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2008 September 29

Credit & Copyright: Wally Pacholka (Astropics.com/TWAN)

Explanation: Is there any place in the world you could see a real sight like this?

Yes.

Pictured above is single exposure image spectacular near, far, and in between. Diving into the Earth far in the distance is part of the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy, taken with a long duration exposure.

Much closer, the planet Jupiter is visible as the bright point just to band’s left.

Closer still are picturesque buttes and mesas of the Canyonlands National Park in Utah, USA, lit by a crescent moon.

In the foreground is a cave housing a stone circle of unknown origin named False Kiva.

The cave was briefly lit by flashlight during the long exposure.

Astrophotographer Wally Pacholka reports that getting to the cave to take this image was no easy trek. Also, mountain lions were a concern while waiting alone in the dark for just the right exposure.

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The hour approaches. The beast’s jaws gape, its tail quivers and then snap! Another minute has been devoured, and the hour strikes with the ominous clonk of a chain dropping into a coffin. The creature blinks twice in satisfaction.

“It is terrifying, it is meant to be,” said John Taylor, the creator and funder of an extraordinary new clock to be unveiled tomorrow by Stephen Hawking at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. “Basically I view time as not on your side. He’ll eat up every minute of your life, and as soon as one has gone he’s salivating for the next. It’s not a bad thing to remind students of. I never felt like this until I woke up on my 70th birthday, and was stricken at the thought of how much I still wanted to do, and how little time remained.”

via

In the left column, almost at the bottom, you’ll find a little world map with the estimated locations of the last 100 visitors to this weblog, based on ip address.

I’ve been looking at it a few times, and I’m amazed by all the locations you people live at who managed to find my little weblog.

Welcome, all of you! I’d love to visit quite a lot of the places I see on that map…

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Visualizing Early Washington. A project at the Imaging Research Center of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County has reconstructed the original landscape of Washington DC before its radical transformation into a modern capital city.

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A Critical Appraisal of Madness’s Videos

The Prince, One Step Beyond, My Girl, Night Boat To Cairo, Bed And Breakfast Man, Baggy Trousers, Embarrassment, Return Of The Los Palmas 7,Grey Day, Shut Up, It Must Be Love, Cardiac Arrest, House of Fun, Driving In My Car, Our House, Tomorrow’s Just Another Day, Wings Of A Dove, The Sun and The Rain, Michael Caine, One Better Day, Yesterday’s Men, Uncle Sam, Sweetest Girl (Not the official video), (Waiting for the) Ghost Train, Lovestruck, Johnny The Horse, Drip Fed Fred, Shame & Scandal, Sorry, NW5

An Illustrated Guide To… Madness , The Madness Story 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, Official site, Wiki

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Oh ya, did I mention that this thing shoots video?!

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To quote Andy Tanenbaum: “An quantitative increase in order of magnitude needs an qualitative increase in order of magnitude.” Here this effect works out (at least) two ways. One, a large pool of photos (increase in quantity) have to be processed (increase in quality) to become usefull again. Two, the availability of a large pool of photos enables a whole new experience (photo tourism).

But you have to be double smart to first see the possibilities and than to enable them.

(source: UW)

Wait, what?

(update: the kind person who sent me the books admitted to adding that text himself… funny!)

no-one can hear you…. oh, well, go look for yourself…

Thanks, Jim!

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Thank you, Andy!

Thank you, Fai! Thank you, anonymous donor!

Thank you, anonymous donor!

Thank you, Jim.. Thank you, anonymous donor!

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Hey, command-line nerds! You shell geeks over there! Switch over to your browser and go to goosh.org right now.

A couple things to try first (type everything after the “>”):

> place 6266 W Highway 290, Austin, TX 78735

> news mcclellan

> o 1

> web mcclellan

> images firefox fox

That’s right, it’s a command-line interface to Google in your browser. You’re welcome.

If you’d ask me to name who I think is the smartest person I’ve ever known about, I’d answer “Richard Feynman”. Read this article for a few examples why:

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In the meantime, we were having a lot of trouble explaining to people what we were doing with cellular automata. Eyes tended to glaze over when we started talking about state transition diagrams and finite state machines. Finally Feynman told us to explain it like this,

“We have noticed in nature that the behavior of a fluid depends very little on the nature of the individual particles in that fluid. For example, the flow of sand is very similar to the flow of water or the flow of a pile of ball bearings. We have therefore taken advantage of this fact to invent a type of imaginary particle that is especially simple for us to simulate. This particle is a perfect ball bearing that can move at a single speed in one of six directions. The flow of these particles on a large enough scale is very similar to the flow of natural fluids.”

This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality.