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 landing spot is designated The Challenger Memorial Station.

Best wishes to their friends and family. The memory of their courage is not forgotten.

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 in Lafayette. Guess Fisherman’s Wharf will still be there.

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 a good thing, because I can’t think of a more
fatal affliction for a sports announcer or commentator than to be egotistical enough to think that
the program they are on is about who they are and what they think.

Rush Limbaugh is afflicted with this particular fault in spades. On this particular occasion in a discussion on the low ranking of Donovan McNabb, Rush opined that in fact McNabb wasn’t
really good, and that he was merely being trumpeted as a media darling because he happened
to be a black quarterback.

One wonders why he didn’t follow this statement up with the logical extension: that this NFL affirmative action program was costing some talented white quarterback from getting a crack
at the big time.

I suppose before this I remembered that McNabb was in fact black. I remember that Ray Rhodes
is black. I remember that Warren Moon was black. I remember that Randall Cunningham was black. But when you bring up their names, what comes to mind is not the color of their skin, but
what they do on the field.

It’s a pity that Rush can’t put his own agenda in neutral long enough to concentrate on
the game. Some of us care more about the colors of uniforms than the players wearing them.

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 “is the rest of the Bay Area in ruin?” A quick trip to the USGS real time earthquake map for California assured us that the earthquake was a reasonably small 3.9 earthquake centered a couple of kilometers from our location. The USGS has a automatically generated page to describe the event. Whew! Guess the house will still be standing when I get home tonight.

On the right you can see traces of the earthquake activity. You can see that activity continues for up to a minute after the initial quake. They run these detectors at high gains so the display is significantly clipped.
Neat.

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 literature never hurts, and you could do worse that reading the classic
War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, courtesy of Project Gutenberg. If you’re not up for a book, you could try listening to Mercury Theater production of War of the Worlds by Orson Wells.
If you are feeling a bit more musical, perhaps you can try Holst’s Mars, the Bringer of War

If you’d like to keep up on what Mars looks like, try the
International
Mars Watch website, and in particular its most recent pictures.

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 hope that you are enjoying it. I’ve been slacking a little bit as of late, but I’ll try to get back to putting some interesting links shortly.

Till then, have a slice of cake and put on a silly party hat.

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 impartial, but I think it’s a pretty good movie, and it looks beautiful. So get out there, drive our stock price up, and enjoy.

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. Times has a policy that forbids the alteration of news photos, but one has to wonder just how much of this stuff slips by.

On a slightly lighter note, some some lighter uses of Photoshop can be found on the web.

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 number of very fine paintings, including some very nice views of Warsaw painted by Bernardo Bellotto which astounded both Carmen and I with their fine detail. It was a splendid display of Polish art, and well worth attending.

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 display device. We’ve had a prototype here at Pixar for a while, and it is impressive. Kodak is the first vendor I know to announce a product with an OLED display, although I suspect that every cell phone in the universe will acquire these displays in the next year, with computer monitors following closely behind.

I can’t wait.

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 it as the Canadian communications satellite
Anik F1. It’s position and magnitude estimates seem right on the money to me. It’s a big sucker, with its solar cells unfurled it measures over 132 ft by 29.5 feet. .

Belated thanks to Ed Cannon!