Links of the week

This week Ross Garnaut released an update to his climate change review. If you don't feel like reading the whole thing there's an excellent summary (and he pulls no punches on what the coalition should be doing) on The Drum.

Someone has made me a search engine. (Alright - it's for all nerdy types out there but it is way cool)

Massimo Pigliucci on Rationallyspeaking.org asks some questions about the US Prison system and why we lock people up. This is despite violent crime in the US going down - which could have interesting causes as Kevin Drum writes on Mother Jones. Do we need to be asking the same questions in Australia? There are currently about 30,000 people in Australian gaols. That's only 0.1% of the population but the number of people in gaol is growing at almost double the speed of population growth, even though in Australia violent crime is also down.

I often forget living in the city with its bright lights and pollution how beautiful the nights sky can be. As an example I've come across this video of time lapse photography at the Very Large Telescope in Chile. It's pretty amazing. Check out Phil Plait's blog for some commentary.

And if you've ever wandered what it would be like to be on a starship tumbling through space you can stop - because we are, as this edited version shows wonderfully.