OnMyMind

For the last few nights, we have had spectacularly clear nights here in West Nowhere, so I have spent a lot of time standing outside staring up at the night sky, trying to learn the constellations. As we live in a bit of a valley, we have a limited view of the sky, but I have been able to spot Cassiopeia and Lyra on a regular basis. While scanning for Lyra tonight, my eye was drawn to it by the twinkling of its brightest star, Vega.

I watched for a while as the Vega seemed to shimmer in the sky just over the tree-line, and found myself wondering why stars twinkle. It seems like the question of a child, so I was a bit embarrassed that I did not already know the answer. I knew that it had to be some type of illusion, as I am sure that stars do not vary so wildly in brightness. It would probably be a very bad sign if any of them did… So I Googled it, and it seems obvious to me know that I found it. Apparently, the earths Earth’s atmosphere refracts the the light from the stars in random waves, much like a glass of water refracts our view of what is on the other side of it. The interesting thing, as I see it, is that although the light is refracted many times as it passes through different densities in the atmosphere, it only seems to twinkle instead of jumping around wildly.
Now that I know, I want to forget. Sometimes scientific explanations seem to white wash the wonder of things, taking the innate beauty from them.
Just as when you look at a diamond and ask why it sparkles, you don’t want to hear about the mathamatical formulas behind cutting the facets, what you really want to hear that it is because it is beautiful. Isn’t that enough?
I think that someday when my children ask me why stars twinkle, that I will forgo the discussion on refraction and tell them a nicer story. I will tell them that the start twinkle because they are laughing, smiling, dancing, and spinning wildly in the sky. And then we will decide which star is the best dancer…

(The photo is above is not real, but a screenshot from Stellarium. Stellarium is a great app for anyone who enjoys looking up at the night sky. Check it out and learn the names of a few dancing stars.)

As a parent, I was absolutely horrified to read this article about a 13 year-old boy who died for losing a baseball game.

Here is the article from the Japan Today website.

13-year-old Kyoto baseball player dies after disciplinary training
Friday, October 7, 2005 at 16:28 JST
KYOTO — A 13-year-old boy on a junior baseball team in Kyoto Prefecture died last Sunday, a day after playing a game and later taking part in three hours of disciplinary training, police said Friday.
The boy collapsed in a ballpark in Kyotanabe around 8 p.m. Saturday after the 63-year-old club manager had him do throwing practice for an hour starting at 5 p.m. and then a total of 300 sprints with other players.
The manager said he had the boy, in his second year of junior high school, and other club members do the exercise as punishment for their losing the game earlier in the day.
The boy was immediately hospitalized but died around 11 p.m. the next day from multiple organ failure due to heat stroke, the police said. The day’s high temperature was 28C (82F), according to a local observatory.
The police said they are questioning the club manager suspecting the hard training could have affected the boy’s health.
“I’ve put them through similar practices before when they lost a game with their consent,” the manager said. “But his death was regrettable and I take it seriously.”

It would take an olympic sprinter a weeks worth of training to rack up 300 sprints. This is so wrong that it defies explanation.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.

In what seems to be a bastard mix of Robert Persig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenanceâ€? and the post-apocolyptic world of “Mad Maxâ€?, we find the story of a woman motorcycle touring in the wasteland.
This is Elena Filatova, a woman who rides here Kawasaki Ninja through “The Land of the Wolves�, the dead zone left behind after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. For fun. She has a fantastic site that documents her journeys through the radioactive dead zone, nearly 20 years after one of the worst disasters in human history. She tells her story in wonderfully flawed English with intelligent insight into past, present, and future of the disaster area. As the daughter of a nuclear engineer, she is uniquely qualified as our tour guide through the region surrounding Chernobyl.

Her story starts off with a self introductions and a quick lesson in radioactivity; her ever present riding partner on her journey. The dialogue is filled with photos of dilapidated buildings and lost family photos with geiger counters held in the frame for reference. Her stops include visits to ghost towns, abandoned ferris wheels, and hastily evacuated school rooms. She even makes side trips to “tourist� spots where, on the day of the incident, locals went to view the “beautiful shining cloud above the Atomic Power Plant.� Standing on the roof of one such building, she comments “From here, the shining cloud above the reactor must have been a staggering sight.� “Staggering�, to say the least.

In Chapter 34: “Alpha, Beta, Gamma�, she provides this insight into the different types of radiation.

Ones that goes through us is called gamma radiation, it is cumulative, it adds up, so we can calculate what a damage it make for health. Gamma is almost identical X-rays. X-rays are human made, while gamma occurs in nature. It is also called a cosmic radiation. Everyone who flys in high altitude aircraft is exposed to 25 mR/hr of cosmic radiation. Gamma is the toughest type of radiation for immediate problems. It is sort of like invisible bullets that can kill in hours. Alpha and beta on the other hand are alike to a time-bomb. With breathing of radiactive dust, they getting inside of a human body, lodges there and in a few years expload with the cancer cells. A beta particle has more mass and less energy then gamma, so it doesn’t penetrate matter as deeply. Alpha radiation generally can not travel 4-12cms (1-3 inches) before it stoped, so we can play billiard with balls of a pure plutonium. The dead cells on our skin will stop beta radiation, so even juggling with plutonium balls will be safe, just don’t swollow them by mistake.
If we travel through the area, where radiation level do not exceed 100 mR/hr, then in one hour we’ll receive the same dosage of gamma rays that receiving the passanger of plane Kiev-London duaring a few hours of their trip. I don’t fly to London, so I can afford trips to Vilcha.
Unfortunately, we can not count the alpha and beta particles that we inhale, it is the major risk. In a first years after disaster it would be a suicide to ride here on open vehicle, but as I said, things changed since 1986, now radiation went in soil and live in cucumbers and mushrooms.
These days, to have a Geiger counter at the greengrocery market is as useful as to have one here.

(Stress not used in the original)

Her story spans well over fifty photo filled pages, and is a quick and easy read. It is the thoughts that you walk away with that will take up the most time.

It is unfortunate characteristic of mankind that we tend to lose track of the mistakes of the past, allowing places like Chernobyl do drift from our minds. Miss Filatova does a wonderful job of putting it all in context, and helping us remember the disastrous mistakes of the past. And all from back of a Kawasaki Ninja ZX-11.

Via Digg.com

From Ji Lee’s website pleaseenjoy.com

“I printed 50,000 of these speech bubble stickers. I place them on top of movie posters, ads and signs all over New York City. Passers are invited to fill them in. I go back and photograph the results.�

There is a great collection of the photos here.

Via BoingBoing

Has the little sister of Apple’s Automator been kidnapped by Microsoft?

Did Microsoft’s evil agents lure little Misha away with a puppy?

I think that Automator just might find a good use for that pipe.

iTunes is quickly becoming a full fledged media center application.

This is a quick “How to” on how to set up iTunes to play a list of movie files in full screen mode.
With the addition of video to its supported files, you can now use it to view any QuickTime files that you have on your computer. At first, I used this function only to organize random video files that I had lying around in different corners of my harddrive. I set up playlists for family videos, movie previews, music videos and such to keep them organized. The one thing that I found frustrating about this set up was that did not seem to be a way to have the playlist bring each video to the front as the files opened. The default behaviour would play the first movie full-screen, but the rest of the playlist would only be audio. I have now found a way around this.
I am not sure if this is new to iTunes 5.0, or if this was implemented earlier, but it is easy to do now. It only takes a few steps.

1. First, you have to import your video files into iTunes (duh!). You can do this easily by just dragging the files into the application window.
2. I set up a smart playlist to include all files where “Kind” contains “QuickTime”.
   
   (It seems that iTunes does not support AVI files at this time. As to MPG and other file types, I don’t have any to test, so I am not sure quite yet.)
3. Next you need to go into the iTunes Preferences and click the “Playback” tab.
   
   Select the box for “Play videos” and choose “Fullscreen” from the drop-down menu.
4. Click “OK” and go back to the main iTunes window.
5. In the bottom left of the iTunes window, click the Artwork icon to open the Album Artwork window. In the top of the Artwork window there is now an option to choose between “Selected Song”, or “Now Playing”. There is no drop-down menu for this, it is a simple toggle. Just click the header and it toggles back and forth.
   
   Set this to “Now Playing”.
6. Your iTunes Video Player Kiosk is now complete. \(^o^)/

Now all you need to do is go to your Smart Playlist and click play. The videos will now play back to back continuously full-screen until the playlist completes. If you do not have any QuickTime files to try this out with, check out this hint for downloading music videos from the iTunes Music Store.
Enjoy.
(Kudos if you can name the music video I used for the Artwork Window graphics!)

I got my hands on a copy of an old Del Fuegos album the other day, and it has been a ticket back to the 80’s. They were a club band out of Boston that almost made it big nationally, but definitely made it big in Boston. I had a chance to catch them live for an outdoor show in a field at the University of New Hampshire back when they were on the rise. Great show. In the middle of the show the lead singer stopped to make a big announcement, once he had our attention he told us that their drummer would be marrying the daughter of the university dean the following weekend. This apparently was a running gag with them, one that they pulled at all university gigs. These guys knew how to play a show. The crowd loved them. The singer had a real interesting voice that seemed to convince everyone that they could sing along and do just as well. Not that his voice was bad, but it was a kinda back-o’-the-throat-semi-whiney-forced-scream-into-the-microphone kinda voice. Catchy.

I love you baby
and I love your cat.
I love the way you look at my fireman’s hat.

And with lyrics like that, singing along was easy.
I think that I have found my commuting music for the next week or so…