Here is an excellent map of the national park as well as Mount Rainier itself. This shows all the camps, glaciers and cleavers of the mountain and is a good aid in understanding the various approaches to the summit.

My tennis game has been suffering quite a bit the past couple months, so I naturally figured that it had to be my gear.

I went on eBay again and picked up a pair of Head Liquidmetal Radical MP racquets. My reasoning is that my previous racquet was 93 sq. in. and while I had amazing control, I had a lot of difficulty generating any power. In addition, it was very unforgiving with a small sweet spot. I'm just not good enough yet to play with that racquet.

Prior to the prestige racquet I had an i.Tour at 100 sq. in. and an i.S1 at 102 sq. in. Both of those racquets allowed me to generate pace on the ball, but with little control. Nothing is more frustrating than hitting the ball off the court, or right back to your opponent time and again.

I decided to settle on a head size about midway between 93 sq. in. and 102 sq. in. The current pair of racquets (which I picked up at 2 for the price of one...strung with case and extra strings!) come in at 98 sq. in. and appear to have hit the mark. My game has improved considerably and I can hit with a lot more confidence that I'll generate pace and have a decent level of control.

The dust sculptures of the Eagle Nebula are evaporating. As powerful starlight whittles away these cool cosmic mountains, the statuesque pillars that remain might be imagined as mythical beasts. Pictured above is one of several striking dust pillars of the Eagle Nebula that might be described as a gigantic alien fairy. This fairy, however, is ten light years tall and spews radiation much hotter than common fire. The greater Eagle Nebula, M16, is actually a giant evaporating shell of gas and dust inside of which is a growing cavity filled with a spectacular stellar nursery currently forming an open cluster of stars. The above image in scientifically re-assigned colors was released as part of the fifteenth anniversary celebration of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Follow the handle of the Big Dipper away from the dipper's bowl, until you get to the handle's last bright star. Then, just slide your telescope a little south and west and you might find this stunning pair of interacting galaxies, the 51st entry in Charles Messier's famous catalog. Perhaps the original spiral nebula, the large galaxy with well defined spiral structure is also cataloged as NGC 5194. Its spiral arms and dust lanes clearly sweep in front of its companion galaxy (right), NGC 5195. The pair are about 31 million light-years distant and officially lie within the boundaries of the small constellation Canes Venatici. Though M51 looks faint and fuzzy in small, earthbound telescopes, this sharpest ever picture of M51 was made in January 2005 with the Advanced Camera for Surveys on board the Hubble Space Telescope.

Planetary nebula Mz3 is being cast off by a star similar to our Sun that is, surely, round. Why then would the gas that is streaming away create an ant-shaped nebula that is distinctly not round? Clues might include the high 1000-kilometer per second speed of the expelled gas, the light-year long length of the structure, and the magnetism of the star visible above at the nebula's center. One possible answer is that Mz3 is hiding a second, dimmer star that orbits close in to the bright star. A competing hypothesis holds that the central star's own spin and magnetic field are channeling the gas. Since the central star appears to be so similar to our own Sun, astronomers hope that increased understanding of the history of this giant space ant can provide useful insight into the likely future of our own Sun and Earth.

I've been enjoying a couple very good darjeeling teas lately, including a very fresh first flush from the Rohini estate. Here is a link to lots of Darjeeling information.

This is an interesting history of how tea became central to the British empire and how they exploited the Chinese, Indians and other Asians to grow their empire. The way that workers are/were treated is amazing. The business of Tea and how it related to the strength of the empire is fascinating.

Do the major media outlets in the U.S. have a liberal bias? Few questions evoke stronger opinions. So far, the debate has largely been one of anecdotes (“How can CBS News be balanced when it calls Steve Forbes’ tax plan ‘wacky’?”) and untested theories (“if the news industry is a competitive market, then how can media outlets be systematically biased?”).

This study attempts to quantify the Liberal or Conservative measure of several prominent media outlets.

Others have critically analyzed their findings and call into question where they draw the line between conservative and liberal.

A good discussion thread on the study can be found at the Dead Parrot Society.

Environmental sensors and handheld devices that quickly and easily detect and identify individual viruses would provide early warning of infections in individuals, the spread of disease in populations, and biological weapons attacks.

The rapid development of nanotechnology in recent years has given researchers tools for building highly sensitive virus detectors. A team from Harvard University has built a detector from nanowires transistors that can identify individual virus particles in real time in unpurified samples.

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