What an amazing race!
I was off the couch and jumping around the room like a chimpanzee.
“When he set a compass upon the face of the deep.” William Blake’s Ancient of Days
This is lightning being filmed in slow-motion using the Casio EX-F1. Watch the lightning search for a ground.
“Search for a ground”?! That sonofabitch is coming after me!
Poor man's Quicksilver
Squee! Danny O’Brien is my hero.
Since the Great PowerBook Disaster of 2007, I’ve been casting about for a way to approximate Quicksilver’s combined application launching/window switching in Linux. About 3 seconds after I discovered Quicksilver, having one key combination to always focus an application (whether it had been previously started or not) became so ingrained in my muscle memory that I’m still, 9 months later, disoriented without it.
Well, no more! Danny O’Brien points to wmctrl which,
with a little GNOME glue as demonstrated by Danny, does what I
need, at least for the 5 or 10 applications I used constantly. A
few adjustments to the way I title gnome-terminal and emacs
windows, and I’m golden.
I still miss Quicksilver, but this little hack makes my fingers feel like they are home again.
Urban legend: don't end sentence with preposition
What began as a guideline to promote clarity in certain contexts was misconstrued as a blanket rule which has engendered an onslaught of awkward sentences, contorted to avoid breaking the “rule”.
The Stumblng Tumblr, who provided the linkage, enjoyed the post primarily for it’s first two comments, which are funny enough to offset a lot of the previously mentioned awkward sentences.
Re: Cephalopod by Matthew Baldwin
Now that Congress has approved domestic wire-tapping, no one can prevent the U.S. from becoming a surveillance state. No one, that is, except for cathym17@zipmail.com.
Impact events
It turns out that asteroid impact events like Tunguska aren’t so rare:
The late Eugene Shoemaker of the U.S. Geological Survey came up with an estimate of the rate of Earth impacts, and suggested that an event about the size of the nuclear weapon that destroyed Hiroshima occurs about once a year. Such events would seem to be spectacularly obvious, but they generally go unnoticed for a number of reasons: the majority of the Earth’s surface is covered by water; a good portion of the land surface is uninhabited; and the explosions generally occur at relatively high altitude, resulting in a huge flash and thunderclap but no real damage.
I think I’ll be looking up quite a bit more often from now on.
From The Big Picture: Jupiter’s moon Io floats above the cloudtops of Jupiter in this image captured January 1, 2001. The image is deceiving: there are 350,000 kilometers - roughly 2.5 Jupiters - between Io and Jupiter’s clouds. Io is about the size of our own moon (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)
Ode To Beaker
The redoubtable shadowfirebird finds what I think is a pretty good metaphor for most of my Fridays: they start out joyful but end with me getting electrocuted.