This is so cool - a site that will mix two websites together. You can have The Labour Conservative Party, The Daily Telegraph Guardian, BBC Slashdot, Popbitch Number 10, Chris Applegate Gammie, or most amusingly of all, The Onion White House

We’re going to Mars. Well not us, obviously. Some of us are. And they’ll be American.

Anyway, President Bush today announced plans to colonise the Moon and thence go to Mars.

Going to Mars has been seen as mankind’s next logical step, and Mars has featured prominently from authors like Philip K. Dick, as well as countless films. But will we end up with a future like Total Recall or more like Capricorn One? Well, as a geek and childhood stargazer the idea of interplanetary exploration is a romantic one, but I’m increasingly sceptical.

For starters there’s the cost. The US Government reckons the next 5 years’ R&D will cost $12bn, $11bn from NASA and $1bn in extra state funding. Sounds a lot, but when you put in the context of Bush’s $1.8trn tax cut, it’s buttons. And you could it’s money going into scientific research and development rather than being stuffed into the pockets on millionaires, so it’s not entirely wasted, and NASA are proud of the benefits of the space programme - although beware that old chestnut about Teflon being invented by NASA - actually DuPont invented it in 1938. NASA just used it a lot.

Anyway, back to the space programme. Let’s not lie to ourselves about that scientific research too much - NASA is part of the military-industrial complex. Man would have never gone to the moon in 1969 if it hadn’t been for the Cold War arms race. And that $12bn can easily be spent being given to universities, or in tax breaks for non-military R&D. So spare me the fringe benefits defence.

The core science behind the space programme is much more valid - after all, there are fewer bigger questions in science than “Are we alone in the Universe?”. But as the recent success of the ESA Mars Express and NASA Mars Rover projects (though sadly not Beagle 2, by the looks of things), the exploration of Mars could be done better (and cheaper) with robots. Aside from the transportation problems - cheap, sustainable travel into orbit is still a long way off (a modern replacement for the Space Shuttle is some way off), sending people to Mars would take ages (over a year, there and back), and we have yet to develop sustainable self-contained environments for that amount of time - coincidentally, the Biosphere 2 project today was reported as on the blink of oblivion. As well as that, there is the enormous risk involved, and given the highly critical report on NASA’s working practices after the Columbia disaster (detailed excellently in last week’s Observer) I don’t hold faith in NASA being able to pull off such a grand aim.

Finally, there is also the political doubt. The Apollo missions in the 60s had enormous popular backing, not least because of the late President Kennedy’s pledge to put a man on the moon by 1970. But will the citizens of 2020 look back at George W. Bush and feel so inspired? Or will Steve Bell’s take be a more accurate description of how they look at him? And anyway, we’ve been here before - the previous George Bush made similar pledges as part of his re-election campaign.

As much as it would be very cool to have a man on Mars, I think man’s space exploration priorities are better served with unmanned exploration, for the time being. When getting into orbit is not much harder or unsafe than flying across the Atlantic (actually, that time might be now) - which could take fifty or even a hundred years rather than twenty - then maybe we can think about walking on Mars. For the moment we’re trying to run when we’ve barely even mastered walking.

Recent blog entries have all been slightly high on the bullshit scale, so to rectify this, here is a nice, down-to-earth entry about toast. Why toast? Because I eat a lot of it, and my crappy toaster at home has broken, forcing me to go back to the ways of the caveman, and toast my bread under the flames of the grill, remembering to turn it over halfway through (although I doubt cavemen used Kingsmill medium-sliced white that they got from Sainsbury’s. Or used a grill, for that matter. Or even ate bread, now I come to think of it. Never mind).

So while I pine for my toaster, let me introduce you to sites such as Dr Toast, which includes toast recipes (Something tells me you don’t need to be Gordon Ramsay to get them right) and from the “Didn’t you have anything better to do?” department, you can read Toast Haiku.

Still not satisfied? Why not try looking at the Toaster Museum Foundation? They need funds to build their toaster museum - donate today! And after that, take a look at what objects someone has pushed through toast, but don’t get too hungry.

‘Toast’ is also the name of the highly-acclaimed autobiography of best-selling cook Nigel Slater, and you can sample the extracts on the Guardian’s website. And finally, for all you geeks out there, toast is also the name of those popup things MSN Messenger puts in the bottom-right corner of your screen - if not carefully managed it could result in toast collisions.

Right, that’s enough about toast. I’m going to have to carry on cooking bread under the grill, until I’ve saved enough money for this little beauty…

Don’t say that we deconstruct the text but that the text deconstructs itself. This way it looks less like we are making things up.

A slightly humorous look on postmodernism from an engineer’s point of view: How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, though at the same time quite informative for unartistic types such as myself…

Blogs have been described as the new journalism. But increasingly, as the New York Times reports, blogs are the new group therapy. Many teenagers are turning to blogging to tell the world, or their friends or classmates, their angsts and feelings. And using services such as LiveJournal, kids from the same school can subscribe to each others’ blogs and form virtual communities outside the traditional hierarchies of high school.

It’s an interesting read, although it doesn’t come to any real conclusions. But it has interesting implications - will the generation brought up as teenage bloggers carry on being as candid in adult life? Will they remain as voyeuristic with regards to other people’s lives? What implications does mass blogging have on the boundary between private and public? Will it make us all mini-celebrities?

A slightly late meme transmission from me, but Christmas got in the way and I’d forgotten about it. Anyway, enjoy the House Of Commons Unofficial Calendar 2004, from b3ta, as featured in the Daily Sport.

WARNING: Contains naked politicians (allegedly). Not at all safe for viewing in front of your boss, parents or small children, or if you are of a weak disposition.

President Bush will announce proposals next week to send Americans to Mars

They’re getting a bit desperate in this hunt for Osama Bin Laden, aren’t they?

Bloody hell. Have you seen “Shattered” - the latest offering from Channel 4? A reality TV show where all the participants have to stay awake for an entire week. That’s right. A fucking week.

This could be quite amusing, or it could be the most irresponsible piece of television ever. After all, it is used as a method of torture, and just 4 days of sleep deprivation can fuck you up, so Lord knows what this will do to the poor contestants.

The prize at the end, incidentally, is £100k, although they reduce it by a thousand each time one of the contestants nods off. Which is quite nicely evil. There are 10 contestants in all, five gals, five boys, and one of the side-effects of sleep deprivation is increased libido, so it could get interesting.

Anyway, if Channel 4 are now moving into the fuck-yourself-up genre of Reality TV, how long will it be before we see “Wasted” or “Stoned”? Only a matter of time, surely…