Samurai Dave

In noodling around the interwebs for stuff on snow in Japan (see previous post) I came across a shedload of stuff. How could I resist Samurai Dave, a man who knows his Ninjas?

Typical

What is wrong with this bleedin' country? A little bit of snow falls and everything goes to pants. Transport systems fail, and people fall over because they've forgotten that frozen water is slippery. I'll bet they order things better elsewhere:

Snow fell in Tokyo and vicinity from Monday night through early Tuesday morning and covered the capital for the first time this season, causing people to slip and suffer injuries and disrupting rail and road traffic services. 

As of 10 a.m., 53 people had been taken to hospital by ambulance in Tokyo, the Tokyo Fire Department said. 

East Japan Railway Co. temporarily suspended some services on the Hachiko Line linking Hachioji in western Tokyo with the city of Takasaki, Gunma Prefecture, as frozen wires failed to transmit electricity to trains at Hachioji Station. 

Train services on the Togane Line in Chiba Prefecture came to a halt due to pantograph problems, while those on the Keiyo Line that links the Tokyo terminal station with the city of Chiba were suspended due to point troubles at a rail yard in Chiba.

Oh. I suppose that, when it's comparatively rare, snow buggers up the most orderly of societies.

Galileo would be chuffed

You can find this picture of Jupiter and its four largest moons - which were discovered by Galileo when he got a telescope for Christmas* - over at the Planetary Society site. It is the sort of image that Mr Galilei might have seen himself, way back in January, 1610. But there is something remarkable about this crude image. It was taken by a camera on a space probe in the vicinity Mars. The Rosetta spacecraft took some images of the Red Planet, too, which it had just passed on its way to rendezvous with a comet.

Truly this is an age of wonders. If the human race, or something like it, survives for a few hundred years more, I suspect the achievements of spacecraft like Rosetta will figure at least as highly as any earthbound event.

*This statement is not historically accurate.

Who Meme

Want to feel really old? Watch this

Science fiction writer John Scalzi introduces his defenceless 13-year-old daughter to the technology of the ancients.