Space facts

After watching the 6-part series from the BBC called "The Cosmos" last week, I went fishing for facts to feed my revigourated hunger. I'll put a few here:

• The distance from the surface of Earth to the centre is about 3,963 miles. Because much of Earth is fluid, the solid skin of the planet is only 41 miles thick - thinner than the skin of an apple, relatively speaking.
• You could fit approximately 1,000,000 Earths inside the Sun.
• The surface area of the Earth is 196,950,711 square miles.
• Our Solar System is moving at 43,000mph through our galaxy - the Milky Way.
• Some of the objects visible in Hubble Space Telescope images are nearly 4,000,000,000 (billion) times fainter than the limits of human vision.
• If you suspend three grains of sand in a large sports arena, such as Madison Square Garden in New York, the arena will be more closely packed with sand than our galaxy is with stars.
• The Earth orbits the Sun at an average velocity of approximately 18 miles per second.
• Due to frequent collisions with subatomic particles, it takes a typical gamma ray photon about one million years to travel from the core of the Sun to its surface, even though gamma rays travel at the speed of light (the gamma ray region of light has shorter wavelengths than X-rays). By the time the photon that started out as a gamma ray photon escapes the solar furnace, it has lost so much energy through collisions that it emerges from the Sun's surface as a photon of ordinary, visible light.
• And, one of my favourites(!) - there are more stars in our universe than there are grains of sand on the whole of Earth..

Doping in sport

As a keen fan and follower of lots of sports it's extremely disheartening to read - week in, week out - about doping allegations, testing, confessions or tribunals. It was especially sad, this week, to read (and watch) the tearful confession of Marion Jones, as she admitted to using tetrahydrogestrinone (THG) during her 2000/2001 athletic supremacy.

It has now become commonplace for accusations or discoveries of drug-taking to be made in sport. I find it so difficult to comprehend the rationale of someone like Jones who was a devotee to the sport, a tireless trainer and exceptionally talented exponent in a number of highly competetive disciplines. All I can think is that external pressures of competition and expectation forced her to resort to 'assistance' in an effort to prevail at any cost. Like the Chambers scandal, I feel very sorry for the relay members (who performed with jones) who will now be stripped of medals they were awarded in good faith and as a result of years of hard work.

It's a worrying sign. Sport is, obviously, a multi-billion dollar 'industry' where performance - and ultimately results - mean money. Just like Abramovich tried (and succeeded to an extent) to "buy" a winning football team at Chelsea; Jones tried to buy herself victory with the use of banned substances. I just pray that American Football doesn't take the lead, where players readily and openly use performance-enhancing 'products'.

The scariest part for me is that drug use in sport is very much like virus development and deployment online. The laboratories (or virus hackers) can develop or invent new drugs (or viruses) before the drug-testers (or security firms) can introduce and implement detection procedures. It's going to be a long road ahead for sport and, like Formula 1, it'll be a prescribed procession of the underhand car at the front with the car representing fairness following - and always remaining - behind...