Brazilian comes back to earth with a bump!

On Sunday, 43 year old Brazilian Air Force pilot, Lt Col Marcos Pontes found himself on the Russian Steppes (Kazakhstan) at 0437 Moscow time.

Fortunately, it wasn’t much of a bump as "Soyuz has made a soft landing," said a mission control official in Moscow. Marcos’s comrades in flight were , American, Bill McArthur and Russian, Valery Tokarev

Congratulations are in order, as the Lt Col is the first Brazilian to venture into space. And after spending 9 days on the International Space Station, it took the guys only three-and-a-half-hours to get back.


This is a result for the Brazilian space program, which met with sad disaster almost three years ago, when a rocket exploded on the launch pad in north Brazil, killing 21 people.

I wonder if I could become the first Welshman in space! – I somehow doubt it, considering I’m afraid of heights (smiley)…besides, perhaps the money would be better spent, alleviating poverty…

Dan Brown Vindicated

A case I have been following with much interest, sees Brown ¨off the hook¨.

The authors of , Holy Blood Holy Grail claimed that Brown had nicked their central theme when writing his outrageously fanciful, The Da Vinci Code. But the High Court in London rejected the Plaintiffs claims, despite making some notable observations regarding an earlier work.

Under the UK, Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, the creators of literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works may enjoy protection for original work if they can establish " a degree of labour, skill or judgement" in producing it.

This snippet of the Act is and was crucial in Browns vindication, moreover, any lawyer worth his salt can use this peice of code to vindicate most plagiarisers, providing they dont blatantly , word for word produce a work without putting the effort in!

Personally, from a philosophic veiwpoint, I am pleased he was vindicated, because hardly anything is truely original. There are two points to consider:

1) Most of us share similar thought processes, we are bound to reach similar conclusions - sometimes - no matter how wild the claims maybe.
2) Knowledge is almost always produced from a previous occurence or work. We usually build upon what has been said, written or discovered.

On a lighter note, a guy in our class at Uni was a notoriously adept plagiariser, so much so, we named him xerox.