I was pretty upset to hear that Hubble’s main imaging system is down again, possibly permanently – now where am I going to get fresh desktop wallpapers from? However, it seems that Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is shaping up well – Centauri Dreams explains how it uses microscopic shutters to milk far more from its 8 million pixels than that DSLR you got for Christmas can manage.

Via one of the many online incarnations of John Scalzi comes news of a novel written entirely in mobile phone text messages. Part of me wants to shrug this off as a sure-to-flop gimmick; part of me wants lament the decline and cheapening of the written word. All of me wants to drink heavily.

In his excellent and fascinating book Synthetic Worlds, Edward Castronova talks a lot about the permeability of membranes between meatspace and virtual worlds. He was mostly talking from an economics point of view, but the analogy still stands for other forms of interchange. Especially when you hear that the membranes are now permeable both ways, with a proof-of-concept meatspace control panel that can control its virtual equivalent – and vice versa.

I’m a sucker for visual representations of complex data sets – largely because I’ve always been rubbish at maths. The Google gang have just put out a new tool designed just for folk like me who’d like to look at how various economic statistics correlate against each other over time for all the major countries on the planet. It’s hard to describe accurately, so just go and play with the Gapminder World and kiss goodbye to an hour or two.