Today is Amnesty's "Freedom of speech day": A movement to illuminate the lack of freedom of speech around the world. They encourage everybody to do something related to freedom of speech on this day, and this is my contribution.

Last night at around 11pm I went to a dark place. Not the dark place in my mind, but the dark place where I took the Aurora photos a few years back. This was another space hunt. Not for Aurora this time, but for comet C/2007 N3 Lulin.
The comet was just barely visible to the naked eye. I could see it a few times, but it was very very hard. When I looked at it through my binoculars it popped right out, so even if you can't see it with your naked eye don't let that discourage you from a similar excursion.
My only failure on this excursion is that I don't have a telescope... or a motorized and tracking tripod. The photos would have been much better had I had that equipment, but it was still fun to take photos of it and see the tail pop out.
This was a chilling experience since the temperature had dropped below freezing, and it's hard to operate a camera with gloves, so at the end of the excursion (about an hour later) I was very glad to start up my car and get some heat back in me.

I hope 2009 will bring joy and good times to everybody. Make it a good one.

At the exact moment of this blog entry the Winter Solstice is a fact. We up on the northern hemisphere can finally look forward to gradually more sunlight as the days up to the Summer Solstice (in June) pass by.
I will celebrate this day of darkness with lots of lights, food and with my family around me in 3 days, on December 24th: Yule Evening.

It seems congratulations are in order again. This year to Russia for pulling the longest straw in the Eurovision Song Contest. The song wasn't really that great, but the ice skater skating around the performers, apparently on some foldable space age plastic really made the stage direction work. Norway ended up in 5th place, and at least we beat the Swedes, who didn't even manage to get in the top 10 :P
Do videnja Serbia, and Zdravstvuite Russia. See you there on May 16th 2009

On the SGU forums there was a discussion about graffiti and whether it was a good or a bad thing. In general I think graffiti can be an awesome piece of art as long as it's approved by the owner of the wall it's painted on. If it has been put up illegally I'm all against it (especially when it comes to the art deprived "tagging").
I don't know if the following is approved by the authorities or not, but it's definitely a piece of art regardless:

A wall-painted animation by BLU

There's a new documentary out now called "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" (do they fail to see the self deprecating irony in the title?) hosted by '80s Cool Guy Ben Stein, nonetheless. It deals with how creationist "scientists" aren't being taken seriously by the scientific community.
Any real scientist knows that creationism has no valid scientific marks since the "theory" can't be falsified (which is a major point in any real scientific theory), and they always claim, in the end, that "god did it". Besides, "creationism" is just "Intelligent Design" disguised as another word.
This is all a bit too much for me to delve into, but thankfully there are other people out there to make my life so much easier: http://www.expelledexposed.com/
I strongly recommend reading everything on that site, and please also link to that site as much as you can, since it will make it get higher on the result list when people Google the movie.

Geert Wilders, who is the leader of the Dutch Freedomparty, has made a short film named "Fitna" that is very critical about Islam, and he released it to the world during a recent press conference. The film has been published on the party's website (an English version can be seen here).
The Dutch authorities fear riots both in the Netherlands and internationally (with good reason when you look at all the trouble the Muhammed caricatures made) and I bet there will be loud protests from the Muslim communities around the world.
I have just seen the film myself and felt like I had to comment about it, and what better way to do it than through my new blog :)