The Harper Conservatives have recently announced minor changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program in response to some very public abuses of the program by banks and other large corporations. It would seem the Tories have discovered that Canadians displaced by TFWs still get to vote in elections, whereas the 330,000+ TFWs in the country don't. Of course business screamed at the prospect of a reduction in the stream of developing world cheap labour, which is comical given the situation.

A local television station acquired a video secretly taped at a meeting of some of Calgary's home builders. In it the builder speaking basically states how with the generous spread of campaign dollars, they have three councillors in their back pockets and are trying to get at least five more. Further, he states that 11 of them have ponied up $100000 each to "bring Preston onside" with his Manning Centre and its candidate school.

If you've been living under a rock for the past week, Justin Trudeau was elected leader of the federal Liberal Party. Not that big of a surprise really, but at least it wasn't the coronation that Ignatieff received. So far this has proven to be a nightmare for the ruling Harper Conservative for a couple of reasons.

In my travels on the interwebs, I often come across creationists who like to use the "randomness" argument against, well, non-creationism. The reality is that these people are really just showing their ignorance of science.

Over the past month I've acquired a new mount for my telescope, and also a new telescope. Now in addition to my 127mm (5") Maksutov I also now have a 200mm (8") Newtonian. The Newtonian is photographically quite fast so it provides a wider field of view than the Maksutov. So after many nights of waiting for quasi-clear skies I was able to give both the new mount and 'scope a test run.

Some time ago I ended up on some email list of bloggers. This means I get a litany of emails from various media outlets asking me to review some book or what-have-you. Generally the topic is some crackpot theory or another (the Maya apocalypse has been a fairly constant theme of late) so I've generally just sent the emails to the bit-bucket. Now I assume other bloggers (those with readerships that require the use of more than one hand) also get these and as I do probably ignore them as well. Until today. A few days ago I received one of the review emails from someone in the publicity department of the U.S. Discovery Channel about one of the upcoming episodes of their show Curiosity about solar storms.

Earlier this week, the police forces of Alberta suggested that they should be allowed to impound cars of people who are excessively speeding (going more than 50+ km/h over the speed limit). Naturally those who routinely break the law by exceeding the posted speed limit (usually by 15-20+ km/h) were out whining in force about how bad it is and how it's all the stupid people going the speed limit that are the problem. I've said about those who wish to speed that you may be able to ignore the laws of man, but you can't ignore the laws of physics. To that end this post.

About a week ago I took an an astrophoto of a galaxy cluster, those of you who know me on Facebook have already seen the shot (some possibly on Twitter as well). Though I provided some basic information about the photo, I didn't really do much analysis of it. So this post is to provide that analysis about my first attempt at a really deep (for me) astrophoto. There's a copy of the photo after the cut.

So I'm sitting at home today watching my toddler run around when the phone rings. I answer the phone and someone with a heavy Indian accent introduces himself as someone from technical support and calling me about my computer. Given that I haven't called tech support about any of my computers in decades I'm fairly certain this is the "we found a problem with your computer" scam. So I decide to play along.

With the revelation that it was the Harper Conservatives and not the Liberals that were using a US company to phone voters during the last election one question remains unanswered. What information did the Conservatives give this company? This is important since US law requires US companies to provide their databases of personal information to the US government on request.