ISS and Supermoon

2013-06-26.

The moon is at perigee, so it’s closer in its orbit and a bit bigger in the sky — a phenomenon popularly called “Supermoon.” Some nice ISS flyovers were lined up for the nights the moon was fullest, so I was able to set up the camera on the roof for a couple of 30 second exposures of the ISS streaking by the supermoon. First night was a closer pass, with the station fading to darkness as it entered Earth’s shadow:

Second night was cloudier, with the ISS passing farther from the moon, but I was able to expose the shot a bit better:

And if you want to see just the full moon or just the ISS (with Ursa Major to the side), I got those too:

These have been my best ISS long exposures thus far, but I need more practice with adjusting exposure for our specific night sky, especially as light pollution increases with local development. More of my previous ISS long-exposure attempts here.

Chocolate and Relatives

2013-06-20.

Had a fun weekend visiting relatives in Connecticut for a mini-family reunion, and dropping in on Amy’s parents for Father’s Day. But first, a detour through Hershey, PA, to stop at Chocolate World.

Relegated these days to a marketing sideshow near the main attraction of Hersheypark, Chocolate World is home to the famous Chocolate Factory Tour , a classic dark ride through a simulated chocolate assembly line, punctuated by loud singing cows.

I love dark rides, and Amy hadn’t been there for years, so it was worth the extra hour of travel time just for the experience. And the chocolate.

Then it was up through Pennsylvania, through NJ and NY, over the Tappan Zee Bridge, and into Connecticut to reconnect with uncles and aunts and cousins whom I hadn’t seen for years, visit Stew Leonard’s, and ride a boat around Candlewood Lake.

Then it was down to New Jersey to say Happy Father’s Day to Amy’s dad and congrats to her brother Bob and now-fiancee Eli. We went to church at FBC Westfield and ate at Applebee’s and looked through one of Amy’s old childhood sketchbooks.

Full weekend photoset here. We drove down I-95 coming back, and that was okay, but I really enjoyed the ride up through Pennsylvania; I may drive that way again on trips up north; the mountain scenery (plus skipping I-95 traffic) can be worth the extra travel time.

Richmond Day Trip

2013-06-17.

I had a job interview down in the Richmond area a few weeks ago, and Amy came along for the ride so we could make a small day trip of it. First stop, the opulent lobby of Highwoods One in Innsbrook, a sprawling business park in Glen Allen, VA. (Amy waited in a nearby library while I interviewed.) After the interview we drove down to the Innsbrook Shoppes for some Hanami Sushi.

And then down into Richmond to visit the VMFA and see Rembrandt’s Three Musicians and Stone Operation, as well as some cool Art Deco/Art Nouveau work, an early Gauguin still life, some medieval pieces, and lots of horses.

Outside, it rained on the Confederate Memorial Chapel and Robinson House.

We didn’t have time to do anything else in Richmond, but it’s just a 2 hour drive south of us, so this is by no means our last visit. Full photoset here.

(Sadly while the job interview went well, the opening itself did not pan out, and I am still on the hunt.)

Recent Reading

2013-06-11.

Costco CEO Craig Jelinek Leads the Cheapest, Happiest Company in the World — Businessweek on how Costco is doing right by its workers and reaping profit as a result.

How The Few Have Chosen Inequality For The Many — Despite lots of good economic news, the benefits are not trickling down to regular people, and this is by design.

Ideology is the Enemy: The Creeping Victory of “Consistent” over “Judicious” — On Doug Wilson’s defenses of slavery as “biblical” and other dangers of slavish devotion to theological and philosophical consistency.

How religions change their mind — A brief history of religious cultural adaptability.

Why Following Design Trends Can Turn Your Website Refresh into a Colossal Waste of Time and Money.

Usability for Senior Citizens — Simplicity, readability, and clearly-defined clickable links are good practices for audiences of any age.

Startup Advice — “Simple is good. Be suspicious of complexity.”

Welcome to Google Island — Mat Honan’s clever allegory.

Largest Oyster Restoration Project in the Chesapeake Bay — NOAA attempts to rebuild reefs of Crassostrea virginica, which both cleans the water and feeds local oyster enthusiasts such as myself.

The Gut-Wrenching Science Behind the World’s Hottest Peppers — Smithsonian Magazine on superhot Bhut Jolokia chilies.

Dear Leader Dreams of Sushi — On Kenji Fujimoto, sushi chef to Kim-Jong-Il, a unique North Korea interest piece by Adam Johnson for GQ Magazine.

A Consumer’s Guide to Fake Meat — nice roundup of common meat substitute brands.

Blog-Tied: How a Hunger for Clicks Drives New York’s Brutally Fickle Food Scene

What happens when a 35 year old man retakes the SAT? He says avoid it.

Sriracha

2013-06-08.

BusinessWeek story on Sriracha and its creator, David Tran. I knew about Sriracha long before Oatmeal made it cool, and even from my youth, Huy Fong chili-garlic sauce (or Lee Kum Kee) was a staple condiment for any meal of broiled chicken. Tran’s route to spicy fame is a classic immigrant culinary success story, but this passage in particular jumped out at me:

Seated, Tran and Lam order pho, the traditional Vietnamese soup. Then they squeeze a small amount of sriracha onto a plate beside their bowls. When I squirt a much larger amount of Huy Fong’s sauce directly into my soup, Tran’s eyes open wide. “I’ve never seen it that way,” he says.

I grew up Asian and to me the condiment was always a dipping sauce, not an extra ingredient. On the other hand, these days the pho restaurants where we eat never give us little side sauce dishes, so straight into the soup the Sriracha goes.

Sriracha is actually a fairly mild chili sauce that I would rate as “entry-level,” coming in at about 2,200 Scoville Units. When I want some real heat I usually go with Thai nam pla prik, or siling labuyo at patis in Filipino.

That’s rated at 50,000-100,000 Scoville units, and I’m already getting numb to that. I think habaneros may be the next step.

PRISM

2013-06-06.

An intelligence leak has revealed PRISM, a massive US NSA data mining operation spying on people’s data shared through Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo, AOL, and others. Outrageous, but ultimately not surprising, given that President Obama has, disappointingly, shown himself all too willing to continue his predecessor’s expansion of powers to invade privacy in the name of national security.

Additional reading:

Update: More from Guardian on the whistleblower: Edward Snowden.

Counterpoint from Kurt Eichenwald and David Simon (most famous for The Wire).

Caturday!

2013-06-01.

Who wants to see Martha the Kitten being a goof?

Recent Reading

2013-05-31.

Linkdump of space-related articles that have recently caught my interest:

ARKYD Space Telescope Kickstarter. I didn’t think Planetary Resources, being funded by millionaires, would need to resort to crowdfunding, but really it seems more a public relations project than a plea for cash. And participatory fundraising can be an effective publicity and education tool — I myself pledged $39 to get a “Space Selfie.” Red shirts may be involved.

The Martian Chroniclers: A New Era in Planetary Exploration. History and overview of latest steps in robotic Martian exploration in the context of the Curiosity team’s recent successes, by Burkhard Bilger for The New Yorker.

Stratolaunch and Orbital — The Height of Air Launch. Stratolaunch ran into a few bumps shortly after announcing their plans, when SpaceX decided not to produce a rocket for their air launch platform, but they seem to have found a willing partner in Orbital Sciences, who have experience with aircraft-mounted rockets like Pegasus.

The Future of the Spacesuit. Jetpacks were already a thing with the MMU and SAFER, but future spacesuits may also include gyroscopes to compensate for torque from tools used for EVA engineering tasks.

Memories of Baikonur — Dutch space advocate Remco Timmermans writes a guest post for aspiring astronaut Abby Harrison about visiting Baikonur Cosmodrome for a Soyuz launch.

How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life. On modeling and recreating the Saturn V’s engines to gain engineering insight for NASA’s new SLS rocket.

Mars One Mission Could Go Horribly Wrong — If It Ever Gets Off the Ground. Turns out building a Martian colonization program through an internet-registered reality show is probably not the best route.

Unpack a Meal of Astronaut Space Food — brief history of astronaut food from Smithsonian Magazine.

Yahoo Buys Tumblr

2013-05-28.

So Yahoo acquired Tumblr. This might not bode well, considering what happened to Geocities, or it might bode at least kind of well, considering that Yahoo might have saved Flickr from itself. For what it’s worth, Marissa Mayer has promised “not to screw it up.”

I moved my “tangential hilarity” weblog to Tumblr from Livejournal in 2007, early in an exodus that caught up thousands of teens and fandom communities fleeing LJ’s gradual descent into stagnation following the SUP acquisition. Tumblr offered a fresh new way to publish in “tumblelog” format via a clean and usable interface that made it quick and easy to post, discover, reblog, and host original and found content. The ability to start a blog in minutes, slap a template onto it, and effortlessly populate and share the stream by just pasting links, image and video URLs, quotes, and chat logs — each with its own specialized format — not only removed friction from the blogging process, but further bolstered the web’s naturally postmodern environment as an authorless*, curated remix culture, for better or for worse*.

That whole dialectic of ownership and curation is Yahoo’s to deal with now — along with large volumes of pornography, teenage angst, Homestuck, and poor revenue.

Tumblr’s first employee, Marco Arment (also famous for Instapaper and The Magazine) has reflections on David Karp and the past and future of Tumblr.

Do Tumblr’s Audience Analytics Support its $1.1B Valuation? — by Carson Smith, a coworker when I was at US News & World Report.

* I refer to Barthes’ work on authorial intent in a postmodern context, but remind all bloggers to always be conscientious of attribution.