brainwagon

Sometimes strange stuff happens, and you just want to mention it. I saw a fox on my way up to the observatory on Friday. I’d never seen one up there before. [tags]Unusual Short Posts[/tags] Addendum: Here’s the satellite view of the Chabot Space and Science Center, courtesy of Google Maps.

I was persusing the top 100 downloads on Project Gutenberg, and noted that they had a fairly nice illustrated book about one of my interests: Egyptology. Even if you aren’t interested in Egypt, it’s got some fairly nice clip art. Manual of Egyptian Archaeology and Guide to the Study of Antiquities in Egypt – Project […]

I mentioned on my blog that the Leonids were peaking a few days ago, but it was cloudy and rainy here, so I didn’t get a chance to see any. Neither did Bad Astronomy blogger Phil Plait, but he has an excellent post with a link to a great all sky video. The astronomers had […]

In what has become a bit of a minor tradition for us, we carted our bodies into San Franscisco this afternoon to attend the SF Auto Show. It’s an opportunity to ooh and ah over some of the more expensive cars, and to sit in a bunch of cars and decide if they have enough […]

I was listening to the classic The Hounds of the Baskervilles for the last few days as I ran around doing shopping for my Thanksgiving dinner. I hadn’t read it in quite some time (despite my oft-mentioned fondness for the world’s greatest fictional detective), and it was a lot of fun. For some reason, my […]

Here at brainwagon central, I’m about to put a turkey and a ham in the oven, I’ve got the potatoes ready to go, I’ve made homemade cranberry sauce, and Carmen’s whipped up her favorite sweet potatoes. I’d like to extend my best wishes to all my readers and to your familes, and wish you a […]

Fox News Preps News Satire Show “The way I look at it, almost every comedy show or satire show I see uses the same talking points against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney,” Surnow said. “The other side hasn’t been skewered in a fair and balanced way.” I sense one small problem with this idea: […]

I noticed by my sidebar that today is J. D. Drew’s Birthday, and I thought I’d thank him by providing a link to the most memorable moment he has given baseball fans everywhere.

Yeah, I know, I said this kind of story didn’t appeal to me. I’m a hypocrite, just rubbernecking my way through life. Let’s move on. Now appearing in the “how retarded could you possibly be” department, is the following story. Some yutz had two Playstation 3s which he advertised for sale via Craigslist for $5000. […]

The news over the last few days has been obsessed with a number of stories that I care very little about. I thought I’d get them off my chest. O.J. Simpson’s is going to tell how “hypothetically” he would have murdered his wife Nicole and Ron Goldman. If you are a murderer, I guess that […]

Well, Project Gutenberg has another installation in their Encyclopaedia Britannica digitization effort. This one includes a number of cool (well, I think they are cool subjects) including Calculating Machines and Calendars. There are also nice maps of Bulgaria, Burma and Cairo. Check ’em out. The Encyclopædia Britannica,Volume IV – Part 04 of 04 [tags]Public Domain,Project […]

Well, I decided somewhat on the spur of the moment to get a wireless webcam for a monitoring application, and I must say, I’m overall pretty disappointed with the Linksys WVC54GC. First of all, it’s a sucky webcam. It is simply nightblind: it can’t take a decent picture in illumination which is even slightly dim. […]

Twenty plus years ago, back when I was in graduate school, I got my first copy of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman. At the time, it was a revelation: a book about computer science that actually taught you deep topics in computer science. Every few years, I go back and […]

Well, my silly cat is at it again. A couple of days ago, I came home and called out the back door for our partially tame, partially feral cat Scrappy. I’ve chronicled his misadventures before. When he didn’t show, I tried the garage, and found him in there. He slowly came in and seemed to […]

Loren sent this around our mailing list at work. The original was a huge gif, I converted it into a reasonably small SWF file. Here is a link to the original, if you have the bandwidth and/or couldn’t view the SWF file above. [tags]Astronomy, Mercury Transit[/tags]