Fanboy Scouts has launched a series of Merit Badges for Geeks including achievements for Speedster, Mt. Doom, Tie Fighter Pilot, Away Team, and more.- Privacy in terms of contextual identity. How you present yourself to your friends is not how you present yourself to your colleagues, and what you’re willing to share in each context is going to be different.
- XKCD is probably right about the future of “old-timey” speech. “Forsooth, do you grok my jive, me hearties?” We have a hard enough time getting the mid-twentieth century right, and that’s with people around who lived it!
- Darryl Cunningham debunks the Moon Hoax in comic-strip form.
- The new Kindle looks nice. They’re starting to get to the price/feature/polish point where I’d be tempted. (Well, except for that pesky DRM…) Also, Amazon launched Kindle for Android recently, but I haven’t tried it out. While it will run on Android 1.6, it’s a bit big for my G1 unless I clear out some other apps.
Tag: moon
Arcadia & Orange Moon Over LA
Saturday night we went out to see a production of Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia at the Sierra Madre Playhouse. If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s a comedy about love, sex, math, history and the pursuit of knowledge. The show follows two main stories: the lives of a student and her tutor during an 1809 visit by Lord Byron to her family’s estate, and the present-day efforts of two historians to figure out just what happened during that visit. (One of them gets it spectacularly wrong.) It was a good production, though I got the impression that the actor playing Bernard was trying to channel Ricky Gervais.
Beforehand we had dinner at The Novel Cafe in Pasadena. Afterward we went looking for someplace where we could grab dessert or coffee, but Sierra Madre had pretty much closed down for the night from what we could see. Solution: a bottle of water, a soda, and a bag of cookies from the grocery store.
About that orange moon.
Along the way back, I dithered over taking the 605 or the 57 until literally the last moment, and decided to take the 605. Less than a minute later, I looked out the window to the right and saw…
…a deep orange half-moon just above the horizon, sitting tilted with the curve facing downward to the right. Just below it were towers of lights, almost certainly the distant skyline of downtown Los Angeles. The lower end of the moon was just starting to flatten out as we lost the view.
If I’d gone the other way with that 50/50 decision, or if we hadn’t taken the time to look for dessert or coffee, we would have missed that view.
Links: Facts, Moon, Toyota and New Spice
A university library has put together a great parody of the Old Spice ad campaign: Study Like a Scholar, Scholar. (via This Is True )
NPR story: In Politics, Sometimes The Facts Don’t Matter
New research suggests that misinformed people rarely change their minds when presented with the facts — and often become even more attached to their beliefs. The finding raises questions about a key principle of a strong democracy: that a well-informed electorate is best.
This makes me feel a little less enthused about the next two items:
It’s incredibly cool that we’ve got photos of the Apollo 16 landing site. (via Phil Plait) But that won’t convince people who are absolutely certain that the landings were faked.
And a U.S. Department of Transportation investigation of Toyota crashes blamed on sudden acceleration has implicated driver error in nearly all cases. Of the 75 fatal crashes investigates, only one could be verified as a problem with the vehicle: the Lexus crash last August in which the accelerator was caught on the floor mat, leading to a recall. Of course, the court of popular opinion has already made up its mind…
Pillar Moon
While driving from Newport Beach to Lake Forest, we watched the full moon rise through a layer of haze and clouds.
For much of the drive it was surrounded by a bright yellow glow, light reflecting off the haze. A few minutes in, we noticed a light pillar shooting straight up from the moon. I seriously considered pulling over to the side of the freeway to take a photo, and probably should have, because it was almost faded by the time we reached our destination. The moon may have risen too high, or the ice crystals drifted away or evaporated, or perhaps it was simply drowned out by the city lights. A lot of the 405 runs past residential areas with lots of trees, so there aren’t too many lights visible from the freeway. You can just barely see the remnant of it in this photo.
I did manage to get one picture of the moon rising behind a cloud layer at the beginning of the drive:
Yes, it’s digital zoom. On one hand, at times like this I wish I had a better camera. On the other hand, if I did, I wouldn’t have been able to capture this while sitting at an intersection waiting to turn!
Moon and Venus Above Palms
