30 years ago, the Iranian Shah was deposed, and was replaced with the theocratic Islamic Republic.

Last week, the Iranian public went to the polls to determine their new president. Since the polls closed, and Ahmadinajed declared the winner, many Iranians have taken to the streets, but there has been an almost complete media blackout.

But the regime has struggled to close all channels, and one of the most prolific has been Twitter. Just looking at the hash list for #iranelection nets an evergrowing number of tweets from people in Iran and participating in the protests that are continuing (and, unfortunately, a lot of hashed spam, too).

I’ve only been following one Twitter account – but what has been posted there is eye-opening and, at some points, rather harrowing. @Change_for_Iran appears to be one or more university students in Tehran, and is apparently reporting events that are happening in and around the part of the city he is in. (I say ‘appears’ and ‘apparently’ because there really isn’t anyway to confirm that a Twitter account is authentic – but in this case, that is a good thing as it makes it harder for Iranian security forces to track the origin of the tweets).

It now appears that the university and neighbourhood have been overrun by the Iranian Republican Guard and there have been shootings and deaths.

Living here in South Australia, it is almost impossible to imagine such a situation – and the same would be so for most of the readers of this blog. We are in established democracies. I don’t know about Australia itself – but that last major riots and protests in the UK were in the early to mid-80s, and they were nothing on the scale of what seems to be happening over there in Iran.

I wish that there were more that I could do other than read these postings, and other images and stories which are filtering through the communications barrier setup in Iran.

I really hope that these democratic reform revolutionaries are successful in achieving what they are working towards – and I really hope that they have outside help (the west was happy to invade Iraq and seek regime change – so why not help establish another democracy right next door?)

I’ve just read that the Guardian Council, the true power in Iran, will recount the votes in the election – but without independent witnesses, any recount is a nonsense.

What with the US presidential elections taking place next week, the news sites are filling up more and more with election related stories (not matter how slight the connection). PhysOrg.com is getting one such story under the radar because it involves NASA astronauts on the International Space Station.

Now, I typically expect some hyperbole and metaphor in a news article – but I was a little surprised at how the article headlined itself in my RSS feed. Apparently, “few ballots will have traveled as far as those cast by two NASA astronauts“.

Hang about, though. The ISS is in low-earth orbit. And space, officially, starts at only 100 kilometres (or 62 miles). In fact, the US sometimes sets the bar that little bit lower at 80 kilometres (50 miles). In contrast, that is about the distance between where I used to work in Basingstoke, Hampshire and the centre of London. In fact, I currently live some 16,000 km or so from London – or about 160 times the distance that currently seperates me from outer space.

Even the article goes on to mention that the ISS orbits at about 220 miles (352 km) above the Earth’s surface.

What with the US having a presence in far flung places like Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and any number of island territories in the Pacific, and the fact that Seattle on the Pacific coast is 3700 km (2300 miles) from Washington, DC, I think that this being the “furthest” vote is quite a stretch.

Of course – of they happen to be exactly on the opposite side of the world, then they will be as far away as possible. I somehow doubt NASA is going to bother to stage that specific event, though, since the actual distance involved is nothing compared to the fact that two votes for the next American president will be cast by people who aren’t even on this planet. That is the exciting precedent here – not a simple marvel of what, at the end of the day, is a simple internet connection from a satellite to a surface station, but rather an indicator of a future where more people will work in the airless region between the Earth and the Moon and still interact with events in an almost humdrum, daily way.