how now brownpau
(Followup from last week.) It took about a month, but with much patience and spinning of wheels, Mars Rover Opportunity has extracted itself from deep sand. Now the rover will examine the terrain to see what caused the stickage, before continuing its southward trek towards Erebus and Victoria, and the “etched terrain” between them.
More from MSNBC, Space.com, the Planetary Society, and Mark Carey’s discussion board.
Really nasty storm tonight: at times the lightning flashes were so frequent that the night was more filled with a continuous electric strobe than it was with darkness, and the thunder was a continuous rumble. I sat by the window with my camera, taking videos and stills. At one point, an especially bright arc was followed by puffs of smoke from where the Capitol Dome would be if I could see it.
My camera, unfortunately, was rarely fast enough to catch the closest, most beautiful strokes. Still, it was worth watching the show. Here were the best lightning photos I managed to snap:
I suddenly have a huge backlog of various things I’ve been doing, reading, watching, using, or following, which I haven’t been writing about; and suddenly I realize I’m behind on it all, with not much time to put out anything beyond linklog sound bites. That’s one of the problems with the interdisciplinary nature of a personal weblog: the buffet is so huge that it’s easy for the plate to fill up quickly. (Or maybe that’s just one of the problems with being a lazy writer.)
Here’s a quick dump of what’s been on my mind: Mars rover Opportunity, the Nokia 6600, Flickr photosets and post-to-weblog issues, Bruce Sterling’s Involution Ocean, Eric Scholler’s Fast Food Nation, American Beauty, Deep Throat, Teddy Benigno, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Imelda, and Apple going with Intel hardware. I’ll try to write about all of it this week sometime this year.
Amy and I went to New York today. The following activities commenced:
And so ends our Saturday in Noo Yawk. Photos from today here.
For the past year and a half or so, my phone has been a Sony Ericsson T300. It came cheap when I upgraded my T-Mobile plan from “Prepaid” to “Get More,” such that the total rebate amount exceeded the amount I spent on buying the plan and phone off Amazon. I got what I paid for, however: a slow phone with poor signal reception, hard-to-press buttons, loose and wonky proprietary charge/headset ports, an extremely SMS-unfriendly interface, and a tendency to fly apart on impact (after multiple falls, admittedly). That, plus a Communicam attachment which snapped decent photos but took forever to upload them to anywhere, made the phone more curse than “communicator.”
When the T300’s charge port started consistently not working properly, I decided it was time for a change. I was torn between splurging on a Treo with PalmOS, or going back to my roots in a Nokia, but this AskMefi thread convinced me to go the Nokia way. The N6600 could perform most personal organizer functions I needed for half the price — but the most prominent disadvantage was that it had a keypad rather than a stylus or QWERTY keyboard. But hey, I’m Filipino; the numeric keypad is second nature.
T-Mobile had just phased out the Nokia 6600, and they were no longer in stock at the local retail store. The up side was that 6600s were going for much cheaper on eBay than ever before, so it wasn’t long before I had landed a decent secondhand unit and transferred my SIM to it.
Coming soon: thoughts on my first month with the Nokia 6600. In the meantime, I’m preparing my battered S/E T300 for a pity listing on eBay.
Update: Nokia 6600 review.
Another space probe to keep an eye on: JPL’s Deep Impact will be making headlines in about a month. On July 4th, the probe will launch a heavy projectile — an impactor — at Comet Tempel 1. Study of the resulting explosion and crater will help scientists learn about the composition and structure of comets, which may reveal clues as to the nature of the primordial solar system.
The mission hasn’t been problem-free, however: Deep Impact has a blurry high-res camera, though NASA says it’ll still produce the best comet closeups ever taken. (Update: Those images will be enhanced via a process called deconvolution.)
More stuff from the official site:
Space.com has a Deep Impact section with news and multimedia, along with a reminder of the last NASA mission to visit and land on a small celestial body: NEAR, which touched down on the asteroid Eros in Feb 2001. And I was posting about it back then. This weblog is starting to show its age.
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.
