Science, Technology and Other Cool Stuff: Miscellaneous Monday! SDO, Gallipoli, boobquake and Korean War 1.5....

SDO kicks ass and takes names

The Solar Dynamics Observatory released its first images last week, aptly dubbing the event "First Light". Simply amazing. The discoveries that will be made by SDO will not only help us prevent damage by extreme solar events, but will allow us to learn more about the sun's potential impact on plans to have an indefinite human presence in space. We need to learn a lot about this before we can send humans beyond LEO for extended periods. SDO will help us do just that.....exciting times ahead!

More on SDO:

http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/

SDO image on APOD:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100423.html

Anzac day
I saw a few tweets go by yesterday saying it was ANZAC day, which always brings the Gallipoli campaign to mind, for me at least. While World War I was one of the stupidest wars ever fought (some achievement, history being chock full of stupid wars) it was also the bloodiest up to that point in time. Armies with 20th century technology fought each other using 19th century tactics: massed infantry, bayonets fixed, marching headlong into machine guns was more or less the norm, resulting in carnage on an unprecedented scale. While we think of the Somme, Ypres, Verdun and Passchendale as the principal battles of WWI, the Gallipoli campaign was a continuation of the same incompetent leadership in another theatre, mainly involving the ANZACS (Australia\New Zealand Army Corps). There's a movie called Gallipoli directed by Peter Weir starring a young, pre-nutcase Mel Gibson that's not bad. One of the first songs I learned to play on the guitar is Eric Bogle's "And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda", the story of a young aussie who goes off to war and finds himself in Gallipoli....a beautiful song, even if some cynical types believe it to be the Danny Boy of Australia. If you don't know anything about the Gallipoli campaign, make it your "learn something new today" thing for today. You could do worse than start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_Campaign