Diamond Select will be releasing this Back to the Future DeLorean 1/15th scale vehicle in August 2009. This is 14 inches long and is fairly detailed for a under $40 retail.
Day: March 3, 2009
As Many as 100 Billion Earth-Like Planets in Milky Way
At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science a few weeks ago, Dr. Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institute of Science speculated there may be as many as 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Boss seems to be extrapolating that numbered based on the distribution of the 300 or so planets in other solar systems discovered so far. The announcement seems time to promote Boss’ book, The Crowded Universe, which makes this argument,
We are nearing a turning point in our quest for life in the universe-we now have the capacity to detect Earth-like planets around other stars. But will we find any? In The Crowded Universe, renowned astronomer Alan Boss argues that based on what we already know about planetary systems, in the coming years we will find abundant Earths, including many that are indisputably alive. Life is not only possible elsewhere in the universe, Boss argues-it is common. Boss describes how our ideas about planetary formation have changed radically in the past decade and brings readers up to date on discoveries of bizarre inhabitants of various solar systems, including our own. America must stay in this new space race, Boss contends, or risk being left out of one of the most profoundly important discoveries of all time: the first confirmed finding of extraterrestrial life.
Fortunately, new technology including the Kepler telescope will help more firmly establish the prevalence of Earth-like planets.
Launchy Program Launcher for Windows
I really prefer Ubuntu to Windows, but the reality is most of the time I’m stuck using Windows. One of the things that is ridiculously stupid in Windows as far as I’m concerned is program launching.
Launchy is a free Silverlight-style program launcher for Windows. It indexes all the programs in the Start bar as well as bookmarks and a bunch of other stuff (you can also tell it to index specific directories and subdirectories).
Type ALT-Space to bring up Launchy, and then type in the first few letters of the application you want to launch. Launchy will show you what it thinks you want to launch. It gets it right pretty much all the time from my experience. If it is consistently guessing wrong, it is fairly easy to make Launchy understand which client you want to start when you type Mail, for example.
It has some nice plugins and more advanced features, but I’ve never find those functions as seamless as they are in something like GnomeDo which does the same thing in Ubuntu. But it does rock as a program launcher and keeps me from having to muck around the impenetrable Start bar.