“The Great Kersten Blunder”

Phil Plait writes about the “The Great Kersten Blunder”, the story of a probe to Venus that was lost because a programmer made a stupid mistake. OK, first the actual story. The great Kersten Blunder is about the error made by Kersten (programmer) on the Vigor space probe’s converting program. He made an error in the … Read more

Sadly that signal was not ‘Aliens’

You might have become rather excited if you spotted the news about the detection of an apparently artificial signal coming from a distant star, for example The Observer published this on 29th Aug … Not a Drill: SETI Is Investigating a Possible Extraterrestrial Signal From Deep Space If the signal is truly from an alien world, … Read more

Brian Cox vs senior Australian politician who rejects Climate Change

There are a few stories doing the rounds of the clash on live Australian TV between UK Physicist Brian Cox and the Climate change denying senior Australian politician, Malcolm Roberts, so let’s take a look and see what happened. The background here is that Mr Roberts had earlier issued a challenge for anybody to show him evidence that … Read more