Opportunity Working Its Way Out

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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!

History of the Mac Startup Sound

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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:

Ring For Sale

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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.”

Bit of a Trough

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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.

How to Sound Like Chewbacca

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It’s something I’ve wanted to do ever since sometime in the early 1990s. Back then, we were in Disneyland, fresh off Star Tours, when someone in the souvenir shop gave off a full-throated Wookiee roar. Wow, I thought, I wish I could do that. Later attempts — always in private, of course — would sound rather less than Chewbaccesque, and left me with only a sore throat. It seemed I would never be able to roar like a Wookiee.

Until now.

Thanks to a few tips from AskMetafilter, plus a couple of hours’ practice, I can now produce something approximating a Wookiee roar. To do it, one simply needs to tilt his head back and gargle a tiny quantity of his own spit while executing the start of a yawn. The roar is helped by cracking the voice a bit at the start of the gargle.

It’s nowhere near the original sound effect, which, according to this sound design article, was based on various animal sounds, but it’s close enough to impress little kids at Star Tours.

Here’s the MP3 of me Chewbaccing. Download it and use it for anything you like.

Also see the Chewbacca costume resource.

Q Street Doggie

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(q-st-doggie-1 uploaded by brownpau.)

Sad, forlorn-looking dog behind the fence of that big house at 20th and Q St NW, across from the Dupont Circle Metro exit. Aw!

Jules Verne, Old Earth Creationist

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“192,000 years, my gallant Conseil, which significantly extends the biblical Days of Creation. What’s more, the formation of coal … and the cooling of basaltic rocks likewise call for a much longer period of time. I might add that those ‘days’ in the Bible must represent whole epochs and not literally the lapse of time between two sunrises, because according to the Bible itself, the sun doesn’t date from the first day of Creation.”
-Professor Aronnax, in Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” Book 1, Chapter 19.

Guess the Pun

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The Sith Hits the Fan

Update: Yeah, you all guessed it: WHEN THE SITH HITS THE FAN.