Giant killer harmless robot to go into space tomorrow....

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Astronauts bound for orbit this week will dabble in science fiction, assembling a "monstrous" two-armed space station robot that will rise like Frankenstein from its transport bed.

Putting together Dextre, the robot, will be one of the main jobs for the seven Endeavour astronauts, who are scheduled to blast off in the wee hours of Tuesday, less than three weeks after the last shuttle flight.

...

With 11-foot arms, a shoulder span of nearly 8 feet and a height of 12 feet, the Canadian Space Agency's Dextre — short for dexterous and pronounced like Dexter — is more than a little intimidating, at least for astronaut Garrett Reisman.

"Now I wouldn't go as far to say that we're worried it's going to go run amok and take over the space station or turn evil or anything because we all know how it's operated and it doesn't have a lot of its own intelligence," Reisman told The Associated Press last week.

"But I'll tell you something ... He's enormous and to see him with his giant arms, it is a little scary. It's a little monstrous, it is."

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SQUARE PEGS to DVD:

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It's about freakin' time.

I am so bored. It is only 12:30.

I am so bored. It is only 12:30.

I KNOW. What the hell, march of time?

Picture of Ginormous crater on Mars, with ice at the bottom: [link]

Putting together Dextre, the robot, will be one of the main jobs for the seven Endeavour astronauts

Well, at least if he's a killer robot he'll only kill other killer robots.

I KNOW. What the hell, march of time?

I HAVE DONE ALL MY WORK. I am faced with documentation to update, and I don't wanna. The internets are not dancing for my amusement.

I am so bored. It is only 12:30.

It could be worse. It could be only 10:30. Le sigh.

ION, we're all about to die: Binary 'deathstar' has Earth in its sights

SYDNEY: A spectacular, rotating binary star system is a ticking time bomb, ready to throw out a searing beam of high-energy gamma rays – and Earth may be right in the line of fire.

Astronomers at the University of Sydney, in Australia, first discovered the unusual and beguilingly beautiful star system eight years ago in the Constellation Sagittarius. One member of the pair is a highly unstable star known as a Wolf-Rayet, thought to be the final stage of stellar evolution to precede a cataclysmic supernova explosion.

"When it finally explodes as a supernova, it could emit an intense beam of gamma rays coming our way", said Peter Tuthill, lead researcher of the team that report their findings in the current Astrophysical Journal.

I was just having fun remembering MFNLaw's reaction to the driving tour of downtown Chicago I took her on yesterday. We first drove right next to the Harold Washington Library, and I told her I'd have to take her past it again, only this time approaching from the south so she could get a good view of the gargoyles on top of the building from a distance. After seeing them properly, she immediately declared it her favorite building evah!

(The picture on that link doesn't give the proper impact that those gargoyles have in person--they are frickin' massive!)