brainwagon

Got this link from Josh Bancroft, but was just talking about this with my Mom this morning. She lives very close to the Airport so this is figuratively if not actually literally in her backyard. British Jet crashes at Hillsboro Airshow Ouch! Not fun at all. [tags]Airshow,Crash,Hillsboro[/tags]

Carmen pointed this collection of Zidane silliness on the Register. It gave me a chuckle.

Some neat artwork from the U.S. Naval Observatory, including high resolution scans of some works by Hevelius, Flamsteed, and Bayer. Some of them are very, very cool. [tags]Astronomy,Public Domain Images[/tags] Addendum: Want a PDF containing all the images from the Jamieson star catalog? Your wish is my command. Caution: it’s 25 megabytes.

Without further explanation: [tags]Mathematics[/tags]

It’s no secret: I’m a big fan of free software. That’s another way of saying that I’m too cheap to buy Photoshop. If you are a graphic artist and make money with your images, by all means, you should probably hand over the big bucks and get Photoshop. But if you’re like me, and just […]

Yesterday, Carmen took me and Adam and his girlfriend to the Atheletics/Angels game as a belated Father’s Day present. It was a fabulous day to be at the ballpark. First pitch was at 6:05, the weather was beautiful, and we had good seats near on the field level (far back, but a short row which […]

Jerry Oltion designed created The Trackball Telescope, a telescope which rotates around on a spherical ball. It’s not that unusual to see these “ball” telescopes, but Jerry seems to have come up with a reasonably novel way to drive the telescope so that it will track stars as the earth rotates. Very neat for a […]

Cornell university researchers have apparently cracked the scheme used by the new European Galileo satellites. Galileo is the European version of GPS, but unlike the American GPS constellation which were paid for by tax dollars, Galileo is privately funded and sought to repay their investors by licensing the pseudo-random sequences that scramble the data streams. […]

Not only did this Tasmanian amateurs do something really interesting in establishing voice communications using LED light sources and Fresnel lenses, but they also have a really great website with lots of informative links. Lots of cool ideas here. [tags]Amateur Radio,Light,LED,Communication[/tags]

Dear Lord, it actually gets worse. Like most of the stuff on ID The Future, this one lies right out of the gate: It is no secret that evolution is, at bottom, an idea driven by metaphysical concerns. In a sense, he’s right. It’s not a secret, it’s an outright lie. Evolution is an idea […]

I read a lot about the conflict between science and pseudoscience, which is to say, I read a great deal about the conflict between biology and so-called “intelligent design”. Intelligent Design The Future is a blog where many of the Discovery Institute “luminaries” post their well thought out criticisms of evolutionary thought. Or so they […]

Well, Comcast was supposed to come by yesterday and install my digital cable, but they were a no-show. A call back to them this morning resulted in a $20 credit and a reschedule for this morning, so I’m stuck at home again waiting. Any bets on whether they will show this morning? What is it […]

While driving through Gilroy today, I saw something that I just don’t think you see every day. Stapled to a telephone pole was a sign: LOST: PET TORTOISE 6″ LONG, HAS BEEN MISSING SINCE 6/6 I mean, how does that happen? “I left the door open for just a second, and he bolted out the […]

Apparently the thing that is most worthy of critical comment from Microsoft Vista is that fonts and colors don’t please Chris Pirillo. While these sorts of rough edges undoubtably displease sensitive aesthetes, does anyone else find such pixel-f*cking to be a little misplaced? Is the factor that will decide whether you spend your money on […]

Can someone tell me what the point of Gnomedex actually is? I’ve asked this question before, and I’m still just as mystified. Josh has said “it’s a place to network”, but surely networking has to have some purpose. To me, it seems like a place for bloggers to talk about blogs and bloggers, but the […]