Category: Uncategorized

Gotta interrupt my sporadic coverage of Japan to mention that the weather finally cooled off here:

It was a very long, hot year here. June was the hottest June on record, the spring was the driest spring on record, and the heat was unrelenting through the summer. I’ll be entirely happy to see the first snowfall.

We’re home, after a long but uneventful return trip. I’ve made some notes about other things I want to write; new entries will appear over the next few days or so. (Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m gonna try really hard to actually do it this time…) Here are a few more snapshots for the nonce. They were all taken in Tokyo except for the one of Mt. Fuji, which I took on the train en route to Kyoto. (I’m reverting to using Flickr to post photos because the Gallery feature I used previously seems to not work.) read more

I heard from one person (hi, Mom) that the photos I posted in the previous entry aren’t showing correctly. It should look like a grid of six thumbnails; clicking one of them should start a full-screen slide show. It probably takes a fairly recent browser for all of the bells & whistles to work. If it’s not working at all, leave a comment and I’ll try something else.

If you’re not allergic to peanuts, almonds, or other nuts, you’ve probably never looked closely at the allergy information on the wrapper on a chocolate bar. If you do have such allergies, or (like me) happen to live with someone who has such allergies, you know two things: first, an allergic reaction to foods, even tiny amounts, can kill you; second, every chocolate bar you’re likely to find in any store will say something like “MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF PEANUTS” or “PROCESSED ON EQUIPMENT THAT ALSO PROCESSES NUT INGREDIENTS”. In other words, a plain chocolate bar probably doesn’t have any nut in it, but the stakes are high enough that “probably” isn’t good enough. They might as well say “EATING THIS IS TANTAMOUNT TO PLAYING RUSSIAN ROULETTE.” Tracie is allergic to nuts and peanuts (which aren’t nuts, incidentally) and hence hasn’t had a chocolate bar for longer than she can remember. read more

It seems that Hatsune Miku, arguably the world’s first completely synthetic international pop star, is five today. There’s a staggering collection of tributes to mark the day here, including 20 minutes of video from what’s apparently her special anniversary performance in Yokohama:

I looked back a bit and found that my first post about her was just a few weeks less than five years ago. If you search this blog for leek you’ll find a few other mentions.

Okay, so, I’ve been thinking about this backlog of stuff I have to blog, since I’ve not been blogging much at all in recent times (what? you noticed?), and I was going to put up a photo of a big modular origami project I completed some time ago, but now I can’t find the stoopid photos of the thing. So here, instead, is a neat timelapse video which Chris brought to my attention–watch it fullscreen if you can:

NightFall from Colin Rich on Vimeo.

If you’ve been here before, you’ll now see that I’ve given the site a cosmetic makeover. The main motivation for this was to get rid of the 450-pixel width imposed on photos by the old layout. Naturally I got a little carried away, and ended up with a new layout, a new color scheme, and a new banner photo. (The photo is of the river next to Uji, Japan, as seen from the bridge.) There are also some nifty HTML5 features such as on-the-fly scaling, which means that this site will adjust its size gracefully if you happen to look at it with a cell phone or other small-screened device. Unfortunately I carefully tagged most of the photos and videos I’ve posted in the past to constrain their width to 450 pixels, so they won’t automatically get bigger in the new layout. Henceforth, though, photos will be considerably larger. read more

That is a photo, taken late last night, of the Curiosity Mars rover descending to the planet’s surface, as seen by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Think about that for a moment: NASA sends a robot to land on Mars, and manages to fly it past the field of view of an observatory that’s already orbiting Mars.

That, my friends, is some amazing engineering.

(The photo came from NASA’s site, where you can find coverage of the Curiosity rover and other amazing things.)

The fire near Boulder is now mostly under control and the pre-evacuation notices have been lifted. Little fires keep starting anew because of lightning strikes but so far they’ve all been extinguished rapidly.
So, for now at least, the worst is over. Here’s what the arealooked like last night–click it to get a full-sized, un-truncated version: