how now brownpau
I took my newly repaired skates (replaced broken brake harness and rotated wheels) out for a spin today, going up Pennsylvania Ave to the White House, around the Ellipse and down the Mall to Lincoln Memorial, then around West and East Potomac Parks to Hains Point, where I plopped down in the grass, shot photos of The Awakening and National Airport, and generally enjoyed the day off.
(Uploaded by brownpau.)
I opted to skip the Memorial Day Concert at the Capitol and go skating instead, so you can stop looking for me on PBS now.
I was so sure it was going to rain. The radar showed angry red patches of precipitation moving east-northeast from Virginia towards the District. As I walked around the Capitol Reflecting Pool, a brisk south wind rustled the trees, and gray cumulonimbus clouds loomed in the west*.
But it didn’t rain. It got dark and gray and windy for about half an hour — then the sun came out, the wind died, and the clouds continued to the east. Radar showed the rain starting just north and east of the District. A few hours later, the same system brought showers to New Jersey.
It’s not the first time that I’ve predicted inclement weather “in the next few hours” based on similar observations, only to be greeted a little later with a clear sky and nary a sprinkle. There’s something about DC, some kind of weather bubble, that repels precipitation from weaker storms. Maybe it’s a higher dew point caused by the urban environment? Is there something about the topography of the area, or the convergence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers? Any meteorologists out there have clues?
(Or is it the Illuminati’s secret weather control devices being used to give us a pleasant Memorial Day Weekend?!?! SHOCK! HORROR! **)
* The general rule for approaching storms in the Northern Hemisphere is that with the wind at your back, low pressure is to your left.
** It is not.
It’s the scientific consensus that, out at the edge of the solar system, Voyager 1 has crossed the termination shock — possibly again — and is now sailing through the heliosheath, the outer layer of our sun’s bubble of influence. That far from the sun, the solar wind “bunches up” as it slows down against the pressure of the interstellar wind, causing an increase in temperature, and in the density of the magnetic field around Voyager.
It’s hoped that the Voyagers will continue operating long enough to reach the heliopause, that point at which the solar wind starts streaming backward into the sun’s wake, and punch through into true interstellar space. More from the Voyager home page about those outer layers.
The earlier probe Pioneer 10, by the way, is flying in the opposite direction, into the heliosphere, the sun’s wake trailing behind it as it moves through the interstellar medium. Sadly, we lost contact with Pioneer 10 in 2003.
The science and imagery coming out of Cassini at Saturn is simply staggering and beautiful.
Wow. Now that almost* makes the NASA-allocated tax dollars worth it, doesn’t it? More imagery from the Saturn Family on the Planetary Photojournal.
* “Almost,” because we haven’t gone back to the moon or landed on Mars yet. But we’ll get there.
On Mars, Opportunity is literally spinning its wheels, carefully extricating itself from the deep sand dune it’s been stuck in for the last few weeks. The rover was going backwards at the time — they alternate forward and reverse driving due to wheel well lubrication issues — so now the rover is actually moving “forward” out of the dune.
I took images from Opportunity’s front and rear hazcams in the raw image gallery and animated them, for an idea of the rover’s progress: front view, rear view (1MB animated GIFs). Note that these are over the span of several days, which is why the shadows keep changing.
JPL also has a closeup video of Opportunity’s left front wheel spinning in the soil.
Update: Unstuck!
A brief history of the Mac startup sound: in which Music Thing interviews Jim Reekes, creator of the famous chord.
It’s a C Major chord, played with both hands stretched out as wide as possible …. I wanted something really fat, heavy bass, high notes, and a sharp attack. The chiffy sound was from pan pipes and something like a stick hit….
Back in MICA, I used Reekes’ now-famous chord as the intro and bass background for my Sound 1 piece ReEno, a darkened mashup of various operating system startup sounds. (“ReEno” is now an erroneous name, I suppose, based on the entry where I claimed that the original sound had been composed and performed by Brian Eno or Stanley Jordan.)
Update: This video compiles Mac startup and crash sounds through history:
If you thought my long-ago breakup was bad, check out this eBay auction on a diamond ring for a botched engagement. Ouch.
The good news is that he’s back on his feet and happily recovering. We at #mefi are of the mind that he’s much better off now, having escaped from a context where “carats = love.”
The writing lobe has been sort of inactive lately, sorry. Creative energies at a low, I suppose; finding it difficult to devote attention to more than just linklog entries. Hard to even write complete sentences. But I’ll be out of this rut soon. I just need to sleep earlier, watch less TV, and stop obsessively reloading my Bloglines feeds.
