Month: March 2009

Don’t let Mukhametkuli Aymuradov die in prison

Mukhametkuli Aymuradov is a 63-year-old businessman who was imprisoned in 1995 in Turkmenistan after an unfair trial. His family have been informed recently that he will be released on 2 May 2009. Amnesty International have asked that pressure be kept up on the Turkmenistan authorities to honour their promise to release him. He is in extremely poor health and his family are worried that he is being denied access to the medical care that he needs.

I’ve drafted a letter to President Berdymukhamedov welcoming the news of his release and calling on the authorities to ensure that he is released promptly on 2 May. Feel free to download the letter and send copies yourself. We will hopefully have copies for people to sign tomorrow night during our regular letter-writing at Greenwich Picturehouse.

21st March was also New Year, Nowrouz, in Central Asia. Please also consider sending a card expressing support to Mukhametkuli Aymuradov’s family.  Flower themes are most appropriate, with a message such as “we are thinking of you during the Nowrouz festivities”. Cards should be addressed to:
Mukhametkuli Aymuradovu
AH-K3 poselok Ovadan-depe
rayon Ovadan Depe
Turkmenistan

Update

Wonderful news from Gitti Dunham, Amnesty’s coordinator for Central Asia. Mukhametkuli Aymuradov was released from prison on 2 May.

Ada Lovelace Day – Prof. Linda S. Sparke

A couple of months ago, I signed the following pledge over at findingada.com:

“I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.”

Well, more than 1,500 people signed up to do the same, so this post is dedicated to Linda Sparke. Why do I admire Linda? Well, firstly, she studies gravitational dynamics, building computer models of the structure and motion of entire galaxies. In fact, she wrote the undergrad textbook on galactic dynamics. Secondly, she also currently dominates the first page of Google for “remarkable warped and twisted”, which I think is an admirable achievement all by itself. Finally, what’s not to admire about someone whose contact details say “knock three times and give the password: F = G m1 m2/ r2“?

On a more personal note, back in 1989 I answered a note from Linda on the noticeboard in the Physics Department at Manchester University inviting final year students to apply for the PhD program in Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Consequently I spent 6 years in the UW-Madison Astronomy department, studying and working with some lovely people, including Linda, and eventually got my own PhD. So thanks Linda! May you continue to inspire people to study astronomy for years to come.

Mapping the sky with YQL and astrometry.net

Machine tags and Google Sky, originally uploaded by eat your greens.

Astronomy photographer of the year has been open for a couple of months now, and the astrophoto Flickr group has a few hundred photos now. The amazing astrometry.net bot has been scanning the group and about 70 photos have been tagged with their celestial coordinates, using astro: machine tags.

Continue reading Mapping the sky with YQL and astrometry.net

Opening up data with YQL

Recently I’ve been following Chris Heilmann’s enthusiastic posts about Yahoo! Query Language (YQL). Chris has also written a good introduction to YQL for developers. It’s a SQL-like language for getting data out of open web services. Sort of a single syntax for interacting with a variety of services, such as the APIs for flickr, upcoming or twitter, without needing to know a lot of the detail of those individual services. One of its features is open data tables, which allows you to describe your own web services using a simple XML syntax, not unlike OpenSearch.

Continue reading Opening up data with YQL