Bashed and Bruised...

I just took up squash the other week... only played two times, but I'm enjoying it. My shoulders and arms probably would disagree with me on that one. I have yet to master the art of getting to the ball (when it's near the wall), hitting it, and then NOT crashing into the wall. What's that old saying?... no pain - no gain.

Figured I'd throw some science news in here too, since y'all are probably tired of me whining about getting beat up in sports, or letting in 10 goals in hockey :)

The "Pioneer Anomaly" is causing enough stir that there may be a deep-space mission to investigate it. This anomaly refers to weird effects that have been happening to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. These two spacecraft were launched back in 1972/73 and were sent to investigate Jupiter and Saturn. Pioneer 10 became the first manmade object to leave our solar system (pretty cool), and is now about 70 AU away from us (1 AU is the distance from the sun to earth, so that's about 9 light-hours away (10.5 tera meters). Ever since these spacecraft were 20 AU away from earth, there has been a persistent doppler shift in the signals they send to earth. This doppler effect can not be explained by known factors (ie. planetary interactions, fuel leaks, etc.). So, some physicists are postulating that it may be due to some new physics. Maybe dark matter at the edge of the solar system, or a new type of force that we don't know about.
Interested? Read on for more info at: http://www.nature.com/physics/ (free reg required).

waiting...

...for a couple of my programs to finish running. It seems like I never have enough CPU power. Or more likely, this is the price I pay for using Matlab (java based). I should go back to programming in fortran :) or at least something non gui'ish.

Got some great news this morning: There's going to be a showing of the Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival here! Kick-ass... now I can get my fix of mountains (there's a severe shortage of them around here).

CFL success is no mystery

Just finished watching a piece on the CBC about why the CFL is seeing a resurgence in fans this year. Found it pretty funny how they analyze various factors: New management, Team success, etc. without making reference to the fact that there's a lot of sports starved Canadians (yours truly) who are paying more attention to the CFL due to the lack of hockey.
Maybe I should quit this math stuff and go into journalism...

Survived my martial arts test, not much worse for the wear. Will be receiving my yellow belt this Monday... only 5 more levels until I gots me a black belt.

Show time

Had my first set of tests for Karatedo on Monday. They went well, and tonight is the final test... a 2 hour battle-royal with full fighting gear. Should be a sweet time.

In other news, I've decided to migrate my website to a different web-hosting company. Right now, I just use the school's servers, but it's slow getting things enabled/fixed when web-hosting isn't there primary responsibility. I'm thinking of going with IX Webhosting. The $12.99/mo deal seems pretty good.

surfs up