Category: Uncategorized

A barren landing site is exactly what they were looking for, since it’s far easier to land on smooth ground than on a bunch of rocks. Phoenix landed successfully yesterday. We watched the live coverage of the landing on NASA TV’s web feed. It’s always fun to watch these big NASA events; we get quite caught up in the excitement as everyone waits to find out whether the last five years of work (in this case) is going to pay off in the form of gathering unprecedented data from another planet, or whether it’s merely going to leave a new crater on that planet’s surface. read more

NASA is landing a probe on Mars today. It’s going to dig samples out of the northern polar ice and soil and analyze them with onboard instruments. The website is here; NASA TV should have live coverage starting later today.

There’s a neat webcam here pointed at a nest occupied by a pair of great horned owls and their two offspring. I think that it’s only a few miles from our house, assuming that it’s near or on the NCAR building.

I’d like to know why they find the camera so interesting. There are times when all of them are staring directly at the camera.

I fell in love with computer games (or video games, as we called them back in the beginning) at an early age. Pong came out when I was around 10 or so, and I can’t think of any phase in my life since in which I wasn’t at least occasionally playing arcade games or computer games. There was a particularly exciting time around ’83 or ’84 when arcade games were nearing their height of popularity and the arcades near campus were having price wars. You could play games for a nickle, rather than the usual quarter. One arcade always had one game set to play for free, just to lure customers. (It was on such a day that I got to level 85 on Tempest.) read more

If you happen to have watched the leekspin videos (which I previously blogged here and here) and thought to yourself “that looks like a good deal of fun, except that leeks are, in truth, far too stiff to spin well,” a solution is now available here in the form of a flexible plastic leek.

Yes, that was indeed a problem waiting to be solved, wasn’t it?

Some clever person has built a little robot that runs around looking for things to drum on, drums on them, records the sounds, and makes little rhythms by playing back the sounds while drumming some more. There’s a web page about it here and here’s one of the several videos of it:

[The video is getting hit pretty hard so it may tell you that it’s not available; try back later if so.]

This is probably the sort of thing I’d be doing if I had more time on my hands. Robots were what got me interested in computers in the first place, but 30 years ago it was a lot harder to build robots than it is now and I never got much further than reading every book on robots and computers that the public library had at the time. read more

It was a pretty morning here. It snowed some last night and the snow stuck to the branches of the trees in a very picturesque manner.

Here’s a lovely little period piece here. It’s a genuine Civil Defense film from 1951. I’m pretty sure that my mother told me she saw it when she was a kid in school. They stopped screening it sometime between then and when I reached grade school. I do remember that they still had sirens in my home town when I was a kid in the early 70s, and I think maybe they still tested them occasionally. Tracie says she remembers doing these drills when she was in grade school in southern California. read more