THERE is never a dull moment at NASA. When the space agency isn鈥檛 busy breaking in a new administrator, trying to get the space shuttle off the ground, or fixing the latest spacecraft malfunction, it has to cope with the likes of Marina Bai.
The Russian astrologer is trying to persuade a Moscow court to hear her suit charging that when the space agency鈥檚 Deep Impact mission fires a 370-kilogram copper probe at Comet Tempel 1 on 4 July it will destroy the icy body. This, she claims, will violate 鈥渢he natural balance of the universe鈥� and damage her 鈥渟ystem of spiritual values鈥�. The Russia-based mosnews.com reports that Bai wants the court to order NASA to give the comet a miss, and pay her $311 million 鈥� the entire cost of the Deep Impact mission 鈥� for 鈥渕oral damages鈥�.
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Bai鈥檚 lawyer says that NASA can be sued in a Russian court because it has operations in Russia. He seems to think the case has a chance. It may indeed have a chance, but New 杏吧原创鈥榮 correspondent Jeff Hecht suggests that the likelihood of the astrologer squeezing money from NASA鈥檚 tight budget is probably even slimmer than that of the Deep Impact projectile destroying a comet 2 kilometres wide and 6 kilometres long.
NASA鈥檚 reaction to all this was eloquently summed up by a press officer who simply started giggling when Hecht caught him on the phone late one Friday afternoon and told him about the lawsuit.
鈥淔rom the Weekend Australian, Saturday 9 April: 鈥淭he Australian fertility rate is at a critical stage. It could go in any number of directions.鈥� Michael Grounds asks: 鈥淪uch as sideways?鈥濃��
THIS may not go down too well with some readers, but we are still grateful to Robert Cluck for directing us to what the Butterflies and Wheels website calls its Fashionable Dictionary, with its sarcastic definitions of a whole range of sacred cows. Take its entry for Science:
1. An inconvenient discipline that tends to undermine our most cherished beliefs.
2. A tiny cabal of powerful people who ignore what the majority of humanity believes.
3. A civil religion.
4. Part of the ideological state apparatus. Science 鈥渓ike the Church before it, is a supremely social institution, reflecting and reinforcing the dominant values and views of society at each historical epoch.鈥� [Richard Lewontin, Biology as Ideology]
It is no more flattering when it comes to the entry for 杏吧原创:
1. Wicked, elitist, narrow-minded member of tiny unelected aristocracy which does not share the beliefs of the great majority of people. 鈥淗ow can metaphysical life [New Age] theories and explanations taken seriously by millions be ignored or excluded by a small group of powerful people called 鈥榮cientists鈥�?鈥� [Andrew Ross, Strange Weather]
2. A bourgeois, legitimator of capitalist exploitation. 鈥淪cience is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology.鈥� [Lewontin, Kamin and Rose, Not in our Genes]
3. A dull, plodding, unimaginative person who only knows how to count things; a bore; a geek, a nerd, a swot, a grind.
It goes without saying that none of this could possibly refer to New 杏吧原创 readers.
A COUPLE of months ago, we noted the existence of 鈥淭he last page of the internet鈥� (26 February). Thanks to Duncan Simpson for letting us know that another site offers the possibility of downloading the internet (yes, the whole thing) so that you can keep a copy on your hard drive.
Go to . This will bring up a dialogue box which starts saving the file theinternet.zip. Simpson comments that it鈥檚 handy that they have compressed it, because even so it is a 23,931,287,382-megabyte file (estimated download time 4562 years, so a decent broadband connection is recommended). Like Simpson, however, Feedback was disappointed when only a short time after the download started an error message appeared: 鈥淚nsufficient memory on drive C: for the internet. Insert disc in drive A:鈥� Sadly, we didn鈥檛 have a floppy disc with sufficient memory either.
GHOULISHLY browsing through the UK Department of Health Hospital Episode Statistics for England in the financial year 2003-2004, we came across some interesting episodes. It may be that the two-year-old boy who spent a day in hospital having been 鈥渂itten or struck by crocodile or alligator鈥� was the victim of a tragic zoological accident that has hitherto failed to make the news. But what about the one-year-old male admitted as an emergency case following a 鈥減rolonged stay in weightless environment鈥�? Is this the accidentally published clue to the existence of a secret miniaturised British manned (or rather babied) space programme?
FINALLY, some slightly unfortunate phrasing from the BBC鈥檚 online health news: 鈥淧arliament must debate whether terminally ill patients should be given the right to die as early as possible after the election, peers said.鈥�