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My friend Dave has been entertaining his Facebook contacts with a NCAA style elimination tournament of the most essential food in the vegetable kingdom. Upstart Kitchen has put together a great blog post about the tournament.

My friend Shannon Phillips is a freelance writer and journalist. When she asked me to take some photos for her new story, I jumped at the chance. I’m happy to say, the editors at Alberta Views used two of my images for the October edition article.

The article is available online (sans photos).

A friend of mine is interning at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC. She works next door to 1600 Pensylvania and though it’s only been a few days the interesting stories are already flowing:

“The street right outside of my workplace is closed off because [Prime Minister] Stephen Harper is coming to the White House. There was a little protest demanding that the US not buy dirty oil. Protestors wore costumes resembling dirty oil barrels and one person in particular was dressed like Chewbacca in a hockey jersey wearing a Harper mask. Is Harper, or are Canadians in general, known for their love of Star Wars?

My guess is he was trying to look like a sasquatch, or possibly it was just a long haired hippie protester that only looked like Chewbacca.

Update: Now that I’ve seen the photo, I think the point of the furry custom was to say that Canada’s carbon footprint is LARGE like Bigfoot.

Over the weekend I went to my good friend Duane’s stag in Banff. We were lounging around in a bar sometime after midnight. My friend Niall was sitting beside me in a little love seat, in front of us sat a coffee table and on the other side two ladies were chatting with us. Out of the blue, one of them challenged Niall.

She declared, “I’ll betcha $20 that my friend here can beat you at an arm wrestle.”

I looked at Niall and then back at the girl—she was very tiny. I thought wow, this girl must be tremendously strong or have some kind of trick, because there’s no way she’s going to beat Niall, she’s just too small. He’s not a particularly big guy, but big enough. He’s about my height and weight, which lead me to ponder what this girl was thinking.

We moved some empties out of the way, they set up, a small crowd had gathered. It was over almost as quickly as it started.

Niall kind of shrugged and picked up his cash. I suggested to him that maybe they figured he would buy them some drinks and therefore they wouldn’t really be out any cash. Niall’s response was priceless.

“Fuck that. They can buy their own drinks.”

An Ariane 5 rocket launched two scientific space observatories, Herschel and Planck, at 13:12 GMT this morning that will help scientists better understand the formation of the universe.

The launch took the better part of 30 minutes from ignition to spin-up and separation of the Planck and Herschel.

The launch:

[Herschel and Planck Launch - YouTube]

My physicist friend Richard Querel works with the group that built SPIRE, an infrared imaging camera and low-resolution spectrometer that was aboard the Herschel. He tells me the instruments will be sensitive down to picojoules, which is the equivalent to the energy emitted by one living cell, or to a dim star, very far away.

It’ll take 3 months for them to get to their orbit, but they’ll likely start collecting science validation data immediately.

Herschel has the largest mirror of any space telescope now in orbit. Its 3.5m diameter primary mirror is one-and-a-half-times the size of the Hubble Telescope’s main reflector.

From the Herschel Space Observatory entry on Wikipedia:

The mission, formerly titled the Far Infrared and Sub-millimetre Telescope (FIRST), will be the first space observatory to cover the full far infrared and submillimetre waveband. At 3.5 meters wide, its telescope will incorporate the largest mirror ever deployed in space. The light will be focused onto three instruments with detectors kept at temperatures below 2 K. The instruments will be cooled with liquid helium, boiling away in a near vacuum at a temperature of approximately 1.4 K. The 2,000 litres of helium on board the satellite will limit its operational lifetime. The satellite is expected to be operational for at least 3 years.

My friend Jarett Sitter and his sister created this clever stop motion pixilation for a Doritos ad contest.

If you like it, vote him up here by clicking the thumbs up.

Last night at about 2:50am, my friends Andy and Shannon delivered their new baby boy, Finn! He is a tall baby, about 52cm, weighing in at a nice 3.475kg (7.6 lbs). We’re all very excited for them.

[Finn Davies - Flickr]

Welcome to the world, Finn.

My friend Katy says:

My band, Ladysugar, made it to the final round of voting for the star 98.7 radio contest! The competition is extremely tight so EVERY vote counts. Voting is quick and easy and would really help us. Just go to http://www.987fm.com/pages/rockstar3/videos.html and find the Ladysugar video. Even if you’ve already voted you can vote again because that was round 1 but now it’s round 2 so voting starts all over! Voting started last Friday at noon and ends this Friday at noon. You can vote once a day from the same email address.

Here is the band in action:

Hit play or watch I Want What I Can’t Have at YouTube.

And here is the voting page.

As I’ve mentioned (many times to anyone that cares to listen) my former house-mate is Canada’s fastest swimmer in the 50m freestyle. This morning at around 4:30am local time he will be swimming in Beijing!

I saw Richard’s photo on Yahoo News (same photo here) and caught a couple clips of him swimming and on deck on the CBC a couple nights ago. (I also saw his roommate Jonas swimming tonight too—he competed in the 100m breast).

Here’s what Richard has to say on his blog the night before the big event.

My friends Paul and Jessica had their building struck by lightning last night. I think that’s what inspired them to start a new blog. Time will tell if they’ll actually keep it up.

As for the lightning, perhaps it was a divine message—vegetarianism goes against FSM.