Category: Stuff n bother

A week or three ago our wonderful blogmaster installed the subscription module into Movable Type. Unfortunately, a configuration wasn’t quite set right, and subscriptions were not working.
If you want to receive mail notifications when a thread updates or changes, you can now subscribe to the thread (see the article detail for the field). You’ll get a piece of email asking for confirmation (this is to avoid spammers), and then you’re in like flynn.
Sorry if you tried to subscribe before!

I’m having a problem with comments on the site – things are saying “Moderated” but they’re not actually showing up in the moderation queue. I’d suggest holding off on posting comments until I get things fixed. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Comments are happy again. And you can sign in using TypeKey now if you’d like.
Feel free to help us test by leaving comments for Dave.
Thanks,
Lisa/blogadmin

Recently Radio Paradise got hacked (the full story is on their home page). Bill has been working diligently restoring the site and fixing the code, but I had noticed that one little aspect hadn’t been fixed it (and in fact, was outdated).
So last week I spent some time with The Gimp and created a new ‘favicon’ for the site, and mailed it off to Bill.
He put it online last night. *preen*
(For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, a site ‘favicon’ is the little graphic that appears in a browsers toolbar next to the URL, or in the bookmarks folder next to the sitename. Also, in Firefox, it’s in the window tab. If you’re looking at RP, and don’t see it, then you have a cached version. Hit shift-reload, and it should appear)

According to an article in the Boston Globe, WBUR is cancelling the outstanding talk show ‘The Connection’, hosted by Dick Gordon. The new station manager, Peter Fiedler, states that the changes are part of a cut back program. “We decided to strengthen local focus because that is where our core listener base is”, he said in a statement.
The Connection is produced at WBUR, but is heard on 66 national stations, including XM Radio. According to the press release, ‘The Connection’ will go silent after August 5th.
I for one am deeply saddened by this news. Dick Gordon made turned the flagging Connection flow into a truly fascinating hour of interviews and details after Chris Lydon’s famous meltdown with WBUR staff. Apparently Gordon’s firing was a surprise to Gordon as well, given to him after his show today.
I hope that another station will pick up the Connection and continue it’s production.

… a more magnificent piece of music than Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, played in it’s entirety, I don’t know what it is.
XM Radio Classics did a wonderful 1/2 hour introduction / lecture on the piece before hand, and then presented the entire symphony, on period instruments, beginning to end. I ended up driving past the house and up the highway again to catch the 4th movement without having to pause to put Zach to bed (we were on our way back from Maine).
During the intro, I had forgotten this bit of history. When the piece was first performed in Vienna in 1824, Beethoven’s hearing had deteriorated completely. He was completely deaf, and therefore never actually heard his masterpiece performed. As related on the wikipedia entry for the Ninth :

At the conclusion of the performance Beethoven had to be forcibly turned around to accept the audience’s cheers and applause According to one witness, “the public received the musical hero with the utmost respect and sympathy, listened to his wonderful, gigantic creations with the most absorbed attention and broke out in jubilant applause, often during sections, and repeatedly at the end of them.”

Can you imagine being in the theater and hearing this piece performed for the first time, not knowing what was to happen next, and being blindsided by the masterful 4th movement? And there, in front, the composer himself, not hearing the public’s jubilant reception of his final work, not knowing of it until one of the members of the orchestra stood up and turned him around to see the audience’s applause and cheering.

While reading my favorite weekly column by James Randi, I happened upon a discussion where certain individuals were taking some of the Mars orbital photographs, magnifying them past all levels of sanity, washing them through photoshop several times so that all the JPG compression anomalies stood out bright and shiny, and then pointing to these anomalies and going “LOOK! BUILDINGS! IT’S A COVERUP!”

Now, this -must- be a characterization out of line of what these people were saying. Right? Mustn’t it?

Sadly, no, it isn’t.

I direct you, for your own entertainment, to the… comments of one Joseph P. Skipper, of MarsAnomalyResearch.com. Mister Skipper goes on for many many pages about how there is this vast coverup by scientists about existing advanced civilizations right here in our solar system.

Now, sure, give a guy some slack. The tin-hat folks can say “But, how do we KNOW? They’re feeding us bad information!”

But, for argument, let me present Skipper’s commentary on banding on the moon as presented by the Deep Space Program Science Experiment, aka Clementine. Skipper comments on this ‘banding’…

Note that these poorly seen rows of artificial structures of some kind do not give the impression of buildings so much as of giant solid, sectional, possibly contoured, appearing reinforced alternating clamping system structures. Note how precisely horizontally distance separated one vertical row is from the other forming a clear definitive rigidly uniform south/north north/south orientation and precisely spaced apart pattern. So, not only does each of the individual bands speak clearly of artificiality, so to does the over all pattern of the many bands. It is very difficult to regard this as anything less than conclusive definitive proof of massive scale artificiality present on the Moon and on a colossal scale.

Now, it’s quite easy to dismiss this fellows rantings as the standard woo-woo “The aliens are there!” twaddle, and that “the public is simply being deceived about the reality” and other bits, but Skipper tries to back up his rantings with ‘facts’ pulled from known sources.

But here’s where it gets fun. The images that Skipper posts are pulled directly from the Clementine Lunar Image Browser, an online database of all the images from the survey. Skipper himself says how to retrieve the images, and he states that you should set the query to “1 pixel = 1 kilometer”. His sample images are 768 pixels wide, which would make the pictures he’s viewing 476 miles across. The moon has a diameter of 3,476 miles, so the pictures he’s looking at would be about 1/7th of the diameter as we see it here from earth (not taking into account parallax errors due to curvature, etc). So, given those numbers, don’t you think we could see those bands just standing out in a field and looking?

No? Lets go closer. A $100 pair of binoculars would give you a 10x resolution. Heck, lets go nuts – spend that $99 and get a 420x resolution telescope, and take a look at the moon. At that resolution, you should be able to discern objects down to something about 100′ across. According to Skippers page, there is apparently a building that, according to his scale, is about 40km across. Should be pretty easy to see it, don’t you think?

Alas, Skipper spends no time even considering the inanity of his arguments, and continues with the ‘obvious cover-up’ chatter and the declaration of deliberate obfuscation by the government.

Because the entire Clementine Moon imaging is visually a sea of a great many different types and levels of image tampering applications and obfuscation techniques covering and hiding evidence and creating false illusions as to terrain detail in the process and essentially covering and obscuring most of the Moon’s entire surface as well as these bands.

It’s amazing how people will persist in their delusions when all they have to do is walk outside and look up to see that what they’re proposing is so ludicrous it defies explanation.

By the way, the ‘banding’ that Skipper goes on about was due to the fact that the Clementine probe was inserted into a polar orbit around the moon. When you take interlocked pictures of a globe while orbiting it, and piece them together to attempt to display them on a flat surface, there is interference where they overlap. That, combined with the fact that the CLIB database consists of JPEG images – compressed versions of the original imagery, which introduces ‘square’ and ‘noisy’ artifacts into an image, resulted in the ‘bands’ and ‘buildings’ that Skipper latches onto with such tenacity.

We’re going to give a try to running without comment moderation for a while. So folks posting / commenting on things should be able to see their posts immediately. Let me know if anything odd crops up.

This is sort of interesting. If you go to a few specific spots in Google Maps, you can see what appears to be huge spheres over parts of Florida.
A bunch of folks have been chatting about this, and several theories (“It’s a Mentos ad!”) have been suggested (“Swamp gas from a weather balloon got trapped in a thermal pocket and refracted the light from venus.”).
Curiously, there appears to be several of these ‘Florida Spheres’ aligned in a loose grid pattern. I’m sure the tin-foil hat crowd will leap on this as either proof that the invasion has started, or to explain the sporadic voting record in Florida. Hmm.
What seems the most likely answer is this is a bit of condensation within the camera body itself (if it were on the lens it would be invisible). These pictures were taken via an airplane flyover, so it could very well be water. In fact, on the Flickr site above, you can see the ‘drop’ has evaporated or moved around a bit.
Not to say this’ll stop the UFO-ites, but it should be interesting to see what spin(s) folk take on this.

Saw this one over on GizMag…

Want cheap, green electricity? The Australians have a simple answer. First, build a 20,000-acre greenhouse to trap and heat air. Then build a colossal tower 1 km (.62 miles) tall in the middle of it. The warm air from the greenhouse will rise through the tower as it would through a chimney, turning turbines and generating enough electricity to power 200,000 Australian homes. It may sound like science fiction, but the project is on track to get approved by the Australian government. If completed, the $800 million solar tower will be the tallest man-made structure in the world.

Time Magazine had it in their 2002 ‘Best Inventions’ category.
$800 million, powers 200,000 Australian homes, and uses up no fuels, and has very little maintenance. AND the greenhouses can be used for other things – all they have to be is hot. I’ll take it!

With its entry list now final, the Rolex Transatlantic Challenge 2005, hosted by the New York Yacht Club (NYYC) with the cooperation of the Royal Yacht Squadron (RYS), is holding true to its promise of being one of the greatest sailing races of the 21st Century. On May 21, 20 entrants—ranging in size from 70 to 252 feet (21.3m to 77m) and averaging 112 feet (34.1m)–will set out on a course from New York to The Lizard in England, recreating the Great Ocean Race of 1905. In that historic race, the schooner Atlantic, skippered by the legendary Charlie Barr, set a record that has not been broken by a monohull in a race for 100 years.

For those who like sailing pictures, there’s a fantastic gallery of high resolution pictures of all the entrants available at the NYYC site. Full story at nyyc.org

According to this article from Reuters, VHS is gettin the boot…
“Accepting the inevitable, Britain’s biggest high street electronics retailer Dixons announced over the weekend that it was taking VHS video players off its shelves for good.”
Good riddance.