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| Thursday, March 21, 2002 |
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Wow 
| | Hanging in the Western sky just after sunset is the best comet I've seen since Hale-Bopp. Turns out it's Ikeya-Zhang. Sky & Telescope has the story here. The tail is as long as several moons. Far more impressive than the story suggests. You can see it with the naked eye, but it really rocks with binoculars or a telescope. Here's a photo gallery, all very recent. |
| | I love this shit. So does my 5-year old kid. We were just up on the peak of the roof with the telescope, digging it totally. |
CARP downcount, 15 days
| |  Meanwhile, I'd love to create a NO CARP symbol. A fish like this one swimming through one of those red circle-bar thingies would be cool. If any of ya'll are better at doing those kind of graphics than I am, feel free. I'll swap it for this fish here, give ya'll credit and pass it along to the whole freaking Webcasting "industry" (which in total probably makes less than you do). |
| | [Later... I liked the before/after effect so much that I decided to put the NO CARP symbol right on top, full-size, so anybody can lift it, full size. And a big thanks to Maurice Rickard for the pic.] |
Like he said
Okay, it's a diary. But with a few links, it'd be a blog
Elvis has re-entered the building
| | Pointers to both this item and the one below both come from Ryan Irelan's Becoming, which features a terrific slide show of a just-completed trip to California. Looks like they came on a good week. Look how clear it was. Jeez. |
| | Ryan lives in Chapel Hill, just like I did before I moved out here. |
| | I know Ryan has already taken the poison 'cuz one of his pix shows him hanging in front of Peet's Coffee. One sip and it's over, dude. But you probably knew that going in. |
Love at tenth post
Perspective
| | If you're in Australia or the Far East late this evening you'll be treated to something we'll miss here in the U.S.: a near-eclipse of Jupiter and its moons my Earth's own. Most of us aren't aware that Jupiter's moons are bright enough to see: they look like a line of stars flanking the planet. They also move around Jupiter rather rapidly. The innermost, Io, orbits around Jupiter about once every Earth day. The four are also in the same size range as our own Moon. Three of the four Jovian moons are bigger, one is smaller. Here's a photographic line-up of large moons (including ours) and small planets. Interesting that Mercury and Pluto are so small that they're more like moons of the Sun than full-sized planets. |
| | Something we missed just a few days ago was the complete eclipse of Saturn by the Moon. Watching the ringed planet and its four main moons disappear behind our own, and re-emerge on the other side, is a terrific sight on a telescope. |
| | By the way, the picture above is clipped from Voyager III, an absolutely terrific piece of Software from Carina Software, an independent developer in California's East Bay. You can lock and center on a celestial object, such as the Moon, and move forward and backward through time. You can watch the heavens change over the next 100,000 years. You can watch the Trojan asteroids chase Jupiter around its orbit. You can watch the moons of Jupiter move from any distance or angle, with or without shadows. You can take a trip around the Hyades star cluster and back, or travel anywhere among the 4000 or so nearest stars. It's an incredible piece of work that somehow appears to run the same executables on both Mac and PC. Highly, highly, highly recommended. |
Hell, maybe Zimran is right — in more ways than one.
| | About Zimran's first point: geez. It amazes me that people can so easily label my politics, because I sure can't. |
| | Hope this helps: I'm a registered independent who only half-jokingly calls himself a "lily-livered libertarian." I hate war, love markets, and trust business and government to do what each does best, and don't trust either to meddle in the others' work. |
| | I also think the world is basically a good place, and that the most powerful forces for change are what the great religions at their cores have always favored: kindness, generosity, mercy and forgiveness. The hateful crap committed in the names of great religions has always amazed me. |
| | I also favor taking the long view — one that spans generations. And I don't know where that falls politically at all. You might think it would be on the left, which has always been the political wing inclined to protect scarce resources; but I take a view of business that's a bit more generous than most on the left are inclined to hold. Simply yet cryptically put, I believe there is an Economics of Altruism that has been essential to business since markets first appeared, and that we're only beginning to recognize. |
| | Mostly these days I'm adrenalized about protecting the freedoms that make the Web the World it is. And like I said yesterday, this puts me in the company of a lot of libertarians that wear other labels in other contexts. Which is why I think the politics of the Web is a Whole New Thing. |
| | So I'd like to ask Ahmed and everybody else who cares about Tauzin-Dingell: Is it good for the Web? |
He's on some cases I didn't even know existed
| | Matthew Tanase, a network security expert, has just launched The Security Blog. Check it out. |
Blogging dissent
One reason to regret leaving the Bay Area
| | I should be going to this conference too. Nothing could matter more right now. But if I went to every good conference, I'd never get home. |
discuss
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