Galactic

Because I participated in their first experiment, I just got an email announcing Galaxy Zoo 2. A while back, some astronomers set up a robot camera that surveyed the sky for galaxies, creating a huge picture database. They need them all to be classified; elliptical, spiral, mergers etc. It turns out that humans are still better than machines for this, so that is where the random People of the Web come in - yes, you too can be a scientist for half an hour. So I hereby encourage you to sign up and get classifying. No expertise req'd; just read the help, and don't worry about making mistakes as the same pic is shown to multiple people and some magical maths corrects all the errors.

Radio Update

After a bit of fiddling around, I'm getting a few faint stations from the poor old thing. There's still a fair amount of background noise, but at least this means that the tubes are still working. I cleaned the carbon tracks on the volume/tone variable resistors to reduce some of the crackling, and replaced some of the wires that connect the various in-cabinet aerials. I even made a makeshift secondary AM antenna using a spool of wire and a small square cardboard box, but the hissing remains. A bit of web-wandering revealed that there is a calibration procedure that can be done (someone had actually scanned-in some old Philco repair manuals). However, this is a fairly involved process and needs things like a signal generator, which I don't think I can lay my hands on at the mo. All-in-all I'm pleased with the result, and shall probably document my experiences and put them online in the near future.