brainwagon

One year ago today, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart on reentry. All hands aboard perished. In honor of the sacrifice these men and women made in the pursuit of mankind’s dream of spaceflight, NASA has designated the Mars rover Spirit’s landing place The Columbia Memorial Station. To remember the crew of the Challenger, Opportunity’s […]

This comes from the betta group on Yahoo. Fire extinguished by exploding fish bowl in Eagan

Pixar has decided to end its negotiations with Disney for a new contract after the current five movie deal expires. What does this mean to the company? Who cares, what I want to know is what does it mean for the stock price!?

I apologize to any of my two or three readers that brainwagon.org (and telescopemaking.org) may have been unavailable for the last few days. I’ve had some problems with DNS and only recently got it straightened out. Hopefully there will be few problems in the future.

Well, it’s 8:40 or so in the morning on Sunday, and I’m surfing to the USGS realtime earthquake website to see if the jolt I just felt was a minor local quake, or whether there is no point to going to San Francisco today. But it appears to have been a minor 3.5 earthquake centered […]

Okay, this isn’t really news. Rush Limbaugh is an idiot. If you don’t know that by now, you’re probably an even bigger idiot. I’ve lately become uninterested in the NFL (baseball being a far more civilized endeavor) so I didn’t realize that Rush had been employed by NFL Countdown Sunday as a commentator. That’s probably […]

While at work late, I felt a pretty good jolt, which marked the arrival of yet another of California’s exciting pastimes: the regular Hayward fault earthquake. Displacement seemed mostly vertical, fairly obvious, but lasted only a few seconds. Once you are fairly sure that the earthquake is not bad at your location, you immediately wonder […]

Today Mars is as close as its been in recorded history, the closest opposition in something like 80,000 years. If you try to go to a local observatory, you likely will just stand in long lines, so I thought I’d give you a few Mars related llinks to sate your Mars craving. A bit of […]

As is typical of males, I forgot a birthday! As of July 21, BrainWagon celebrated it’s one year anniversary. Huzzah! Let the kegs of ale burst asunder, and let there much munching of delectable meats… In the past year I’ve managed 141 entries, most of them about silly stuff. To anyone who reads this, I […]

Well, it’s that time again, I’ve got another production credit on another movie. Pixar is releasing Finding Nemo, starring a young clownfish named Nemo and his dad Marlin. Nemo is captured by divers and put in a fishtank in a dentist’s office, and the movie highlights their parallel adventures to be reunited. I can’t be […]

Los Angeles Times – Editor’s Note details the dismissal of Brian Walksi, former photographer for the LA Times. He produced an altered photograph of a British soldier directing Iraqi citizens to take cover by montaging two photos taken several seconds apart. The trouble is, some people appear in the resulting montage twice. Oops! The L.A. […]

Carmen and I went to the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco today to get away from the war news coming out of Iraq and to get a chance to view a real DaVinci, his famous Woman with an Ermine, which is on loan from the Czartorski Museum in Krakow. There were also a […]

Bill and Anne were nice enough to send me this spiffy postcard from Japan. Mmm. Sushi.

The new up and coming display technology is Organic Light Emitting Diodes, or OLED displays. OLEDs will be cheaper to manufacture, have a much faster response time, don’t need to be backlit, draw less power, are brighter, and can be viewed over a much larger viewing angle. In short, they are very nearly the ideal […]

In a previous article, I posted pictures taken by my friend Phil of the Orion Nebula and hypothesized that they were of a geosynchronous satellite. Afterwards, I posted a plea on sci.astro.satellites.visual-observe, and got a very nice response from Ed Cannon (who also took the trouble to post here, but I missed it! Doh!) identifying […]