Sunday, December 21, 2008

Is It Space?

Here are a couple prizes that sound like they're space ones, but they aren't:

Alabama Launchpad - In spite of the name, this is a business plan competition. It's oriented towards new technology businesses, so there's no reason a good space business plan couldn't win it, but it's not focused on space.

Griffin Poetry Prize -
There once was a rocket that shook
To save he'd do all that it took
Scrap Science and sats
and airplanes and CATS
and everything else in the book!

Oh, that's not what they were looking for? Sorry, move along ...

The Griffin Poetry Prize is founded by Scott Griffin, who I would hazard a guess is not related to the NASA Administrator. As for Administrator Griffin, I actually agree with some of the things he's done, but, as you might guess from the lame lyric above, I don't agree with a certain central feature of his plan.

Here's one that is related to space, even though it doesn't sound like it: Miami 2008 - A topical conference on elementary particles, astrophysics, and cosmology ... During the conference, we will give software awards to promising young participants in recognition of their contributions to the meeting. The awards consist of single-user, licensed copies of Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, and Scientific Workplace, the latter including a copy of MuPAD.

Today is that last day of the conference. It's just a coincidence that I ran across it today, since for all of the above prizes I was just surfing around the Big Fat Prize list.