No, not the Princess hotel, although I’ve heard that’s very nice. Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn from Thailand visited La Palma on Monday, and stayed the night. In the morning, she inaugurated the Siam Park in Tenerife, which will be the biggest aquatic theme park in Europe when in opens. Then she came to La Palma and visited the observatory, where she visited the huge new Spanish telescope GranTeCan (Gran Telescopio…
Wild Cherry Tomatoes
These tomatoes grow wild on La Palma, and they’re about the size of marbles. The locals call them tomates bicacaros and don’t think much of them, perhaps because people used to eat them when they couldn’t afford anything else. I believe that the only reason they don’t sell for some daft price is that they’ve got very thin skins, so they don’t keep. I have some in my garden, and…
The LHC
Well the Large Hadron Collider is finally up and running. I’m used to big science facilities, but man, it’s huge. Of course some people got the idea that it was dangerous. My favourite is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt1Yo610lG0, by a guy that reckons that the LHC is solely designed by the masons (scientists are exactly the same as masons) to disrupt the Van Allen belt and allow Satan to come back. I…
El Hierro
View from La Peña, El Hierro, the smallest of the Canary Islands No, this blog’s still about La Palma. But there’s practically nothing on the web in English about El Hierro, compared to not much on La Palma. And I thought that anyone trying to decide which one to visits would appreciate at least a little information. El Hierro is shaped roughly like an equilateral triangle sucking its cheeks in….
R.I.P. Florian Goebel
Florien was the project manager for MAGIC II, the second of the huge Cherenkov telescopes at the Roque de los Muchachos. The telescope was due to be inaugurated next week, on the 19th. That’s been delayed now, because somehow he fell from the prime focus tower in the dark last night. The tower is about ten metres (33ft) high, and Florien’s dead. I only ever had one conversation with him….