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The results suggest the Milky Way is roughly the same size as Andromeda, the largest galaxy in our local group.

What is more, it is moving 15% faster than earlier predictions.

The greater mass means that future collisions with nearby galaxies could happen sooner than thought, according to the researchers.

Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, US, and his colleagues made use of the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) to deduce the Milky Way’s size and speed.

Dr Reid was speaking at the 213th American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Long Beach, California.

The VLBA is a system of 10 radio telescopes scattered across and around North America that together allow unprecedented resolution in astronomy measurements.

This resolution, according to the CfA, is equivalent to being able to read a newspaper in Cairo from an armchair in Edinburgh.

By using the VLBA to measure the apparent shift of far-flung star-forming regions when the Earth is on opposite sides of the Sun, the researchers were able to measure the distance to those regions using fewer assumptions than prior efforts.

“These measurements use the traditional surveyor’s method of triangulation and do not depend on any assumptions based on other properties, such as brightness, unlike earlier studies,” said team member Karl Menten of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.

The results show that the Milky Way is about 15% wider than previously thought.

Spinning around

Tiny shifts in the frequency of the radio emission that arise because the regions are moving gave the researchers an estimate of how quickly the Milky Way rotates around its centre.

They estimate this to be about 914,000km per hour, significantly higher than the widely accepted value of 792,000km per hour.

That speed, in turn, allowed the astronomers to calculate the total amount of dark matter in the Milky Way - the invisible component that makes up the majority of the galaxy’s mass.

The researchers estimate that the Milky Way contains about 50% more mass than earlier predictions - putting it on a par with the Andromeda galaxy, previously thought to be our much bigger neighbour and the largest in our Local Group of galaxies.

“No longer will we think of the Milky Way as the little sister of the Andromeda Galaxy,” Dr Reid said.

That higher mass makes for a higher gravitational pull, suggesting that collisions with Andromeda and other nearby galaxies may happen much sooner than thought - but still billions of years in the future.

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No one wants the Palestinians, they want to support them from afar.  Proof of that is the recent efforts to secure Egypt’s borders physically and with increased border guards, at least 300 Egyptian border guards have been rushed to the area to reseal the border.  Egyptian border guards have opened fire on Palestinians, injuring several.  (AP via ATS)

But never fear, Cynthia McKinney is on the Palestinians side. 

the ex-congresswoman and elongated-time activist for the palestinians was among a agglomeration of individuals turned forsake after their boat tried to enter israeli waters in an attempt to land in gaza to assort medical supplies. green party presidential applicant cynthia mckinney, unimpeded by the “closed military zone” imposed by israel, was among 16 people aboard a medical supply boat that collided with an israeli naval ship tuesday as it tried to enter coastal waters all gaza.

The yacht, owned by the U.S.-based Free Gaza Movement,(Fox, via ATS)

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Cynthia McKinney is not alone in her support for the Palestinians. 

annie lennox and bianca jagger, along with communists, anarchists and shahid, all sharing a low-grade interest, standing together against israel and for hamas.  continue reading at cristy li, and many thanks to her for the images.

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Jett Travolta, right, joined his father weeks ago in Paris, where John Travolta has been filming a movie.

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"At this point, we know that John Travolta and Kelly Preston’s only son, Jett, had a seizure at around 10 a.m. this morning," attorney Michael Ossi said. "All attempts to revive him were unsuccessful."

The boy hit his head after the seizure, but the exact cause of death is not known, Ossi said. An autopsy will be conducted Monday. His body will be transferred to Ocala, Florida, for burial, he said.

Jett’s death "was completely out of the blue," he said. "John and Kelly are happy when their children are happy. This is the worst day of John’s life."

Watch John Travolta and son Jett in Paris »

The Travoltas also have a daughter, Ella, 8.

Bahamian police said a caretaker at the West End resort where the Travoltas were vacationing found the teenager unconscious in the bathroom. Jett Travolta was taken by ambulance to Rand Memorial Hospital in Freeport and was pronounced dead on arrival, police said. iReport.com: Can you relate to the loss of a child? Share your story

Jett’s death was mourned by the staff and residents of West End, where the Travoltas were beloved members of the community, Obie Wilchcomb, former minister of tourism for the Bahamas, told CNN’s Larry King.

"We in West End had admired Mr. Travolta and his wife, Kelly," Wilchcomb said. "The people of the community of West End, particularly those who work at Old Bahama Bay, certainly today were in such shock, and they felt the tragedy because they had become a part of the community."

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Wilchcomb said the Travoltas’ love and affection for their son was apparent to those in the community.

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"Mr. Travolta spent a tremendous amount of time with his son, Jett. He never left him at home. He always brought him with him. And once you saw John Travolta, you saw his son, Jett. They were very close, very affectionate. Lots of love, you see at all times," Wilchcomb said.

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a cnn figures shows that: “eight in ten americans said obama inspires confidence, can detail things done and is unfeeling enough to be president, three characteristics americans look for in a leader and the three qualities on which obama got his highest scores.” that’s the foremost number an incoming president has gotten on that dimension …

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paul shanklin, a guy who writes political parodies for scamper limbaugh, came out with the song “barack the magic negro,” set to the tune of “pump up the magnetic dragon.” limbaugh played it on his show. you can listen to the song here (sorry, there aren’t any visuals, scarcely the song). as you’d predict, the song has …
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i am very excited about this movie, mostly because dan brown’s earlier book made into a silent picture, “the da vinci code”, was so dang disappointing, and this enlist is at hand ten times better than da vinci (take my word for it - you need to assume from it!). here’s the newest trailer: good no? i emergency to …

Roy Saari, 63; USC swimming star won gold and silver in 1964 Olympics

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roy saari, a usc swimmer whose odd kicking style propelled him to swim the first sub-17-tiny 1,500-meter freestyle hurry and later win a gold medal in the 1964 olympics, has died. he was 63.

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etherpad is not promising to win a prize for its user interface design, but it may just be one of the most useful entanglement apps we have seen in quite a while. etherpad allows you to instantly produce a workspace on account of text documents that you can then share with your colleagues, clients, or friends. every edit to the document will immediately appear on your co-workers’ screens in real-time.

EtherPad acknowledges that Google Docs already allows for a similar kind of collaboration, but compared to EtherPad, Google Docs is clunky and slow when you just want to collaborate on a simple text document.

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editor’s note: looking back over 2008, there were some posts on readwriteweb that did not subvert the attention we felt they deserved - whether because of timing, competing dirt stories, etc. so in this extinguish-of-year series, called redux, we’re resurrecting some of those hidden gems. this is one of them, we hope you enjoy (re)reading it!

EtherPad would be a great tool if you want to keep collaborative notes during a conference call or meeting, but you could also use it to draft or edit text for a press release or email collaboratively.

No Sign-Up

EtherPad, for example, doesn’t require you to sign-up before you start working on your document. You can also just share your workspace’s URL with your co-workers and they, too, don’t have to sign up. Indeed, you can’t even sign up for the service, which may become a bit of a problem if you want to go back to a document you worked on earlier but don’t remember the randomly assigned URL.

Google Docs requires you to send an email invitation to all your collaborators, and updates to documents don’t appear in real-time.

Features

EtherPad also has a versioning system that allows you, or anybody else with access to your workspace, to save the document at any time.

Developers who want to share code might also find this a useful tool, as it can highlight JavaScript syntax. Looking at EtherPad’s heritage, it becomes clear why the developers added this feature. The service was developed by AppJet, an online web programming platform, and is basically a showcase for the next version of AppJet’s tools, but was mainly created because the developers at AppJet were looking for a tool that had EtherPad’s functionality but weren’t able to find one.

Verdict

As is often the case, the most useful tools are those that have a relatively restricted feature set but allow users the freedom to use them as they see fit. EtherPad is one of these services and it will probably become a standard tool for us very soon.

You can find a screencast of the product here, but given that you don’t have to sign up for it, you may just as well try it out for yourself (or join this workspace we already created).

review

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Earlier in the week, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim signed former Colorado Rockies’ closer Brian Fuentes to a two-year, $17.5 million dollar contract with a club option for a third year. The Angels now have their replacement for Francisco Rodriguez, who signed with the New York Mets earlier this offseason. The Rockies simply didn’t have room in what is looking to be a crowded back end of their bullpen to retain Fuentes.

Fuentes had 30 saves in 34 chances in 2008 after regaining the closer’s role in Colorado, which he had lost in 2007. He is a three-time All-Star (2005-2007), and has 115 career saves.

Fuentes finished 2008 strong, going 16-for-16 in save opportunities and a 1.75 ERA after the All-Star break. Also, he had a 1.84 ERA on the road in 2008, so a move out of Colorado should be a move that will benefit him. He is also originally from Merced, California so he may have wanted to play closer to home as well.

Fuentes becomes part of a strong Angels’ bullpen, with setup men Scot Shields, Jose Arrendondo and others. That means he should get plenty of save chances as long as the Angel offense doesn’t suffer a too much of a drop-off without 1B Mark Teixeira.

Fuentes could be a nice potentially low cost-high upside fantasy closer in 2009, now that he’s pitching for a better team and will probably see more save opportunities then he has in the past. He’s got a chance to top 40 saves, and probably won’t cost you as much on draft day as the other closers that may put up similar numbers.

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first team qb tim tebow, jr., uf, 6-3, 240 highlights: one of the most celebrated players in the game’s history, tebow led the gators to a 12-1 record capped by uf’s fourth-quarter comeback against alabama in the southeastern conference championship game. he accounted for 40 tds on the season, throwing inasmuch as 28 compared to only just two interceptions. though tebow finished third in heisman balloting, he received the most first-part of the country votes.

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At the same time that Flickr are demonstrating idiocy in the human resources department, they continue to do so some very cool stuff behind the scenes.

Aaron has been walking through some new API methods over on the Flickr code blog, quoting something I said in a chat with Steve Ivy:

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something:somethingelse=somethingspecific

…which I don’t even remember saying but the shoe fits.

There’s something about the mix of rigidity and haphazardness in machine tags that appeals to me. While they all share the same structure, everyone is free to invent their own usage. If machine tags were required to go through a specification process we would have event:lastfm=... and event:upcoming=... instead of lastfm:event=... and upcoming:event=... but really, it simply doesn’t matter as long as people are actually doing the tagging.

With the introduction of these new API methods, it looks like there’s room to build more finely-tuned apps to pivot around namespaces, predicates and values.

Paul Mison has written an desktop-like machine tag browser which shows at a glance just how many different machine tag namespaces are out there. Quite a few pictures have been tagged with adactio:post=... since I first introduced the idea.

Tagged with flickr tagging machinetags

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