there are about 400 planets in every cubic light year

Turns out a cubic light year is, well, mind-bogglingly big. I wondered how an average density of 400/ly would compare with the density in our solar system.

• Neptune's orbital radius is 4.5 billion km
• which is 0.0005ly
• giving a solar system sphere volume of 5.23 pico-lyÂ
• with 8 planets (still should be 9...) , that's a density of 15 billion planets per cubic light year

Mind... blown.

In the grand scheme of things, we're all pretty much blind and deaf.

How long have you been waiting for this story to come along?

My last fill-up of diesel was £1.429/litre, which is £5.41 for one of your tiddly US gallons (£6.50 for a real gallon).

At today's rate of £1 = $1.5942, that's $8.62 per US gallon.

I think you a word out.

And the author's considered response and explanation of the claims:

http://donpmitchell.blogspot.com/2012/01/life-forms-on-venus-probably-not.html

Note that Don has access to the original Venera raw data and isn't working from the usual poor quality photos.

Er, sorry. Try this newer page:

http://www.mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm

See this site for the best processed pictures from the Venera missions. Absolutely fascinating stuff those Russians did then.

http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_DigitalImages.htm

I think you mean "Pedants' Society", unless you're the sole member.

It isn't the same. The package would have been falling faster at 5000m than it was at ground level, and the impact onto a surface at that height would have been larger.

For this reason, landing on Venus is a doddle as 90atm pressure means you barely need parachutes. Surviving after landing is a different matter, of course.

I'm still waiting for the summary to finish...

I've been using Django for a while now on my web app, having moved away from home-brewed PHP. Very easy to use, and encourages well-written and elegant code.

What, when Chrysler were involved?

As a counter-point, I built my web app on Django after messing with PHP for too long, and love it. It's clean, easy to understand and the documentation is pretty good - although I agree it could be better, but then it's free and I can contribute... My app has been Django-powered for four years now and is fairly complex from a data point of view.

Imagine a giant *outline* letter Q (that is, the line in Q is the path) where the outer bit of the tail is the start and the inner bit is the finish. As you enter, following either left or right walls will take you back to the start.