Yeah That Could've Done With Some More Words.

Unfortunately at this point the chances of those words making any sense are about 50/50.

Today an Austrian (EU member) backed by private Swiss (non-EU Member) money (Red Bull) jumped 'from the edge of space' from specially built capsule slung beneath a balloon and sadly did not die. This achievement ranks right up there with me cleaning my bedroom for two main reasons; Firstly he didn't jump from anywhere near the edge of space. At a recorded height of 39km (24 miles) he jumped from about half way inside the stratosphere so had around another 10km before he got to the generally accepted edge of space. The fact that he was jumping from within the Ozone/Greenhouse Gas layer of the stratosphere should tell you a little bit about how regularly weather balloons travel this high and much higher. Secondly Felix Baumgartner is not the first man to travel beyond the sound barrier in just a protective suit. In fact anyone whose ever ejected from a military fast jet may well argue that he was overdressed. Basically this was all done in that heartland of UFO conspiracy theories Roswell, New Mexico to make it look like the private sector was putting pressure on the US government over global warming/climate change when in reality they were putting pressure on over offshore tax havens. To maximise the annoyance the jump was meant to take place during my traditional Tuesday night trip to the pub but was cancelled at the last minute in order to put newscasters everywhere through two 5 hour sessions of technical tedium.

The US response was pretty good though with NASA, the City of Los Angles and the California science centre all conspiring to drive the space shuttle Endeavour through the streets at around 2mph (3kmph). Although this is significantly faster then my father vacuums it must've been really annoying for anyone in LA. In order to match the annoyance caused by the balloon jump and to make sure the two events occurred simultaneously the people moving Endeavour kept discovering 'really complicated engineering challenges' such as cutting down trees and removing telegraph polls which delayed their journey significantly. I believe in the time it has taken me to write this post the Endeavour has now finally arrived. Of course if I were suddenly to break into an in depth discussion about carbon intensity and green urban development the city of LA would feature heavily as a case study of how not to do it. The cumulative intent of this was to give the EU and the rest of the world a boot up the bum about pulling their weight in terms of space exploration because it's all very nice bashing the USA over climate change/global warming but they're really the only ones bothering to put satellites up to, you know, measure this sh*t. For example now that the space shuttle has been retired the only real way anyone has of getting satellites into space in aboard a somewhat risky Soviet-era Soyuz rocket. Yesterday (13/10/12) one of those rockets successfully launched two satellites from the Galileo In Orbit Validation (IVO) system with the EU hopes will one day rival the US' Global Positioning System (GPS). IVO currently has 4 satellites while GPS has around 30.

Anyway I guess this all serves to remind me to put the COP18/CMP8 in all of my diaries now because I've got a feeling that this summit held in Doha - the capital of Qatar - is going to be 'fun' what with Britain charging five Royal Marines with murder over the shooting of a Taliban prisoner in order to test the bounds of international law over Syria. It's November 26th (26/11/12) to December 7th (7/12/12) by the way which on current form means the lenghty court case that will follow the US' Presidential election should be ending just in time for the high level segment. Or to put it another way the US Presidential election is going to be so tight that every vote will count unless of course you're using one of those Republican owned voting machines.

22:50 on 14/10/12