brainwagon

Johan, ON5EX, reported that he had detected a rocket launch on the Ohio grabber. He gave the following screenshot: Scanning back through my own records, I see that I detected the same launch! I wish the brave astronauts on WA5DJJ good luck. Addendum: Okay, it’s just a bit of thermal drift. As his transmitter warms […]

I wanted some graphics of the entire earth for a little programming project. I found them here: flatplanet maps Addendum: NASA’s Blue Marble: Next Generation dataset is also quite good.

A year ago today, I blogged that Tom Duff had shown me Russell Cox’s blog. I hadn’t kept up with it, so I went over there and found this interesting article on a nifty problem in combinatorics. I solved a somewhat similar problem (counting the precise number of possible checkers positions) but sadly, I couldn’t […]

I imagine that millions of Americans were watching the Superbowl this weekend, and saw the trailer for Dreamworks Monsters vs. Aliens that was broadcast in 3D. Hopefully some small subset of you actually had the glasses that you needed to view the 3D images. I was a bit curious about the technology involved, so I […]

I must admit: I’m separated by 20 years from my college experience, and I still miss it. Not the parties, being single, or even being young, but simply the challenge and excitement of being in an evironment where you are encouraged to learn about interesting topics. I love academia. I like being in the classroom. […]

Here’s the recording. Heard many old familiar calls (VA7VW, N6RSX, W6YX). Hung in there okay until the satellite crossed over the continental U.S., then it got kind of busy/ugly. Fun though! ISS Recording, Jan 14, 04:46 UTC

If you get this tweet, it probably means that the TwitMe plugin for WordPress is working. The rest of you, pay no attention.

Well, after a little over two weeks of vacation (which seemed a lot longer to me) it’s finally time to take a shower, put on some clean clothes and get to work again. Hope everyone enjoyed their holiday. For me and my team, it’s time to finish a movie!

My little feline buddy Scrappy was a feral cat that we’ve adopted. A while ago, we found out he tested positive for FIV, so we decided his days of being a part time inside/part time outside cat were over, and he’s been imprisoned in our house. He seems to have adapted well. Here’s a picture […]

I admit to a fascination with Scientific American. I used to have a couple of decades of the magazine which I kept mostly for the Mathematical Games and Amateur Scientist column. Project Gutenberg has begun to digitize some of the 19th century copies, which are mostly of historical interest, but still can be interesting. For […]

Well, 2008 had its moments, but I’m glad to kiss it goodbye. 2009, bring it on! Tonight Carmen and I decided to stay in and cook: we made some New York steaks, some spinach salad with smoked salmon, and a ratatouille topped with puff pastry. Basically using some of the skills we acquired at our […]

I’m spending way too much time sitting around this morning, surfing the web. I’m gonna stop, but before I do, here’s a link to an interested TED talk about how statistics can be misused to mislead juries.

Thanks to KE9V for pointing me at this lecture by Randy Pausch: httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo I don’t know what rock I’ve been living under, but it’s a fabulous lecture. You can read more about Randy here. As the New Year approaches and some of us might be making resolutions, it’s definitely worth watching.

Okay, I mostly don’t post pet videos on this blog, but sometimes, you just have to make an exception, like when someone decides to give a bean burrito to his dog. Okay, you don’t really need to make an exception. But I did. What can I say, for some reason I never posted anything on […]

I’m interested in mapping and in open source, so it’s interesting to see projects which combine both. Such is OpenStreetMap, a project which not only produces software to use maps, but also relies upon user data to create maps that can be used freely. I heard about this a while ago, but today it came […]