RoD Has a Column in MB
I'd like to plug this before Saturday rolls around: Read or Die, a non-profit organization that aims to promote literacy in the Philippines, now has a twice-a-week (every Saturday and Wednesday) column in the Manila Bulletin. Miss Tin Mandigma is currently maintaining it. The first writeup came out on December 22, and could be read here.
If you're interested in helping raise literary awareness in the Philippines, I hope you'll follow this column and keep an eye on RoD's many projects.
Have just been a bit busy/scatterbrained, but should be writing an essay on efforts to promote literacy alongside Philippine speculative fiction sometime. Although perhaps, that's self-explanatory right there?
PS: In case anyone tried to respond to a post on this blog within the last 24 hours, my apologies: I was trying out a plugin that was apparently not working. It took me a while to log back in and fix it. Comments should be working fine now.
Christopher Go: a Filipino Discoverer
Apparently, I wasn't reading the newspapers last year. I missed the story that came out on Christopher Go, the Cebu-based Filipino astronomer who discovered that a former white spot in Jupiter had turned red. He was accepted into the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society in September 2006.
Thanks to Charles for the info! Mr. Go's dedication as an amateur astronomer is simply inspiring.
Browsing through Mr. Go's homepage, I came across the photos he took of the 2001 Leonids [ Youtube ]. I vaguely remember looking forward to this event and uh, sleeping through it ^^; Not that I had a telescope or anything, but I would've wanted to be with friends who'd gathered out in wide empty spaces just to see it.
It seems it's being predicted that the next meteor storm of such a scale would occur only in 2099.
I suck.
Would be great to be alive in 2099 just to see that, though.