New Scientist News:

In February 2003, astronomers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) pointed the massive radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, at around 200 sections of the sky.

The same telescope had previously detected unexplained radio signals at least twice from each of these regions, and the astronomers were trying to reconfirm the findings. The team has now finished analysing the data, and all the signals seem to have disappeared. Except one, which has got stronger.

I hope this is the real deal, but it’s not a definite. The signal is in the water hole region of the radio spectrum, which some have argued would be a logical place for a civilisation seeking to communicate with others to broadcast, but it has other characteristics that have aroused suspicion amoung scientists. Finger crossed for first contact…

Update: The BBC reports moves by senior scientists associated with SETI to squash expectations generated by this particular signal:

But researchers connected with the project told BBC News Online on Thursday that no contact with extraterrestrials had been made.

“It’s all hype and noise,” said its chief scientist, Dr Dan Wertheimer. “We have nothing that is unusual. It’s all out of proportion.”

And Dr Paul Horowitz, of Harvard University, who specialises in hunting for possible alien contacts added: “It’s not much of anything at all. We’re not investigating it further.”

Oh well, never mind. Maybe next time. (Of course, this might just be arse covering while they do some more testing… Yeah, yeah, OK.)

This post marks the beginning of a new category of meta-posts, sort of a cross between a linkblog and a normal post. Each day may or may not have one, and each one may or may not have more than one paragraph. The idea is to use these posts as places to put brief notes on things for which an individual entry seems overkill, or things that may evolve into unique posts later, or things for which I can’t be bothered to categorise or think up a title for. We’ll see how it works. (link)

The Yahoo Mail Internet Cafe Awards get coverage on the BBC today. Unfortunately the site requires Flash to operate properly, which isn’t installed in my workplace. (Obviously, I shouldn’t be surfing anyway.) The Beeb mention a Cybercafe in San Fransisco in a laundrette being awarded a prize for the most unusual, but this certainly isn’t not unique – I used a laundrette-cun-cybercafe in Taupo, New Zealand. The most exotic I’ve ever used was in a family home in Jaisalmer in Western India, where the computer sat underneath the family’s shrine and almost seemed to form a part of it. (link)

And now for today’s sponsor…

Is Windows ready for the desktop? Maybe, but I’ll stick with Slackware, ta. Still, there’s some good points here for those of you who have to use it, for whatever reason.(via, link)

Problem with this kind of meta-post: They will appear as a single item in the feeds. This wouldn’t be such a big problem if I was correctly generating , but at the moment I’m not, and this reads the same as . I’ve been meaning to sort this out for ages (honest) – it just needs a little plugin magic for blosxom. It might help me make my atom feed validate, too, if I generate a hash of stories->modification timestamps as well as one for stories->creation timestamps. (link)

Y’know, I’ve noticed that my posts don’t seem to be appearing on the UK Blogs Aggregator. I’ve been listed there for yonks, and used to see my posts there. Perhaps it’s got something to do with my new URL, but my redirect script seems to work without any problems – follow the RSS link for Random and Irrelevant from the Aggregator sidebar and you still end up at my feed. Hmm… (link)

River of Beer Discovered in Germany (via, via, link)

More problems. One – my paragraph links are rubbish, as they’re relative. Two – my hacked-up version of wikieditish isn’t doing the Right Thing with entities. This is fine when you only edit a post once or twice, but multiple edits become a pain. I think I’m going to rethink this. (link)

It’d probably help if I knew what month it was, too. Ooops.