The Boston Globe online runs an excellent photo blog called “The Big Picture”. It features amazing photographs of various subjects. This particular photo essay features a series of photos about Mars and its atmosphere: Click Here to See Martian Skies The photo of the earth and moon from Mars is particularly good. You can see all of the photo essays from this link: The Big Picture One thought on ““The Big Picture” Features Martian Photos”

One thing I noticed about the tragedy at Virginia Tech is that the media constantly played the monster’s video and kept mentioning the monster’s name. They were playing right into his hands and should have just left that video with law enforcement agencies. This kind of notoriety only encourages copy-cats and zeros that want to gain a sort of immortality to their name (also see Kennedy’s assassin and the Columbine scumbags for other examples).

I wrote about some of the old rides at Disneyland a couple of years ago. What I hadn’t realized that the classic “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride” had been closed at Walt Disney World in Florida back in 1998. That was one of my favorite rides as a kid and it was unique in the Disney World version in that it had two different tracks, each track giving a different experience (same as Space Mountain).

This is an update on the XM Satellite Radio that I wrote about earlier. I was able to improve the installation in the Matrix by adding a bracket that mounts it to the right of the radio and angles it toward the driver. Also, I wired the power inside the dash so I wouldn’t have to keep using those bulky power plugs. The Sony dash unit was useful in that it has an Aux input that allows the signal to go straight from the XM Radio into the Sony unit.

The following link shows a cool visual illusion involving the shading of squares A and B that appear to the mind to be a much different shade. It’s hard to believe but they are exactly the same shade of gray. Checker Shadow Illusion

There’s been an interesting trend lately to turn any adverse publicity into an opportunity to absolve oneself from responsibility by entering into a rehab program. Historically that was limited to drug or alcohol use, but lately rehab has been a “cure-all” for public relations disasters such as rants about ethnicity (Gibson) or sexual-orientation (the guy from “Grey’s Anatomy”). Of course there is still the usual parade of Hollywood stars going to rehab for the classic reasons.

Cheryl gave me an XM Satellite Radio player for my birthday and it’s been one of those gifts that keep on giving. It was pretty easy to install in the car, the only trouble was running the wire from the antenna (placed on the roof near the back hatch) to the dash area. It has quite a few news, sports, and talk stations but I was mainly interested in it for the music and it thankfully that makes up the majority of the stations.

The Mice - Intersecting Galaxies Gravity has been one of the bigger mysteries to man. Isaac Newton’s attempts to understand it spawned a new branch of mathematics and a better understanding of mechanics. Einstein explored it in his unified field theory and warned others to stay away from such a tough problem. One concept that is interesting is “What is the speed of gravity?”. In a thought experiment, if something very massive suddenly appeared in the vicinity of Pluto’s orbit, would it take four hours for the Sun’s gravity to have an effect on its motion (four hours is the amount of time light takes to get to Pluto from the Sun) or would it be near instantaneous?

Memorial Day is a day to remember the sacrifices that the men and women in our armed forces make for our liberty. Since April 1775, the soldiers of America have fought and died for an abstract but important concept of “liberty”. At the time of those initial revolutionary battles the concept was not so abstract to the people as they had directly experienced being under a government that did not provide basic freedoms or due process for its citizens.

NASA is providing a free and interesting computer program called the WorldWind. It allows easy viewing and zooming in on satellite images. It also has features to show effects of climate and humans on the earth as well as allowing some 3D rendering. The effect is kind of like flying around the earth and zooming in on things. Some of the fun is seeing how your town looks from space.