Entries in "Current Events"
Virginia Tech Shooting
My thoughts and sympathies are in Blacksburg, Virginia at the moment, and with the friends and family of everyone who knows someone at Virginia Tech. One of the prospective graduate students I got along with very well when she visited Cornell a month ago was from VT. She and I had a lot in common: both of us had lived all over; we'd both been in the IB program in high school; we'd both moved before our senior year of high school (thereby further complicating our IB programs); we'd both studied aerospace engineering as undergrads; and we both planned to go to Cornell for graduate school...
I sincerely hope that I hear soon that she's alright.
Edited to add: She is okay, though very shaken. Some of the people shot were her friends.
Google and NASA
I should really be working on the vestiges of my homework (as always) right now, but it's my birthday, so I feel justified in doing anything I want to at the moment.
Scanning the BBC headlines this morning brought this article on a new venture between NASA and Google that was announced. My first thought was something along the lines of, "Well, that's nice, but... why?" Then, I saw this:
"Imagine having a wide selection of images from the Apollo space mission at your fingertips whenever you want it."
NASA has huge wealths of information hidden away on their website. Having just finished that space shuttle project, I've been combing through a lot of it recently, and I know that my mother, a science teacher, frequently uses NASA's website for educational purposes, too. Now, if Google could make it easier to find a lot of that information from the get-go, that would be wonderful for people like us.
And who knows? Maybe coming across some of the stuff NASA's got hidden away will inspire a few more kids like me.
As for other things Google and NASA could do together, well, I can just imagine the results.
Interview with New Orleans' Mayor
One of the blogs I read regularly posted an mp3 of an interview with New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin that has since been censored. It is more than worth a listen.
London Bombings
I woke up this morning to hear the news about the bombings of the London Underground and a bus. I've gotten confirmation from my UK friends in the area that they're alright, and right now I'm just hoping that the same can be said for my cousin Rich. There's never a good time for this sort of tragedy, but it seems particularly callous after London won the bid for the 2012 Olympics and the G8 started up in Scotland. So far there are only two reported dead. I hope the number doesn't rise, though I suspect it will.