From where I sit

Mosaic of Spitzer Space Telescope images at Adler planetarium

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:27:28 GMT

Ever wonder what the Milky Way galaxy looks like in infrared?

http://bit.ly/360x2MilkyWay

Now you know.

Read more about that here: http://is.gd/5ab0b (Bonus points for spotting where Phil's detail image fits into the whole.)

High-speed photography of high-speed objects, slowed down

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:51:57 GMT

Thanks to Doug at The Drex Files for passing this along.

Did you ever wonder what bullet impacts would look like if they were filmed at a million frames per second, then slowed down so that you could actually, you know, see the bullets? Okay, maybe you hadn't, but here anyway is ten minutes' worth of spectacularly sharp footage of that very thing.

The only thing about this I'd have changed is the music which was chosen to accompany the pictures. If you like, try turning down the sound on the above vid and listening instead to the music which goes with this clip -- just have it open in another tab.

Firefly meme (nicked from dalaire)

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:06:03 GMT

I haven't really watched much of the show, but this sounds okay:

Your results:
You are Derrial Book (Shepherd)

Derrial Book (Shepherd)		65%
Dr. Simon Tam (Ship Medic)		60%
Malcolm Reynolds (Captain)		50%
Jayne Cobb (Mercenary)		45%
Alliance		45%
River (Stowaway)		40%
A Reaver (Cannibal)		40%
Zoe Washburne (Second-in-command)		35%
Wash (Ship Pilot)		35%
Kaylee Frye (Ship Mechanic)		35%
Inara Serra (Companion)		25%

Even though you are holy
you have a mysterious past.

Click here to take the Serenity Firefly Personality Test

Charlie Hunter Trio

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 02:05:22 GMT

Just ran across this today. It's a 1993 live show, with the Charlie Hunter Trio playing "Dance of the Jazz Fascists", a tune from their first CD. The sound is a little murky in places, as club recordings can be, but the performance is pretty impressive.

Well, that's one way of saying it... (Engrish Dept.)

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:10:59 GMT

Happened across this, while looking for something else:

http://wiudwing.blogspot.com/2008/03/whole-world-ghost-different-trees.html

It's a blog entry containing a number of photographs of trees which are impressive or remarkable for one reason or another. They're nice pictures, but what makes it special are the descriptions which accompany each photo. These you must experience for yourself; there is no other way.

Virgin Galactic

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 04:44:37 GMT

Reposting from this entry at DrexFiles:

Go here and click “view the movie”. It will take your breath away!
THIS is the real start!
http://www.virgingalactic.com/flash.html?language=english

Yeah, it's technically a six-minute commercial... technically... but have a look, anyway.

Suppose you had an aluminum can...

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:45:37 GMT

...and suppose that can had a pinhole in it, and suppose that you lined that can with photographic paper and placed it upon a Czech radio telescope and left it there. At the end of one year, what would be the result?

This, apparently.

Wallpaper meme (nicked from Red & Liz)

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 15:47:43 GMT

01. Anyone who looks at this entry has to post this meme and their current wallpaper at their livejournal.

This is what it looks like:

Chosen because:

* It's from the current Star Trek movie, which has been occupying no small amount of my time, over the last quite a few months.
* Even in the trailer (from which the cap was actually taken, months before the film's release) it has a definite urgency and dynamic feel for the second or second and a half it appears on screen.
* It's mostly dark -- I don't like backgrounds which are too bright
* It fit nicely with the icons and gadgets already part of the desktop and required no alteration.
* It's... you know... space: disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence.
* Hey, I just liked it, okay?

03. Don't change your wallpaper before doing this! The point is to see what you had on!

This is the sort of thing which makes me really like the Bunny comic

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 09:12:07 GMT

http://www.bunny-comic.com/index.php?id=1329

http://syndicated.livejournal.com/bunnycomic

Thanks, Huw.

Writer's Block: Words to Live By

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 04:01:02 GMT

What is your personal motto or favorite quotation?

View 500 Answers

"Always do right; this will gratify some people and astonish the rest."
-- Mark Twain (Note to the Young People's Society, Greenpoint Presbyterian Church, 1901)

The Meme (nicked from PHJ)

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:50:38 GMT

"The Meme, The"
"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I honestly couldn't say whether I've read every last word, but certainly an overwhelming majority of it.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty-four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Certainly not all of it, but quite a bit -- much of it I enjoyed.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (Couldn't understand what so many people saw in it.)
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (Tried and failed.)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (Tried and failed.)
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Hmm, redundancy?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Didn't understand what was so marvelous about this one, either.)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (Tried and failed.)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (Never finished.)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (Another redundancy, but good enough to have its own spot, anyway.)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

All right -- who broke the Internetz?

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 18:40:00 GMT

All I've found so far is a Google News hit for an article which I am at present unable to read. From the Google results page:

"Web sites under attack
InfoWorld, CA - 5 hours ago
McAfee reported more than 200000 Web pages infected by an automated attack against phpBB software. phpBB is an open source Internet forum software product ... "

And that's all I've got.

Anyone know any more?

"Dynamo"

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:28:34 GMT

I have a habit of stumbling across one thing while looking for another thing altogether. What I stumbled across this morning was a blog entry about a short animated film which the blogger claimed was awesome.

He was right; it is.

It can be found here:

http://www.area-56.de/chapter56/2007/01/awesome-short-film-dynamo.html

See what you think.

Nicked from double-oh-memeage

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 01:29:05 GMT

My LiveJournal Friends

Try out this Meme

Brought to you by NardVille

BWAHAHAHAHA -- Happy Halloween

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:39:56 GMT

See here:

http://www.petpresident.com/nosfera.html