Science bits

I finished reading Genius, James Gleick's book about Richard Feynman this morning. It's an interesting read, although quantum physics is a bit hard for my monkey brain. I'll stick to astrophysics, which I find easier and the error bars are larger ;-) As Professor Woolfson once said in a lecture I attended at York, "my calculated mass of the star was out by 100%, but that's OK in astronomy." That was on a strange numerical analysis course I did there, compulsory for first year physicists and optional for third year computer scientists. It was assessed by the writing of a program, which all the drunken freshers hardly bothered with, as it was worth a tiny amount of their final degree marks, and all the "oh my $diety it's my final year I had better do some work" compscis worked really hard on, as it was worth far more to them. This lead to the compscis getting all the high marks...

Space Shuttle Discovery is due to land at 18:02 UTC today. You can watch it live from this page: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

Richard Feynman worked on the Rogers Commission, which investigated the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger. I discovered today that a film is apparently going to be made of those events: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_%28film%29