Gravity is a very, very weak force. Back in 1798, Cavendish used a torsion balance to try to estimate the value of G, the gravitational constant.  What’s cool is that you can reproduce this experiment yourself.  Check out Bending Spacetime in the Basement, which includes some nifty videos of the torsion balance in action.
[tags]Science,Gravitation,Science Fair[/tags]
It’s now 4:04AM on Monday, and I’m up, typing on my laptop.
Not by choice, mind you. Like most people, I have 40 hours to put in over the next week, and like most people I don’t get enough sleep as it is. But Scrappy is a handful during the night.
You see, he’s still really a feral cat. This means two things:
I’m supposed to keep him quiet and not have any serious exercise, but I’m also supposed to keep him inside. These two goals are simply not compatible. I went to bed about midnight, and slept until about 1:30AM. Then, he started banging his head against my bedroom door. So, I placed him in the downstairs bathroom. Whereupon he urinated all over everything, tore stuff off the wall, and generally had every panic reaction you could imagine.
Now, it’s 4:08AM, and while I’m downstairs on the couch, he seems content (for the moment) to rest at the foot of the couch. I’m hoping it lasts for a couple of hours. Maybe I’ll try to learn something more about Asterisk, and pray for the sun to come up.
I’m supposed to take him to the vet at 9:00. They are supposed to remove his drains and then I can take him home, but frankly if I can’t let him go outside, I’m going to have to have him boarded for a couple of days, for his sanity and mine.
Okay, just for mine really. He’s now crying once every couple of minutes, and the funny thing is, I understand exactly. Neither of us is having the night that we want to. I hope he’s better soon.
Q: If Charles Darwin were alive today, what would he be known for?
A: Longevity. He’d be 197 years old.
For some reason, churches around the world are apparently taking the opportunity to reassert the claim that the findings of science (in particular, biological evolution) are compatible with their religious faith. You can check out this lengthy list of articles to find out more about “Darwin Sunday”.
Frankly, I’m a bit skeptical about the wisdom or the aim of this. Â If you would like people to realize the compatibility of science and your religion, why not work 364 days a year to make sure that they understand the compability, instead of participating in a stunt on a single Sunday. Â In my mind, all this really accomplishes is to provide further fuel to the claims of creationists that evolution is really just another type of religion.
[tags]Charles Darwin, Evolution[/tags]
Well, Scrappy did end up spending the night at the vets. They decided to anesthetize him, install a drain and then make him suffer the indignity of wearing a lampshade on his head for the next three days. On Monday, I’ll have to take him back to have the drain removed, and then in a week all the stitches will come out. Eeesh. Poor little guy. The things we do for our pets.
Well, it’s been about 11 months since our adopted cat Scrappy last got in a fight but he’s back at the vet’s today. He apparently got into another one, and instead of turning his back and getting bit on the rump, he got bit on the face and that seems to have turned into an abscess, so he’s going to have to be anesthetized, shaved and have that drained. He’s scheduled to go in at 4 o’clock, and I can’t think of anything else. Stupid cat. He’s going to have to remain indoors for three days at least, which he isn’t going to like very much either. Perhaps I’ll try to figure out how to finally get him to use a litterbox while I have to endure his howling.
The poor guy really does not like to be put in his cat carrier either. Everytime I put him in, he nearly hyperventilates, and begins to pant horribly. It’s creepy, and scares me, I think the guys little heart is going to burst. Surprisingly though, when you let him out he settles right down, and after a moment or two of trying to hide lets you (well, me or Carmen) pick him up and will just snuggle up and purr. It’s basically claustrophobia: I wonder if he was locked inside some place long ago or abused, but he really doesn’t like to be in a closed area. I’m hoping he won’t
have to spend the night at the vet’s, he’ll feel much more comfortable when he gets home.
Oh well, I know few people probably tune in to my blog to hear about this stuff, but I’m not thinking of anything else today.
Feel the need to lob tennis balls at those who oppose you? Try checking out these rather nice plans for a small trebuchet. With such a mighty seige engine, none dare oppose your military might!
Seriously though, these things are:
Unless of course, you get hurt, in which case you didn’t hear it from me.
[tags]Trebuchet[/tags]
I remember seeing some of these Rube Goldberg devices setup using the Halflife 2 physics engine before, but not many are this elaborate and complicated. There are some really good bits inside.
HL2 Rube Goldberg Device: Reloaded – Google Video
[tags]Google Video,Halflife 2[/tags]
Several weeks ago, I blogged about the volcano on Augustine Island in Alaska, including a link to the Google satellite map of the area. Now, the NASA Earth Observatory has a nice picture of the ash plume from the February 2nd eruption of the same.
Just to refresh your memory, here’s the link to the Augustine Observatory again.
[tags]Volcano,Geology,Augustine Island[/tags]
Honestly, with criminals this smart, how hard can a cop’s job be?
Lori Menzel of the town of Kewaskum said the burglar left his Yahoo account open after checking his personal e-mail on the computer at her home.“He never logged out,” she said, adding: “He made himself at home here. He spent some time in our bedroom trying on my husband’s clothes. I could tell he went through some of my clothes.”
According to my UPS tracking code, my Sipura SPA-3000 should be awaiting me when I arrive home today, and in a timely fashion, I found this link for setting one up to do free/cheap VOIP:
GRYNX » VoIP for free with the Sipura
I’ll post a complete review of the device itself after I’ve tinkered with it for the weekend.
Incidently, if you are using Firefox and Greasemonkey, you can use this script to turn UPS and Fedex tracking numbers into clickable links that go directly to the right page on their respective service for tracking.
[tags]Firefox,Greasemonkey,Scripts,VOIP[/tags]
Just in case you didn’t have enough to worry about on this fine Thursday, check out this interesting article:
Damn Interesting » Parasites on the Brain
Toxoplasma gondii may be the most prevalent human parasite. As many as 50% of humans worldwide, and up to 80% in urban areas, have been infected with it at some time in their lives. An estimated 60 million people in the US have active cases at any given time. It’s a single celled parasite whose favored host is cats. However it can infect and live in a host of other creatures including rats and humans. Most infected people, and most infected rats, show no particular signs of illness when infected. They continue on with their daily life and work completely unaware they’ve been parasitized. But they may not be as unaffected as they seem.
You could also pick up the book Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer for more fun parasite information. It’s part of my bookshelf that justifies my increasing paranoia about squishy things in biology.
[tags]Parasite,Brain,Carl Zimmer,Parasite Rex[/tags]
Find out how popular your name has been over the years. “Mark” seems to have peaked in popularity in the 1960s, while my dad’s name “Vernon” probably peaked back in 1918, and now is all but extinct. Forget about some of my other uncles names: like Clarence, Virgil (never really popular, even in its heyday) and Merle. My uncle Wayne would have scored highly, but even his name is, well, on the wane. Overall, diversity of first names seems to have been declining steadily since the 1950s.  Interesting.
[via Flutterby!]
Need I really say more? An implementation of Babbages Difference Engine, capable of evaluating 2nd and 3rd order polynomials with two or three digits of precision. Needs some video demonstrating it in operation, but wow.
Bonus links:
Double bonus: my favorite Babbage quotation
On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Triple bonus coverage: The British Museum of Science and Industry manual on setting up their Difference Engine to do real calculations.
[tags]Lego,Babbage[/tags]
Fifteen years ago today was my official hire date at Pixar Animation Studios. Because nobody works for a company for fifteen years anymore, I thought it would be nice to commemorate the occasion by asking some of the people that I have enjoyed working with over the years out to lunch at Hahn’s Hibachi, a Korean barbecue place in Jack London Square. I didn’t bring a camera, but Tom was nice enough to snap this picture of the aftermath.
I’m not the kind of person who spends a great deal of time looking toward the past, but I think it’s good to sit back and consider where you’ve been. I’ve been a part of something really terrific, working for the premier animation company in the world, with some of the best people in the world. To all who showed up, thanks for making the first fifteen years of work enjoyable, exciting, challenging and fun.
I was asked to think of what my greatest Pixar moment was, and it really is hard to pick, since there have been so many. Somewhat arbitrarilly, and yet totally worthy, I chose Jen’s invention of “Digital Dailies Bingo” during production for The Incredibles. This neatly solved the problem of preserving the sanity (what little we may have initially possessed) of the rendering team during a challenging production by allowing us to turn the adversity of having shots kicked back for fixes into a game. Inspired team-building brilliance!
Other big ones:
To all who showed up to help me celebrate, thanks a bunch for fifteen terrific years.
[tags]Pixar[/tags]
Addendum: Flicker-ized for your enjoyment.
According to Phil Plait, James Randi ended up in the hospital for a heart problem that required bypass surgery.    Randi is probably best known for his ruthless skepticism of all sorts of paranormal skullduggery, most famously his attacks on spoon bending Israeli Uri Geller. In 1973 he worked with the Tonight Show to change the metal items that Geller was supposed to bend on the show, with somewhat predictable results.
Best wishes for a quick recovery.
[tags]James Randi,Uri Geller,Skeptic[/tags]