Here's an interesting link for you all, it's a leaked Draft Report from the IPCC.


Now the IPCC say that this report is only a draft and needs to be TWEAKED, probably because it doesn't bode to well for future Government Funding. Most of what I read was over my head and a translation would be nice, Snowy what are you upto for a few hours, please.

On the face of it, it would appear that Man is not solely responsible for Global Warming, no surprise there for me, so tweak away we all love paying Taxes.

I was looking through Amazon for some gift ideas, then I found it, the perfect gift for the man that never grew up.

Plop Trumps

This tech is frankly.....wow!!!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20693705

This could be of interest to people:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-20667659

With several little singers. Wow, what a Christmas gift!!

Search for life suggests planetary systems more habitable than ours


Source: Search for life suggests planetary systems more habitable than ours

By using a combination of technologies, and some bailing wire, duct tape and elbow grease, I've managed to give my chatbot, Morti, a telescope to share with his visitors.

Ok, ok. Maybe this isn't exactly the best place to post this, but I want to get some testing data from more than a single source, so this post should work just fine.

The URL is for Morti's main page, at http://www.geekcavecreations.com/Morti/?debug (the 'debug' thing is so I can track a few things {NOT PERSONAL STUFF, though!}

A few things, though:

1.) The Google Earth plugin will NOT work on bodies within the solar system, mainly because the Google Earth plugin won't support viewing them.
2.) The telescope searches two different databases; SIMBAD for Google Earth, and APOD for the image search. Neither one is perfect, and both are ~VERY~ intolerant of spelling errors.
3.) The SIMBAD Astronomical DB is pretty comprehensive, with over 17 million commonly accepted names, designations or identifiers for nearly 7 million objects, but there are far, far more objects in the sky than that, so don't blame Morti if the scope can't "find" something.
4.) The APOD image search will return images for a lot of stuff that isn't necessarily a celestial body. Try typing "telescope Apollo 17", and see what comes up.
5.) There is a SIMBAD image search, too, but there are some problems with it (not everything in the DB has an associated image, for one), so I won't be using that any time soon. The APOD image search is sort of weak, but it's better than the old one.

I'll be working on creating a "new image" button or link for the image search, but that's going to have to wait till after the holidays.