Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Phoenix Spacecraft sucessfully landed on Mars
Phoenix is quite different than Opportunity or Spirit Rover landed in 2004.
It's not a rover and cannot move. It landed in the Mar's north polar region, where scientists thought to be relatively uniform and has no need to move around. I don't quite agree with this though - you never know what you would see out there.
The mission object is quite clear, dig up the soil there to see if any form of water, either solid or liquid, is present.
Quite excited to see what kind of stuffs Phoenix would find.
More on NASA's project site or Wikipedia.
By the way, Spirit and Opportunity Rover, both launched in 2004, exceeded far beyond their expected 90 sol days functional period, and still working quite well at the moment.
Mourning
In case that you have wondered what's happened to my blog, this blog is currently observing the three day mourning period (19-21 may) to the victims of Earthquake in Sichuan Province, China. Most of the coloured bits on this blog have been changed to black and white.(expired)
The current death toll is 30,000+.
Your help is urgently needed.
BBC Website 'unblocked' in China
From my 10+ years online experiences in China, an educated guess is that the BBC website is in "blackest" list of Great Firewall of China(GFW), along with Falun Gong, VoA and anti-CCP websites - you should never expect those sites to become accessible in China, and the fact is , I never sucessfully accessed any of those in the past ten years in China, without using any sort of 'special method'.
So this unblock is quite unusual.
Just over a week ago, Youtube and several other websites were blocked because of the tibet related photos and videos. Other recent reports also confirmed the unblock of youtube in China, but it is conditional - if you ever try to access tibet-related videos on youtube, GFW will block your access to the whole site for about 5 minutes or more.
There are quite a lot of materials related to Tibet on BBC as well. However, GFW treated BBC quite generously this time ... em... very weird.
I never opposed the presence of Internet Censorship, but its whole process must be made 100% transparent to every citizen this censorship will affect, otherwise it will be abused by the government like the case in China, tens of thousands of website are blocked without any form of notice, and only a few of them are pornographic websites, the majority of blocked websites are the ones that the government does not "like".
"It's all over"
He was recognised by local residents. Before police arrives, brave locals hogtied this so called tai chi master.
As a member of Chinese Community, I am more than delighted to hear the news of his arrest.The justice is bit overdue for him, but hey, the important thing is, we got him!
For Qian Xun Xue, the "little Pumpkin" Mr Xue abandoned in Australia, as far as I know, she is happily living with her grandmother in Changsha, China. Not sure about whether she will be involved in court procedures after the arrest.
More on the development of this story in Bear's Blog Chinese.
EXAM
My last one is at 1st November(Thursday).
I'll reappear here after that day. But before it, there is hell lot of works to do.
About All Blacks
Although that the tea stays longer in a cup than All Blacks, I still believe it is the strongest team in the world. Mind you that the ABs still holds positive win record against every team they have played with.
What really amused me is that, ABs are able to win first tiers in IRU many times in tournaments and other cup matches, but always falldown on really "vital" matches.
My guess is some people are just too scared to lose. Got to learn something, ABs.
