James Webb Space Telescope comes to Dublin

Well a replica has at any rate and they are busy putting it together in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham at the moment. I went in to the royal Hospital this afternoon and took some snaps - this thing really is enormous.



We've got it for the next month or two because NASA, ESA and the CSA are holding a technical review of the JWST at the Royal Hospital from June 11th to June 14th. John Mather, the JWST Chief Project Scientist, will give two public lectures while in Dublin. Gizmodo of all places has a neat little write up, some older pics of the model and a video.

I can't find all the details but there is more information and (free) booking details for the lecture on Tuesday next in Trinity at the Royal Irish Academy website http://www.ria.ie/committees/chemicalandphysicalsciences/new.html
-(edit: given that it's on next Tuesday it is now booked out ).

For any XKCD fans in the audience John Mather got a Nobel prize for COBE so he is basically ultimately responsible for this:

Google Maps in Ireland

I was very pleasantly surprised to discover today that Google Maps not only added the ultra cool Street Level view to selected (US) Cities but they finally added some up to date street level maps for (more) of Ireland. I can't tell yet if it's the entire country but they certainly are pretty recent for the area around Leixlip West.

Directions now work in a real sense since the improved mapping now means that it is aware of most local streets and roads but the Google maps Geocoding API still can't handle Irish addresses it's a bit hard to search for places and then get directions between them. What works for me is to locate the start point and then save it in "My Maps", repeat the exercise for the destination point and then use the fact that the maps search parser will search "My Maps" first to enable it to feed locations into the navigation engine.

Here's hoping that they get their act together and give us some updated satellite imagery soon too.

PS3 UK Sales

Seems like some folks are carrying out real world research that backs up the claim that the 165k UK initial sales numbers were basically untrue.
The Argos availability numbers are quite interesting - looks to me that lots of the devices must have been reserved and then got released as the bookings went unclaimed.

PS3 Sales numbers

The BBC is running a story that the PS3 sold 165K units in the three days since its release. I'm sorry folks but this is bullshit and I spy the a marketing hype machine's greasy fingerprints all over it.

The PS3 sold about 200K units in the US in its first three weeks when priced at $600 per unit during the peak consumer buying Christmas season and we are supposed to believe that even though the UK version is less capable and is priced 40% higher (GBP 424 ~ $832) it sold almost as many units in the UK in its first three days in the not peak season of the end of March?

Assume that the US sales were front loaded by about 60% or so with all the pent up demand waiting for the release and they sold, say, 120K units in the first three days which is almost certainly over estimating the initial demand but even then the new Sony console is almost 7 times more popular in the UK than in the US without even taking account of the cost and functionality problems.

Call me cynical lads but I really don't think so and the BBC's reporting seems to be full of entirely unchecked data to me. We'll see. In the meantime I'm still waiting to come across any acquaintance of mine who has bought one on either side of the Atlantic.

Don't get me wrong I think the PS3 is a really sweet piece of hardware but I just can't see that there is that sort of demand in the UK.

Giant Killers

So the draw with Zimbabwe was a very good result and we all knew that beating Pakistan was never going to happen.

Wrong!

One of the Greatest Cricket Matches Ever

Wow.

Only the third draw in World Cup history -221/9 after 50 overs. Zimbabwe threw it away to be fair but the last few overs were fantastic - nice one for the Irish in the lead up to St Patricks day. :)

Oh and Jeremy Bray is da Man.

Paranoia - It's Teh Bomb.h