Competition ā own some rock from the moon
WOULD you like to own a piece of the moon?
Depending on which time zone you happen to be in, 20 or 21 July 2009 sees the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing.
Advertisement
Our competition to celebrate that historic event offers a fabulous prize for the winner: some rock from the moon.
The competition is simple to enter. You will doubtless know the words spoken by Neil Armstrong when he stepped off Apollo 11ās lunar module and onto the moon itself: āOne small step for [a] man ā one giant leap for mankind.ā Can you think of something else he might have said instead ā something equally memorable, or perhaps something funny?
Your entry should be no more than 75 characters long (including spaces). You can send your entries by email (please put āCompetitionā in the subject line), by fax or by post, or online at www.newscientist.com/article/dn17213 where you can also read the specifications of the rock from the moon that you could win, along with an analysis of it performed for New ŠÓ°ÉŌ““ by a team at the Open University in the UK. A feature showing how the analysis was done will appear in next weekās issue of New ŠÓ°ÉŌ““ (20 June).
The competition closes on 29 June and the results will be published in the 18 July issue of New ŠÓ°ÉŌ““, in anticipation of the anniversary of the landing.
Are these Yes Men really the Yes Men?
FEEDBACK congratulates the Yes Men after their documentary The Yes Men Fix the World won the Panorama Audience Award at the Berlin Film Festival back in February. They unaccountably failed to pick up a gong at the Istanbul Film Festival in April and the Toronto and Warsaw festivals in May, but we remain convinced that this is the yearās top documentary film.
The Yes Men are the duo who set up the website to spoof the World Trade Organisation (). Blatant though their parody was, they started getting invitations to speak, from conference organisers convinced they were the WTO. So they said yes.
Their anti-business boomed from there. A high point has been their launch of Vivoleum ā a transportation fuel recovered from the remains of climate change victims ā at Canadaās Gas & Oil Exposition 2007 in Calgary, Alberta (7 July 2007).
The film is scheduled to go out on HBO cable TV in the US in July or August, and to open in cinemas in the UK and the US in September and October respectively. Readers who can make it to Dublin on 18 June can judge for themselves when the film opens the Irish Film Institute there.
Butā¦ butā¦ how can we be sure that a bunch of corporate public relations operatives didnāt get together to pretend to be the Yes Men? Indeed, they may already have launched their spoiler. The Hollywood film , a mournful-sounding comedy featuring Carl, a junior loan officer at a bank, was released across most of the world last December and January.
Would-be Bernard Madoffs acting badly
A QUITE different banking movie may, possibly, be in the pipeline: one about swindler Bernard Madoff. A note in The New York Times āDealbookā blog of financial news says that a biopic of Madoff āis apparently already in the worksā ā see . So we checked out the promotional website at ā which transforms into when you click on it.
It features a clip from The Insider entertainment news channel showing Hollywood actor/producer Edmund Druilhet conducting auditions for the āmost hated man in Americaā. But the would-be Madoffsā attempts to portray the financierās āfatal combination of superficial charm and unbridled greedā come over like people hamming it up badly.
We couldnāt help noticing what the NYT and The Insider apparently didnāt: when we checked the movie website it declared: ālast updated on Wednesday, 01 Aprilā. Should we file this film under āmore fictitious than fictionā, or not?
WILL he get a long-service award? According to the statement that the Institute of Physics sent to David Pearson, there was but one nomination for the position of secretary of the instituteās council before its recent elections. So āin accordance with Bylaw 69 Stuart Palmer is elected to serve as Honorary Secretary for the period 1 October 2009 to 30 September 2103ā.
āRoman Iwanczukās packet of Florida Crystals sugar says it is āNow certified carbon freeā. Roman is finding it hard to get his head around the concept of a carbohydrate with no carbonā
Accessing articles about open access
FINALLY, while browsing the website belonging to our friends at Nature, Mark Grosvenor came across an article that he thought he would like to read ā but was , in red letters, āAccess: To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment.ā
And what was the title of this article by Raf Aerts of the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL), Belgium? āOpen-access publishing can survive recession.ā Can the same be said for evaluations of open-access publishing in paid-for journals, we wonder.