What I think is so cool about these discoveries is, in the words of astronomer Steve Vogt, "the emerging view that virtually every star has planets". Think about this for a while. Look at all the stars in the sky, and imagine every single one of them having a planetary system. Suddenly it doesn't seem to much of a stretch thinking some of them might be habitable, or even harbour some kind of life.

In my eyes this fact, if it gets confirmed by subsequent studies, is the biggest discovery about the universe since the theory of relativity. When I grew up I was taught there were 9 planets in orbit around the sun, and the existence of (or at least abundance of) exoplanets where largely speculative, with the first observations just being confirmed during the 90's. When my kids grow up they'll be taught there are thousands of exoplanets in our very vicinity and millions in the galaxy. And there are free-floating bodies as well, rouge planets that are not gravitationally bound to a star! How cool isn't that? To top it all, we will soon have instruments sensitive enough to measure the very spectrum of an exoplanet atmosphere and look for biosignatures. If it finds free oxygen and methane, that's a very strong indication of life as we know it. (Since oxygen is highly reactive, it tends to show up in compounds such as carbon or silicon dioxide. Biologic activity is one possible supply of free oxygen.) The search for extra-terrestrial life, long belonging to the realm of science fiction, has turned to a serious and highly active field of research in just a few years.

Thanks everyone who helped, but especially this tip. For some reason (evolutionary biology?) it seems easier to understand an image where the sunlight comes from above. Now I got a better idea of what's going on. An amazing picture.

There's something about that picture that's hard for my brain to process. I get the backlit rings to the sides of the planet and the shadow the planet casts on its rings on the dark side, but where do the rings on the upper half of the planet come from and why do they seem offset from the other rings?

This is very cool, but it's got a really long way to go before it can be used to build anything remotely like an integrated circuit. I'm also not sure the benefit will be that large since the wafer cost isn't a very big part of the cost of making integrated circuits today. What I think it can be great for is solar cells, nanotubes and other products where getting rid of the wafer will solve two problems: the cost and the size. If you can make an arbitrarily large solar cell panel, that's a real advantage over wafer-based manufacturing methods.

And that, in this case, would be the best thing that could happen.

While I'm definitely against censorship and a big supporter of freedom of speech, I still think it's reasonable to set certain limits to it. Long before the Internet there were several laws that can be seen as limiting free speech:

- Defamation. If you maliciously spread false rumours about someone, that constitutes a crime in many jurisdictions.
- Perjury. You're not allowed to lie under oath.
- Causing danger to others (not sure about the English term for this). It might be illigal to shout "fire" in a theatre, to take a classic example.

To uphold free speech we must protect it from abuse. As long as the wording of the law is clear and precise and proper trials are held, I think laws like these are acceptable. Online bullying and harassing are big problems today, so you need to see both sides of the coin. If you're making life a living hell for someone and constantly send them harassing text messages or slander them on Facebook, you can't expect to hide behind free speech.

Note that I still strongly disagree with any kind of law that tries to limit free speech that's being "offending". That's bad for two reasons: 1) What's offending is different to different people and 2) it can be used all too easily to silence inconvenient voices.

Something like this perhaps? http://newcovermagazine.com/2010/08/23/going-no-were-chinese-traffic-jam-enters-9th-day/

It works reasonably well in Stockholm. Maybe just because I seldom start off towards work until 8 am and by then the plowing is usually done even on the bike lanes. Over the last two winters with really heavy snowfall I was only forced to use some other transportation once or twice due to snow. (I chose not to take the bike on many more occasions but that's a different story.) I use studded tyres during the winter of course.

There are two reasons why it will take a while for Debian to run out of Toy Story names. The first reason is that there are a lot of them.

Sports lessons teaches kids that there are fun sports out there, and maybe they should consider starting playing one of them. With obesity rising in the U.S. (along with most of the developed world, even if the U.S. is one of the worst cases), more kids being physically active can only be a good thing.

This also applies to grownups. I play floorball once a week with my colleagues (a simple game played indoors with a plastic ball and clubs, sort of like field hockey, big in Sweden and Finland). All of us probably tried first it in PT classes in school, and it's highly unlikely we'd do it if we hadn't tried it before and realized it was fun. That's how you usually develop an interest for something - you try it once, decide it's fun, and start exploring the possibilities of doing it more regularly. With obesity rising in the world, more grownups being physically active can only be a good thing.

Today's word: The cloud.
Explanation: Someone else's computer.

I must point out that I did not mean a closed system in the thermodynamic sense of the word, which the island is most definitely not. What I meant was that it's self-sufficient with respect to electricity - I was just lazy when I wrote the post title and used the first word that popped into my head.

The Earth is also not a thermodynamically closed system, precisely because you cannot ignore sunlight and thermal radiation in the equation (this is, in part, what climate science is about). You also have things like meteorite bombardment and gas losses from the atmosphere into space that prevents the Earth from being a closed system.

The news isn't that it's a country - which it's not - but that an entire island, cut off from mainland grid, is able to use solar power as its only means of generating electric power. This makes it very interesting, and I would like to know a lot more about what their grid looks like, how they handle peaks and lows in solar output (like day and night), and so on.

Can you give a citation to that? What statistics is it you're referring to and where can I find the definition you describe? If you're correct that's some very misleading statistics but it's a pretty strong claim so I'd like to see some evidence before buying it.

A couple of points about Facebook:

1) You have a real incentive of actually signing up with your real name because otherwise your friends won't find you.
2) Your friends can see what you write.

This creates a (somewhat) self-regulated comment environment. People still post dumb stuff on Facebook because they're dumb, but at least you get rid of most trolls, one-liner thumb seekers and Justin Bieber haters that haunt for instance Youtube.