It's all been a bit space based round here recently, but this video is too good not to share, a Shuttle launch caught on video from an Air Canada flight.

Hat tip: 37 Signals

Sometimes you see things that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

The Deep Impact spacecraft, with it's original mission complete and now undertaking science under the EPOXI moniker, turned it's cameras back towards the Earth from 50 million kilometers away and over the course of several hours caught The Moon transiting The Earth!

Phil Plait sums it up beautifully:

While there is science galore in these animations, I think their real impact is the visceral one from simply seeing them. As Carl Sagan once said: everyone you have ever met, every human who has lived and died, lived out their lives on that blue ball. And yet here we are, in the 21st century, plains apes allowed to evolve and satiate their curiosity, now with the ability to lob metal proxies into deep space, look back, and see ourselves.

Science. I love this stuff.

Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man… living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money.

- George Denis Patrick Carlin (12 May 1937 - 22 June 2008)

Where interoperability information is protected as a trade secret, there may be a lot of truth in the saying that the information is valuable because it is secret, rather than being secret because it is valuable.

Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Competition Policy, speaking at Open Forum Europe.