brainsnorkel.com

For me, New Years Eve is new toys eve! I have a January birthday and I always acquire a new toy as a birthday present that’s somewhere near the top of the scale between “cheap and useful” and “a clear sign of a mid-life crisis.”

My appalling photography evidenced during the Christmas period would clearly be remedied with more advanced hardware. My Flickr pro account is also clearly in need of increased utilization.

About now I was going to boast about my first digital camera above 2 Mega Pixels — and a digital SLR at that!

Sadly my new camera’s autofocus was dead on arrival and I had to send my snazzy new Nikon D40 back for replacement.

Sigh.

One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’s sanity. NASA has decided that the Moon should be an all-metric zone, and it sounds like IETF standard inter-networking is on the cards too.

The decision is a victory not only for the metric system itself, which by this decision increases its land area in the solar system by 27%, but also for the spirit of international cooperation in exploring the Moon. The decision arose from a series of meetings that brought together representatives from NASA and 13 other space agencies to discuss ways to cooperate and coordinate their lunar exploration programs. Standardizing on the metric system was an obvious step in the right direction.

“When we made the announcement at the meeting, the reps for the other space agencies all gave a little cheer,” says Jeff Volosin, strategy development lead for NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. “I think NASA has been seen as maybe a bit stubborn by other space agencies in the past, so this was important as a gesture of our willingness to be cooperative when it comes to the Moon.”

The article is accompanied by this lovely little graphic showing places in our neck of the solar system that don’t primarily use metric: “United States, Liberia, and Burma”