I was researching progressive scan video cameras and came across a short film shot on a Sony TRV900.

This is Flight.357 by Andy Sutton.

A short film I made in 2001 about a guy who when confronted with his impending doom see’s his life flash before his eyes. Low budget, all shot with a Sony TRV900 DV camcorder and edited on the old iMac Graphite. I did the 3d in InfiniD3D and the rest in after effects. No blood or gore, but I think it works.

As for the camera I was researching, the TRV900 has 3 CCDs, progressively scanned for a high quality image. Still rather ‘camcorderish’ but workable for amateur film making as we see here.

It’s an older camera and as such ‘SD’ resolution with a maximum of full-SD PAL @ 720×576. Also included and unusual for a consumer-level camera is a manual focus ring.

Much more information on the TRV900 is to be found here.

International Space Station Expedition 16 have experienced high deceleration forces during the re-entry of their Soyuz TMA-11 flight.

The Soyuz spacecraft was either commanded or automatically entered into a ballistic re-entry due to anomalous data from it’s guidance systems. A ballistic trajectory is considerably steeper than a normal trajectory and causes the aerodynamic braking to increase much faster than during a shallow re-entry. It’s probably testament to the design of the Soyuz that it can withstand such a manouver.

CDR Peggy Whitson, FE1 Yuri Malenchenko and Spaceflight Participant Yi So-yeon experienced up to 10Gs of sustained deceleration to ultimately land about 295 miles off their original target in the Khazakh Steppes . Due to the distance involved, recovery forces took 45 minutes to reach the capsule. The crew were given medical examinations on site.

My understanding is that the ballistic re-entry profile is a fail-safe mode where the full guidance system cannot be relied on to execute the shallow re-entry profile correctly. I would guess that the ballistic profile is initiated by a relatively straight forward extended burn by the motor on the PAO to reduce orbital velocity and create a ballistic descent.

Just a quick note that Parkers has a new UK Road Tax Calculator which works out the tax you’ll have to pay based on the make and model of car that you own.

The emissions based rates are staged over the next couple of years so some car owners will end up paying tax to the tune of £500 or so but some small cars will band A or B CO2 emissions actually see their tax reduce to as low as £20 a year.

It has to be said though that all cars pre-2001 and most cars thereafter will see increases in tax.

Updated, See end of article.

In a startlingly rare example of honorable conduct by a Nu Labour MP, Angela Smith is said to be resigning from her post as private secretary to the chief secretary of the treasury, Yvette Cooper.

Angela Smith has apparently informed colleagues that she cannot support the governments ’scrapping’ of the 10% starting rate of tax which increases low earners tax rate from 10% up to 20%. Compounding the issue is that average earners were given a tax break from 22% down to 20%.

40 other Labour MPs have signed a motion expressing concern at the move which penalises workers who earn less than £18,500 while rewarding those who earn more.

The Tory party have vowed to vote against the low earners tax increase when the Finance Bill is debated.

Update - She’s not going!: It seems that the honor was not quite as great as we were lead to believe. After a chat with ol’ Gordon, Angela Smith has decided to stay in her job.

Apparently she does care about low earners having their tax doubled, just not enough to make a stand about it.

Those low earners being hit by the tax hike will instead have to content themselves with Angela Smith’s ’sympathy’.

…Tanya & the gang want *you* to help them stop it happening.

Background: In an interview with the Royal Telvision Society’s Television magazine, Neil Berkett, CEO of Virgin Media said “this net neutrality thing is a load of b****cks”. He confirmed that Virgin Media are already in talks with big-name content providers to get them to cough up more money to have their service provided faster than others.

Full-on protection racket style.

If you can’t understand why Europeans would be upset at a UK ISP’s actions, it is because destroying Net Neutrality hurts *everyones* freedoms on the internet by handing control of the content from you, the public, into the hands of big corporations.

Naturally, Virgin’s customers seem very upset at the prospect, they are already being hit with traffic throttling between 10am and 9pm and the prospect of an unwelcome third party ‘illegally’ spying on their browsing habits in the shape of Phorm.

Quite why Virgin Media seems so hell bent on commercial suicide is anybody’s guess. Perhaps they intend to get out of the broadband market.

On Saturday we took a trip over to Sywell Aerodrome in Northamptonshire for the 2008 Sywell microlight fly-in. Unfortunately, only a few aircraft attended, probably due to the nasty weather which included sporadic hail and a stiff breeze. Almost all of the attending microlights were 3-axis affairs with just one two-person flexwing in attendance.

Sywell is an all-grass runway airstrip but has just been granted planning permission for a hard-surface runway to allow for winter operations. Inevitably, this runway surfacing has attracted a group of NIMBYs with too much time on their hands who have been protesting the change of surface. I have very little sympathy with such NIMBYs, especially when the aerodrome has existed since the 1920s and used to handle far, far larger (and noisier) aircraft than it does today.