little bits of everything

It all started when I caught an advert on Radio 4 for a radio play of a book I'd just finished: I just finished the book #neverwhere by @neilhimself and I find it's on Radio 4 soon http://t.co/wcfcarhsYB #fb — Paul Morriss (@paulmorriss) December 20, 2013 @neilhimself is Neil Gaiman, the author of the book, and he retweeted my tweet. I was quite excited about it. My children found my excitement amusing, to which I would respond "1.9 million followers!", (that's how many Neil has, not me). I would freely acknowledge that not all of them saw it. 10 other people further retweeted it, 21 people favourited it and I got three new followers. A few people replied to me too. I didn't dare admit it was the first book of his that I'd read (apart from Small Gods which he jointly wrote with Sir Terry Pratchett). Before we visited family after Christmas one of my children said that I was bound to bring it up when we saw our relatives, but I promised that I wou...

Last night I borrowed the binoculars that one of my sons got for Christmas and looked at the moon and stars - the first time I've done that for quite a few years. Wanting to find out more I was looking at I've been wandering through some astronomy related web pages, mostly the International Astronimical Union (IAU) and found that: don't pay to have a star named after you - it's a con there appears to be no single master database of stars as you might expect, though there are conventions on naming there are loads of ways you can take part in astronomy and all sort of other fields science, from analysing things, to letting your computer do work when it would otherwise be idle the IAU are working on the naming of exoplanets (those outside the solar system)