This made my day

This really has made my day:

@MarsPhoenix -- 1st day of Martian spring (north hemi) is Oct 26. The team will wait til January (& longer sunlight hours) before attempting contact.

It's probable that Phoenix is a dead stick.  It outlived its planned end-of-mission date in August 2008, giving a last 'peep' on November 2nd.  The dim light of the Martian polar winter was too weak to charge its batteries, so after reboots and brownouts, Phoenix shut down.

It's been frozen in drifts of CO2 ice since then.  In fact, Phoenix's lidar spotted falling snow in high cloud (this is water ice; the CO2 comes when it gets colder!) before it went down.  It is likely that the winter has killed the old bird (Phoenix was not designed to survive the winter, and extreme cold is ever so bad for electronics), but it has a 'Lazarus mode' : if there's power, it'll try to boot and say hello.  If the boot fails or the communications fail, it shuts down and tops up its batteries for a while before having another go; if Phoenix is capable of life, then eventually it should start up fully.

That would be awesome on a scale like unto the Incredible Rovers That Just Will Not Die. 

And I just want to hear it tweet again.  :)

Lenny? Omid? Tag, boys, you're it.

The race relations people have told the BNP to stop using weasel terms like "the Anglo-Saxon folk community" and the "Celtic / Norse folk community" in their membership rules.  Phrases like those are academically bogus and more importantly, are white-supremacist dog-whistle code for WHITE PEOPLE. 

Oddly enough, saying only white people can join breaches all sorts of race law. 

They're going to have an EGM.  They'll have to comply or they will go illegal, as I understand it.  This means either:

1: They'll comply, grumble, and then wheel out their token Member Of Albedo.  If this happens, I'd love to see some big funny important respected but not white zomg celebs join up and just turn the party into a laughing stock before hijacking it and closing it down.  

2: They'll go all martyr-whiney, schism, and the real hatebags will go underground, and we'll get the Real BNP.  Which will, at least, prove that they are the dirtbags we've been saying they are.