Canada’s newest satellite, RADARSAT-2, was successfully launched earlier today aboard a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

RADARSAT-2 is the next generation of RADARSAT-1, Canada’s synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging satellite that was launched in November 1995. At 12 years of age, RADARSAT-1 has exceeded its original 5-year lifespan by at least 140%, which is very impressive for any satellite.

RADARSAT-1 provides high-quality imagery of the Earth that is generally unaffected by adverse weather, cloud-cover or nighttime. The largest user is probably the Canadian Ice Service, which uses the data to produce ice prediction maps and guide ships in the Arctic. Other uses of RADARSAT-1 imagery include environmental monitoring, hydrology, geology and forestry.

Congratulations to the Canadian Space Agency on a successful launch!

Nintendo’s Wii game system is a pretty neat thing. In addition to having inertial controllers and cool controllers like the guitar that comes with Guitar Hero III (see also Wikipedia), it also has the ability to connect to the Internet. One of the applications you can download for free from Nintendo’s Wii Shop Channel is the Everybody Votes Channel.

The Everybody Votes Channel allows you to register a Mii (basically a user profile with a customizable avatar) and then vote on multiple-choice questions that the Nintendo people publish. You can also predict how other people will answer. There’s even an option to suggest questions through some sort of vetting process.

Anyways, I checked up on it today and noticed the following interesting results:

Where do you prefer to watch movies? (Asked of Canadians)
Theater: 56.0% (male: 58.3%; female: 49.5%; National Prediction Accuracy: 72.1%)
Home: 44% (male: 41.7%; female: 50.5%)

Which will happen first? (Asked of Canadians)
Time travel: 21.0% (male: 21.0%; female: 20.9%; NPA: 80.7%)
Finding life on Mars: 79% (male: 79.0%; female: 79.1%)

Women will probably nod knowingly when they read this next one…

When lost, which are you more likely to do? (Canada)
Ask for directions: 58.2% (male: 52.7%; female: 73.1%; NPA: 63.3%)
Find it without help: 41.8% (male: 47.3%; female: 26.9%)
With the exception of people in NT, Canadians will ask for direction.

If you had a time machine, where would you go? (Worldwide)
To the future: 57.9% (male: 59.3%; female: 54.5%, WPA: 72.0%)
To the past: 42.1% (male: 40.7%; 45.5%)

And we Canadians appear to be more interested in the Queen than the Prime Minister, and not very many people will be surprised by this given the national prediction accuracy:
Would you rather meet the Queen or the Prime Minister? (Asked of Canadians)
The Queen: 71.5% (male: 67.1%; female: 83.5%; NPA: 78.3%)
Prime Minister: 28.5% (male: 32.9%; female: 16.5%)

Disclaimer: Of course, this is hardly scientific, but still interesting. 🙂