Wow Signal

It’s been what? 31 years? since the wow signal, the unexpected discrepancy caught by SETI on August 15th 1975. Who knows what caused it or how!

SpaceX Falcon 1 Rocket Fails to reach orbit

As I watched the countdown near the last few seconds, the only thing I could think of was if the whole thing exploded. Or fell. Or did nothing. That’s pretty much what it did! They had a discrepency in the first attempt to launch, and so it was delayed probably another 30 mins. Watching the launch live on their website, I was impressed they got the thing off the ground. And Judging by the cheers and yells of everyone in the company, so were they. Too bad it didn’t make it to where it was going… All I know is that NASA lost a solar sail, and that would have been pretty sweet if it had made it.

Fredrik

Best desk ever. Only $99.

New video from Spacecraft

This video of the moon transiting earth brought to you by Deep Impact:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/mov/260503main_red_green_blue2.mov

World leader sumit, blah blah blah

Forget the story, check out the picture in this article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7492451.stm

those are Japanese Police?! We’re pretty behind!

Nutraloaf deemed constitutional

No, it’s not the kind of Nutraloaf you might be thinking of. Nutraloaf is a mixture of bland, raw ingrediants such as spinach, baked beans, tomato paste, or bread put together into a loaf and baked in the oven. It is served to prisoners who abuse the privelege of silverware, or to whoever just behaves badly enough. It supposedly tastes so horrible that many prisoners have sued state prisons over it, claiming its torture. But is it that bad?

Arin Greenwood decided to cook some for a few of his lawyer friends. They tried the various forms of nutraloaf and decided that it’s horrible, but not the worst thing in the world. People in asylumns have seen much worse appearently, and so It does not sound like the dish will be declared unconstitutional any time soon. But Ifound the story by Arin to be a perfect example of how a good lawyer-or lawmaker, or what have you- should do their research. By testing out the product!

Solar Downtime

I might be stating the overly obvious when I say the sun is blank, and I know I’m jumping to harsh conclusions when I say that less sunspots can be attributed to cooler temperatures, But what I am about to describe will take it a step further and oficially make me one of many who don’t do enough research before they open their mouth.

Because the sun is so obviously at a low point in its cycle, don’t you think it would affect our crops? The number one, most important thing to plant-life is, afterall, the sun. So it is only logical to say that perhaps maybe there will be less of a yeild during solar min.

If in fact that is true, then it is no surprise that food prices are soaring! Crops aren’t booming, so what would anyone expect? The food price surge does not mean we’re headed toward some economic crisis (though that may be possible), but just going through a more mediocre output from the sun.

Soon we will be in a new era where we will have an understanding of the sun and we will be able to more precisely manipulate our markets based on how it’s affecting us. The Sun goes through many changes and has a lot of peculiarites about it which we still do not understand. Clearly there must still be many unseen affects which it has on us. There must be many more, but the most obvious is solar output. At a time when 6 billion people (!) rely on fragile agriculture systems all over the world the effects of a minor change in solar output would be quite drastic.

To conclude this unorganized, poor-grammar-ridden rant, the Sun is supposed to be developing more spots. It is at a time in its cycle when it would naturally be increasing in activity. But it’s not and that can mean one of three things:

1. the cycle is just a bit delayed and it will pick up just as normal soon
2. this is the quiet before the storm and the beginning of the next cycle will be extravgant, full of activity
3. we’re in for a second Little ice age

Biking Des Plaines river trail

I began Yesterday around 3pm, biking from Oakton and Desplaines River Road on the Desplaines river trail going north towards libertyville.

Pain in upper right thigh started immediatly as I began the ride and didn’t dissipate until 3/4 of the way to libertyville. Came across a flooded part of the path near Dundee rd. The only way around was jumping down a wall (after dropping my bike) on the otherside of the overpass. Later I learned of a second entrance which I used on the way home.

Other than the flooded area the trip there was pretty much non-stop. Drank exactly one bottle of water. Should have had more.

Made it to libertyville at an unknown time. Ate fried perch, beets with onions, baked beans, and broccoli. Drank some tea, refilled my water bottle and left quickly at 6:22.

The ride home seemed a lot faster. Right knee began hurting first 20 mins of ride. Pain would dissipate. Only made one stop for extra water once I was in Des Planes. Passed oakton on accident and ended up taking Touhy – a much more rough ride with no side walks. Had I been less tired I would have biked on the side of the road, but since I didn’t trust my judgement (and also since I was listening to music) I painfully rode through the grass, coming very, very close to hitting a telephone pole.

Made it back home around 9:25

All in all the trip was at least 60 miles both ways. Using google maps to trace the route closely via streets makes 62 miles about. Since the path swirves and doesn’t follow the roads, I likely biked closer to 65 miles.

Code Kata

To begin I can only quote Steve Yegge’s voluminous body of work recently, I was struck by a 2005 entry on practicing programming from the original posting at Coding horror:

Contrary to what you might believe, merely doing your job every day doesn’t qualify as real practice. Going to meetings isn’t practicing your people skills, and replying to mail isn’t practicing your typing. You have to set aside some time once in a while and do focused practice in order to get better at something.I know a lot of great engineers — that’s one of the best perks of working at Amazon — and if you watch them closely, you’ll see that they practice constantly. As good as they are, they still practice. They have all sorts of ways of doing it, and this essay will cover a few of them.

The great engineers I know are as good as they are because they practice all the time. People in great physical shape only get that way by working out regularly, and they need to keep it up, or they get out of shape. The same goes for programming and engineering.

I only partially belive this. Yes, practice makes perfect and it is the only way you can get better at something. But I disagree that coding at work, for example, is not practice. It does help you get better. It might not be the best, most perfect practice, but it is practice nonetheless. And lets not forget the fact that many jobs involve going just slightly beyond your skill set. A step ahead.

But the idea of a coding Kata intrigues me. A kata is “a series of choreographed practice movements”, barrowed from marital arts.

The steps steve presents are interesting. He deviates from the normal theory of practicing strictly coding assignments and delves into more complex routines. Things like reviewing resumes, reading the code of other people regularly, and picking a profession you know nothing about and asking a professional to explain it to you. These are just some of the steps toward bettering yourself off as far as communication in the programming field. Coding Horror argues that communication is just as, if not, more important than the actual coding skills themselves. Which seems to make sense in todays large programming teams: in order to get anything done, everyone must collaborate and the only medium between that is communication.

Planet Vulcan

There was a time when astronomers suspected that there might be another planet hidden near to the sun. What would cause a mathematician to think they missed something so close to us? Solid math.

In 1850, French Astronomer Jean Joseph Le Verrier applied Newtonian Dynamics to the orbits of our planets. He noticed a discrepancy with the planet Mercury and had been convinced there was a planet affecting the orbit. So the search began for what was named planet Vulcan (after the Roman God of Fire). The search never succeeded. But Why? After all, this is the same man who predicted Neptune based on the Discrepancies in Uranus’s orbit – even before anyone had ever seen Neptune. And he became right when he sent his predictions to Johann Gottfried Gotte at the Berlin Observatory, who found the planet on his first night searching in 1846. So as the blind discoverer of a planet, Jean Joseph had to be on to something. Planet Vulcan was puzzling scientists as an invisible planet.

It was Albert Einstein who would finally solve the case in November 1915 with his Theory of Relativity. Jean Joseph had not done his calculations wrong, he just couldn’t account for everything. He needed Albert’s Theory and unfortunatly spent a great deal of time unknowingly trying to solve a problem which demanded it.

Sources:
Josh Wilson At NC university
National Geographic (recently on digg)