On behalf of Canadians everywhere, I would like to apologize for this atrocity.

We’re really really sorry.

What American accent do you have?
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A local geocacher who goes by the name Valpin mentioned a really neat thing to look at in Google Earth.

If you go to N50° 0’38.20" W110° 6’48.32" and zoom out a bit, I think you’ll be impressed. I’ve created a KMZ file you can open in Google Earth if you’d rather not have to cut and paste.

My friend Rob pointed out an article on the BBC’s website about a working replica of a Turing Bombe that was recently finished at Bletchley Park, aka Station X. People in England have been working for about ten years, building all the intricate pieces necessary to build one of the machines that helped crack the German Enigma code. They’ve finally finished and took the machine for a “test drive” yesterday and even had a couple of people who ran the originals under heavy secrecy in WW II.

I saw the machine while it was being built on my first trip to the UK in 2003. We visited Bletchley Park one day and saw the exhibits, including a real Enigma machine and the Bombe that was being built. You can see a couple of pictures I took of a non-working replica here and here.

People in Germany may find themselves in need of a really big shoe.  Check out this image from Google Maps.  (Thanks to Paul Tomblin for mentioning this in his blog.)

I’ve been playing with Google Analytics lately and while checking a report that shows me the keywords that people have used to find my blog I noticed that one fairly popular term was “dargonboat” and that I apparently had an entry with that in the title. It seems that I made a small typo in the entry I wrote last summer about the Ottawa Dragon Boat Festival results. I’ve since corrected the typo, but it’s amusing to see how common this typo is. I even found a blog entry by someone who appears to have found it on a medal they won. It’s mentioned about halfway down that page after some of the pictures.

If you think back, you’ll recall that some scientists were trying to bring back space dust collected by a probe. Well, they’ve taken lots of pictures of the aerogel they were collecting the dust in and now everyone can get involved helping them find dust particles. If you visit the Stardust@home website, you too can participate! Unlike SETI@home, Stardust@home has people actually looking at pictures rather than running a screensaver that crunches numbers when you’re not otherwise using your computer. There’s more information on the Planetary Society’s website, too.
It just launched yesterday, and it appears that their servers are a tad overloaded right now, so I haven’t been able to get into the website to register and try looking for space dust, yet.