Archive for September, 2004
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7 Sep 2004
Three years ago, NASA launched the Genesis mission. The satellite spent more than 1000 days orbiting the sun, collecting particles that are part of the solar wind. By the time the return capsule enters the Earth's atmosphere, it will be travelling twenty-five thousand miles per hour. Then it will be caught, in midair, by a helicopter.
All of this to bring less than a half of a milligram of stellar matter to the ground.
Update 09-08: The parachute (that I forgot to mention was supposed to open during reentry, before the probe was caught by the helicopter) failed to open, and the Genesis return capsule slammed into the ground. Breaking news stories on Google News.
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7 Sep 2004
Jeopardy is showing new episodes again, and Ken Jennings has won show number 39 in a row. My favorite among some KenJen statistics: The last time that Final Jeopardy was mathematically necessary (i.e. the last time Ken did not have more than double the score of the next-best contestant) was June 29.
Update, 09-08: Huge KenJen spoiler.
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7 Sep 2004
Lots of numbers are special. 2 is the only even prime. 28 is perfect. And if you're patient and know a lot of esoteric mathematics, you can find something special about every number.
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7 Sep 2004
There's something big wrong with plutor.org right now. Things aren't rebuilding right, and some templates got reverted weirdly, and there are all sorts of other issues probably related to the Moveable Type update I did last week. I'm going to do an export-and-clean sometime this week to fix it. Please be patient.
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6 Sep 2004
M, Mari, Chris, Nomad, and I just got back from our trip to the family camp in Maine. It was a fun time, but it was pretty dang chilly all weekend. Here's a few of the highlight photos.
Update 09-08: Chris has posted a few of his pictures from the trip, including their visit to Boothbay and Popham Friday morning.
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2 Sep 2004
I just upgraded Moveable Type to version 3.1. The upgrade borked because Postgres 7.2.1 doesn't support "ALTER TABLE foo ALTER COLUMN bar SET NOT NULL". I had to do some jimmying by hand, and now I'm getting strange errors in strange places. Let me know by reply or by email if you see anything seriously sketchy.
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2 Sep 2004
Only one article so far, but I plan on following this Hacking Congress column. I'm quite interested in statistics and large data sets and screenscraping. Like I needed to tell you.
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2 Sep 2004
This is one of the few sci-fi short stories that really sticks out in my mind: The Nine Billion Names of God, by Arthur C. Clarke.
Despite the reaction this will provoke from Chris, I will take this opportunity to go off on a tangent on Sir Arthur (probably best known for writing the 2001/2010/2061/3001: A Space Odyssey series). Although I love that short story, and 2001 was pure genious (more elaborate than the movie, and really shines a bright searchlight on Kubrick's obfuscations), most of his other stuff that I've read was really dismal. The book that he's said he's most proud of — Childhood's End — ended about a hundred pages before the back cover.
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2 Sep 2004
Not only do I have dreams like Roast Beef's in today's Achewood (substituting 'Google' for 'Yahoo'), but in fact the whole story feels like Onstad is stalking me.
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1 Sep 2004
The only game I wish I coulda tried at our LAN Party last weekend was Tribes: Vengeance. I gave the original Tribes a chance (in fact too many chances, probably, considering the weight I put on Freshman year), and I tried to give Tribes 2 a chance (although my computer wasn't quite up to it). I will track down the source of the problems, I swear it.
Reminds me of this classic.
