Projo Subterranean Homepage News

10:06 p.m.
Sun may hide a companion star: Space.com reports,

Debris disks discovered around two nearby stars look strikingly like the Kuiper Belt in the outer part of our solar system, astronomers said today....

The stars are about 60 light-years away, and the shape of their disks have astronomers pondering the long-debated possibility that our own Sun might have an as-yet unfound companion dubbed Nemesis.

Each of the two disks has a sharp outer edge that might be caused by an unseen companion star that gravitationally grooms the material. Our own Kuiper Belt, which contains comets, Pluto and other frozen worlds, is thought to have similarly abrupt outer bound....

The New Horizons spacecraft got off today to Pluto -- some 9 years away -- and the Kuiper Belt -- more years away. But it is going in the wrong direction to peek at the other side of the sun.

Full Text of bin Laden Tape translated by AP. It ends,

...You have tried to prevent us from leading a dignified life, but you will not be able to prevent us from a dignified death. Failing to carry out jihad, which is called for in our religion, is a sin. The best death to us is under the shadows of swords. Don't let your strength and modern arms fool you. They win a few battles but lose the war. Patience and steadfastness are much better. We were patient in fighting the Soviet Union with simple weapons for 10 years and we bled their economy and now they are nothing.

In that there is a lesson for you.

Now that sounds like a threat.

Update 11:18 a.m.: Al Jazeera story in English (link fixed) translates some of his message. Excerpt:

"In response to the substance of the polls in the US, which indicate that Americans do not want to fight Muslims on Muslim land, nor do they want Muslims to fight them on their land, we do not mind offering a long-term truce based on just conditions that we will stick to.

"We are a nation that Allah banned from lying and stabbing others in the back, hence both parties of the truce will enjoy stability and security to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, which were destroyed by war.

"There is no problem in this solution, but it will prevent hundreds of billions from going to influential people and warlords in America - those who supported Bush's electoral campaign - and from this, we can understand Bush and his gang's insistence on continuing the war."

Addressing Americans again, he said: "If your desire for peace, stability and reconciliation was true, here we have given you the answer to your call."

Reuters: Bin Laden says new US attacks prepared, offers truce:

Interesting. We weren't even in Iraq when 9/11 happened. How come he's still out there, popping up?

10:04 a.m.
Bush lawyers ask judge to make google hand over data; Google promises a fight. At the San Jose Mercury News, Howard Mintz reports that the Justice Department is seeking one million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period.

The government argues that it needs the information as it prepares to once again defend the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act in a federal court in Pennsylvania. The law was struck down in 2004 because it was too broad and could prevent adults from accessing legal porn sites.

More chilling: "The government indicated that other, unspecified search engines have agreed to release the information, but not Google."

I don't know about you, but I don't perform well with somebody looking over my shoulder. I grew up on stories of families huddled around secret radios in cold-war Poland, spies everywhere, neighbors turning in neighbors, and we were proud that it couldn't happen here.

Realtime, your way: Now Out In Theaters -- And On Your TV! A guide to the same-day-release movement.

Free 411. No more cell phone charges for directory assistance if you do it with 1-800-FREE-411. How it works.

Yeah, yeah, yeah: Lots of early Beatles videos. Via Robot Wisdom again.

Better than sliced bread: Tab Mix Plus is now my very favorite Firefox browser extension.

With a gazillion tabs open, I can move tabs around, close all the right ones, all the left ones, similar ones, see the ones I've closed (accidentally), make the current tab bold (so I can find it). Links I click on open in new tabs with italic headers, so I know I haven't read them yet.

Each tab opens with a little x on it so you can close it; with a lot of tabs open, they get small and I was closing in the act of clicking, so I configured it to only have the x on the current tab: read it, close it.

Also now saves all the tabs from your last session, if you choose.

Images of Venus. The Russians made them in 1975.

Browse these links to see how to do everything your way.

On to Pluto: Lou Josephs has been blogging the impending "launch of Atlas LV 15 with the New Horizons observatory space craft as the payload" all week. (Background)

Canceled first due to high winds aloft in Florida, yesterday's attempt ended oddly:

Laurel, Maryland where the New Horizons Flight Control Center is located has no power, so no launch today...I quess John Hopkins APL doesn't have a back up generator.

The launch window for today opens at 1:08 p.m. and closes at 3:05 p.m. Live liftoff coverage on the blog begins at 1 p.m., Lou says.

If it goes, watch the NASA launch live here or at Johns Hopkins/APL, where the webcam is trained on the rocket right now.

Mosquito time:Wristwatch to detect malaria: Found at Aljazeera,

The sturdy digital timepiece pricks the wrist with a tiny needle four times a day and tests the blood for malaria parasites.

If the parasite count tops 50, an alarm sounds and a coloured picture of a mosquito flashes on the watch face. Three tablets that kill all traces of the disease must then be taken within 48 hours.

Locked away: Want to e-Mail a 'NY Times' Columnist? Better Subscribe to TimesSelect : Joe Strupp at Editor & Publisher,

If you haven't signed up for TimesSelect, The New York Times' online subscription product, don't bother e-mailing the paper's star columnists.

Since the Times put the words of its eight Op-Ed columnists behind a paid wall last September, it has also decided that only TimesSelect subscribers should be allowed to e-mail Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, et al.

Back in September the Times asked the hundreds of papers who publish the Op-Ed contributors through The New York Times News Service (NYTNS) to stop printing the writers' e-mail addresses with the columns (and to take the columns off their Web sites, too). Apparently not everyone got the message, because last week the Times' syndication service sent out an advisory reminding its client papers to remove the e-mail addresses.

So if you read a columnist in the paper and want to praise/slam them, you have to pay to email your Valentine/razzberry.

I used to read and sometimes link to Times columnists, but they might as well be offline now. How odd that reaching the top of the ladder -- for columnists -- now means being well paid and little read.

(My colleague Don noticed that I've been too busy to serve up my usual "cornucopia" of links, and complained about it . This one's for you, Don.)