Normally, I don’t post stuff about my model sailplane hobby, but I thought that this neat idea was worth it. One of the ingenius guys at the Charles River RC club had the neat idea to fix a GPS to his plane and then take the information it gave him and plot it in 3-D space. The result was this image. He then later mixed that in with some satellite photography and came up with this image. Pretty neat! You’ll be able to read about it next month in an article he is preparing here next month.
update: for those interested, the original thread I found this on is here on LiftZone‘s forums: Show Me Your Launches!
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Today is the 35th anniversary of the successful Apollo 11 moon landing. In honor, I suggest you check out this kick-ass full-screen Quicktime panorama of the moon and the Apollo landing craft.
There are still some conspiracy folks questioning “Was it faked?” but there are heaps of evidence that say “it was it real!” I think I’d have to side with the “NOT FAKED” camp on this one. Mostly because the science is there, and maybe just a bit because Buzz Aldrin throws a mean left-hook.
NASA has a nice gallery of Apollo 11 photos, and you should check them out. After that, why don’t you take a look to the heavens this evening (link to Louisville-specific data at Heavens-Above.com), and wonder what it must have been like to be there on the moon.
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I suggest you do all you can to beg/borrow/steal Devendra Banhart‘s Rejoicing in the Hands.
Imagine if you will the sweet roughness of Will Oldham with the old touch of Marlene Dietrich. Yeah. Think about that. Sparse arrangements, often just Devendra and guitar accent his odd and often beautiful and melancholy lyrics. There is a waver in his voice that evoke the best of the old blues singers, but his phrasing is straight out of a 1940s cabaret or a smoke-filled movie.
It should be noted that his music belies his twenty-something years on this planet. Enjoy.
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class="External">Every day is Halloween in Harajuku.
links via MeFi, photo from here.
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Charlie, Geoff and I did a little geocaching today at lunch with much better results than yesterday.
We hit 3 for 3 today. First up was Turn Where ? Was: Sams Club — the first in a Louisville-themed collection of caches where you are guided by the age-old method of “Do you remember where (some long-gone landmark USED to be) was?”. For example, the old White Castle on Bardstown Road, Shillito’s, The Sams Club… etc. The second was Camo 826 in the heart of the industrial park. The last was Charley the Cat, next to J-Town’s Little League park, Skyview. Down by the train track where the cache was, I think we may have interrupted a pair of locals in some sort of naughty business as when we approached they high-tailed it out of there blanket in hand. Charlie took some very nice photos indeed, and you can check them out in my geocaching gallery
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Last night we had a pretty powerful storm blow through town. The rain was one thing, but the powerful winds were quite another. Oldham County, to our east, has declared itself a disaster area. Some parts of Jefferson County namely the Highlands area didn’t fare quite so well either. My friend David Gruneisen went about today to shoot some photos (as is his style), and as per usual they are good and pick up on interesting detail. You should check out David’s Storm gallery and see what nature hath wrought upon the Highlands.
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This just in — the Federal Marriage Amendment was just shot down in the Senate. The final vote was 50 “yays” and 48 “nays”, with two abstaining (Kerry and Edwards, oddly enough). The vote needed two thirds majority to pass. Wanna see who voted yay and nay? Check out
Roll Call Vote 155 over at http://www.senate.gov.
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Charlie and I hit some geocaches today during our lunch break! Turns out there are quite a few within walking distance from our workplace, and two of them were right across the street on Papa John’s beautiful coroporate campus. We didn’t find the first (titled “Better Pizza 2”), but we did find the second (titled “Papa’s Paradise”). A nice little jaunt on a not-so-hot day.
Geocaching is a pseudo-sport where people hide little treasures called “caches”, record their longitude and latitude with the help of GPS receiver, and then using the Geocaching website, they list their new cache for all to see. Prospective geocachers go to the site, search for local caches, get the longitude and latitude and then commence to searching. Some caches are tiny film canisters (like the ones we found today) some are coffee cans, some are for swapping old ties. Write your name in the log and move on!
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Check out this article from CNN: McCain: Same-sex marriage ban is un-Republican. Thank you, John McCain. Aside from the fact that an amendment would be most-unAmerican and terribly exclusionary, McCain makes the point that wresting control of an issue that varies from state-to-state from the states (and more to the point, from the people in those states) is most assuredly un-Republican. Good on ya.
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