The Evil Eyebrow

  • Freaky Cool Asteroid!

    Monday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is of asteroid Itokawa, which is currenlty being examined by a Japanese spacecraft named Hayabusa. This is a fascinating mission which involves a sample return, but that’s not why I’m writing this…

    Take a look at the image. The asteroid is nubbly! No craters! No smooth surface! It looks like you can see rocks and stuff all piled up! Way stinking cool!

    Here are images from the Japanese Space Agency site. If you can read the japanese, you can translate for me. Look at the smooth surfaces next to the rocky nubbs. Wow.

    I assume the Japanese page is talking about landing sites for Hayabusa. It looks that way anyhow.

  • Road Geek

    This link concerning Road Geeks came to me through one of my professional listservs.

    …and technically, I’m violating the terms of my agreement by mentioning it’s existence. “IMPORTANT: This list is confidential. You should not publicly mention its existence[emphasis mine], or forward copies of information you have obtained from it to third parties.”

    Confidential I can get along with. Not forwarding information and considering said information to be the property of the message owner I can do. Not mentioning the existence of the list? That’s kind of crazy.

  • Thin Member Fracture (a.k.a. Fun with Spaghetti)

    What do you do during your lunch break?

    Today, I decided to check out who was awarded the 2005 Ig Nobel Awards and for what.

    My favorite one of these was the alarm clock that runs away and hides, which I heard about on NPR a few weeks ago. I think it was on Morning Edition; you should be able to find a transcript.

    That was not, however, what I did with my lunch break. Instead I watched movies about the brittle fracture of thin members or “why does spaghetti break in more than one place?”

    This was clued in to me from The Panda’s Thumb.

  • The Truth is Out There

    There are good reasons to read other blogs. For one, no one is an expert at more than a few things. For two, more famous people get sent more interesting links.

    Example taken from The Bad Astronomy Blog: Save yourself from government promulgated helmet designs that allow them better access to your thoughts!.

  • Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: The Movie

    SPOILERS

    We saw Goblet of Fire last Friday night. My rating is B+. I thought that the first half of the movie was spectacular, and the last half of the movie was good.

    I found this movie somewhat different from the previous Harry Potter movies because I knew going into the theater that they were going to have to cut a huge amount of material and make other adjustments to splice the story line together. A 730 page book does not fold into one feature length film without some serious pruing. With that attitude, I was not too worried when Krum turned out to be a muscle-bound pretty-boy and Fleur Delacour was a french-accented nothing.

    I was exceptionally disappointed with the portrayal of Dumbledore, however. Dumbledore is supposed to be a highly skilled unflappable wizard who thinks deep thoughts and acts accordingly. Only once or twice in the entire book series do his emotions come to the fore. In this movie, Dumbledore is an excitable, emotional boob who shows little sign of refinment or unflappability. Alas, it was disappointing.

    Don’t let that get you down though. The movie was a good one and I plan to see it again. I’m happy to report that the Gross Irregularity that was spotted in a publicity still was not present in the movie. I did confirm that the date of Voldemort’s father’s death was 1943, which I don’t believe quite jives with the book timeline, but I’m not prepared to swear to that and besides, it’s close.

    For non Harry Potter book readers, I think they’ll find some scenes in the movie almost incomprehensible. There was little explanation of the pensieve and none concerning the actions of Harry’s and Voldemort’s wands in the duel. Personally, I believe that with the amount of pruning they did, they should have gone a bit further and eliminated the pensieve and Barty Crouch Sr. The story line only served to complicate the film and given the demise of Barty Crouch Sr. by the end of the story, it would be a non-item concerning the effects on later movies. The fact of Mad-Eye turning out to be a Voldemort infiltrator could have stood on its own without any of the backstory that got pruned so heavily anyway.

    As I said, we’ll see it again, and maybe I’ll have more observations then.

    For teen girl watchers, you’ll be happy to know that Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint had obviously been working out between Azkaban and Goblet.

  • Gross Irregularity in Harry Potter Film II

    SPOILER WARNING

    Well, I must confess that I made a slight error in my post Gross Irregularity in Harry Potter Film. I believe that the names on the tombstone (in the Book) are Tom Riddle, a.k.a. Voldemort’s father, and Tom Riddle’s elderly parents. This does not materially change my complaints posted earlier concerning the movie, but it does alter things a bit.

    However, as I mentioned in the post, I will be reserving judgement until I see the movie tomorrow. This was emphasized today when I read a NY Times review of Goblet of Fire and saw this image in the story.
    Harrry Potter in the Cemetery; presumably preparing to duel.
    Compare that image with this one from the internet movie database and my concerns may have been alleviated. As you can see, the name Tom Marvolo Riddle has been replaced by Tom Riddle, which would fit into the scheme of the book. I’m still confused about the dates, though.

    I’ll let you all know tomorrow.

  • Computer Experiment II

    This is why I love the internet. 15 Years ago, if I were trying to hack my computer, I’d have to dig out a DOS manual or call a friend who knew more than me. Now, I can just query Herr Google.

    Thusly, I find this wonderful website, http://freepctech.com/pc/002/files010.shtml which has free-for-download boot floppies all ready to go. Just copy them to the a: drive and you’re off!

    Well, after I did that, I discovered that I was still going to have to make some boot floppies for FreeBSD itself. The adventure continues!

  • Google Maps and Risk!

    Ripped from SF Signal, the definitive Google Maps Hack: Risk!

  • Complete Lunation

    The Astronomy Picture of the Day for November 13, 2005 is spectacular!

  • Computer Experiments

    I guess, given that it’s 2005, I can’t really call it an experiment, but it’s new to me, therefore experimental.

    We recently purchased a new computer to replace our 1998 vintage Gateway (AMD K6) and I decided that what I needed was another project. The project is to install FreeBSD onto the Gateway and use it as an experimental computer for webhosting, running GIMPS, and anything else that might occur to me.

    The first step, of course, was to cleanse the computer of all vestiges of Windows 98 and install FreeBSD. A friend recommended I check the bios to ensure that I could boot from the CD drive before I shredded the hard drive. I dutifully checked and it seemed that it would be possible. So, off I went, using a freeware program to overwrite the 4 GB hard drive and then plugged in the recently-burned FreeBSD boot CD-ROM and turned the computer back on.

    Nada.

    Oops. Seems that I can’t boot from the CD ROM after all.

    Well, now I get to have fun creating a boot disk for the a: drive with the appropriate CD drivers to run the FreeBSD software. I’ve got a panasonic 24x drive, who’s various serial numbers are currently buried inside the box. I’m going to try using some default software before I dig the drive back out and look for specific information. Stay tuned!

    Conveniently, of course, I’ve got a working computer sitting next to my wiped computer, enabling me to mine the internet for tips. This is so much easier than in 1990 when I was hacking my old MS-DOS based computer.

The Evil Eyebrow

There is no knowing the Evil Eyebrow

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