Cherry Blossoms, 2013

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These young cherry trees near our apartment blossomed early, catching the last snow of the winter in late March:

Snowy Cherry Blossoms

We visited the Tidal Basin that weekend to see if the DC blossoms had started, but there were only buds.

Tidal Basin with pre-blossom cherry buds

I returned a week and a half later to find the blossoms at their peak. It was Wednesday evening at sunset.

Cherry Blossoms Cherry Blossoms

We returned again that weekend after church to see the last of the blossoms; already many had lost their petals and green leaves were gradually replacing the pink flowers, but there were still many trees in full bloom.

Cherry Blossoms Cherry Blossoms Cherry Blossoms

Full Cherry Blossom 2013 photoset here, and I have an unbroken collection of cherry blossom photosets going back to 2004.

Boston Marathon Bombing

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Explosions at the Boston Marathon. People killed, including a child; grisly injuries among runners and spectators.

May all affected find aid and comfort, and the bombers be brought to justice.

Update: Speaking of bringing the bombers to justice, a timeline of the hunt for the suspects, and profiles of the Tsarnaev brothers from NYTimes and Boston Globe.

Recent Reading

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The Touch-Screen Generation. Young children—even toddlers—are spending more and more time with digital technology. What will it mean for their development? (The Atlantic)

In the Passover haggadah, enigmatic bunnies multiplied like rabbits (Washington Post, Menachem Wecker — a former coworker at US News)

As employers push efficiency, the daily grind wears down workers. Many businesses no longer want long-term relationships with their employees, who must now work harder without getting financial and psychological rewards that were once routine. (LA Times)

The 25 Least Visited Countries in the World (Gunnar Garfors)

Why Media Sites Should Adopt Responsive Design (PBS MediaShift Idea Lab)

The Chemistry of Kibble. The billion-dollar, cutting-edge science of convincing dogs and cats to eat what’s in front of them. (Popular Science)

Glass Works: How Corning Created the Ultrathin, Ultrastrong Material of the Future. (Wired)

Winter is Here: How Game of Thrones became the most important show on television (Grantland)

The Mad Men Account (Scathing Feb 2011 review of “Mad Men” by Daniel Mendelsohn for The New York Review of Books)

Why Dictators Don’t Like Jokes. Pro-democracy activists around the world are discovering that humor is one of the most powerful weapons in the fight against authoritarianism. (Foreign Policy)

Snapshots from Hong Kong: Photo Tour of 7-Eleven (Serious Eats)

Matt Groening’s Artwork for Apple (Vintage Zen)

Timeline of 10 Famous Fonts, an infographic (The Mines Press)

So you got a Raspberry Pi: now what? (Engadget)

Re-owning

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The transient instability of social media serves as a reminder that I should refocus on my personal website as the core of my online presence.

Continue reading Re-owning

Sidebar LifeStream Change

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Until recently I was using a Friendfeed embedded badge for my Lifestream (a peripheral sidebar content freshener) but from March 8th onwards my Friendfeed stream simply stopped updating from any services or feeds. I don’t understand it, as other Friendfeed accounts still seem to be updating, but considering how support and innovation on the site have pretty much ceased since the Facebook acquisition, this seems a good time to switch Lifestream embed sources.

So I’ve replaced Friendfeed with Twitter and Flickr badges. The main loss is that my Tumblr, YouTube, and other feeds won’t show up anymore, but if the content is important enough I can either tweet a link, or post it to this weblog. (I refuse to auto-tweet from outside services.)

Really, over time I’d like to get rid of third-party sidebar badges and just make this weblog into a more tumbl-y stream of links and content; more “fireball” if you will. That’s how it used to be.

Recent Reading

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More space-related reading from recent weeks:

Why can Hubble get detailed views of distant galaxies but not of Pluto? (Emily Lakdawalla for Planetary Society) Because galaxies are really big and planets are really tiny by comparison and Hubble was made to look at big things.

Up: the story behind Richard Branson’s goal to make Virgin a galactic success (Adam Higginbotham for Wired UK)

Swimming with spacemen: training for spacewalks at NASA’s giant pool (Lee Hutchinson for Ars Technica)

AmericaSpace Exclusive Interview With Golden Spike’s Dr. Alan Stern — former NASA scientist Alan Stern headed up the New Horizons mission to Pluto, and now is President and CEO of Golden Spike, a private lunar exploration company.

Space Launch System Truths and Misconceptions — another AmericaSpace interview, this one with Dan Dumbacher of NASA, whose agency title is a mouthful: Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems in the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. (Mostly meaning “person in charge of Orion capsules and the big rockets that launch them.”)

China’s Long March 5 Will Not Launch Until 2015 (Bradley Perrett for Aviation Week) On delays affecting China’s production of future rockets.

NASA’s LRO Sees GRAIL’s Explosive Farewell — As the GRAIL spacecraft crashed into the moon at the end of their mission to observe lunar gravitation, the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter was able to observe the plumes of dust kicked up by the impact.

Green East Coast Meteor

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Saw a bright green fireball in the sky tonight, low over the northern horizon (as seen from Fairfax) going west to east. I couldn’t get a photo in time, but I sketched it with Paper app on my iPad mini while the image was fresh in my head.

Quick Paper app sketch of East Coast meteor tonight

This fireball was nowhere near the intensity of the Chelyabinsk meteor, but was still high and bright enough to be seen all up and down the east coast. The CapitalWeather story on the event has a couple of videos, and the American Meteor Society’s update has an approximate ground track.

Looks like any fragments from the object probably landed in the Atlantic Ocean. (I wonder if the green color of the fireball was from oxidation of metallic compounds consistent with a spent rocket stage. The west-to-east track might be consistent with the angle of some past low earth orbit launch. This is all speculation, though.)