the Moon. The Apollo moon landers are only about 15 feet across and thus are much too small to see. The various unmanned landers are all much smaller than that. Now, a high-resolution telescope in lunar orbit would have no problem seeing them (both the Apollos and the various unmanned landers), just as the MRO spotted Spirit and Opportunity on Mars. It would be about 2000 times closer to the Moon’s surface (100-200 miles vs. 250,000 miles for a telescope on Earth. Hubble orbits a couple of hundred miles up, so at best it is 249,800 miles from the Moon, i.e. not a significant difference.
I think either Clemantine or Lunar Prospector might have been able to spot the Apollo landers. Maybe they just didn’t look. They were mostly concentrating on geological features and looking for water at the poles. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, scheduled for launch in about 2 years, has a 1-meter resolution camera, and should be able to pick up all the junk that’s there.
Another thing I wonder about, though. Why is it always the *evil* reptiles who get the blame for murdering celebrities? Don’t *good* reptiles ever contribute to celebrity elimination?