From Yahoo News: Two Charged After Human Catapult Death

Yeah. Catapult? Oh no — they were firing PEOPLE with a TREBUCHET. Wow.

The Helios solar-powered aircraft from NASA’s Dryden Research Center has crashed into the Pacific! It was a one-of-a-kind craft, and truly amazing! Uber-lightweight, and capable of staying aloft for a long, long time…. NASA does intend on building another, saying “the technology is worth pursuing”.

Wanna see some movies?

Today at work, I received this memo from our commander-in-chief:

Gentlemen

Some of you know that the urinal in the Corvus men’s room will occasionally get stuck in the “flush” position and overflow onto the floor. When it occurs (once or twice a year at this point), the only remedy (short of shutting off all water to the building) is the following:

1. Grab or grasp the flathead screwdriver above the bathroom’s fluorescent light fixture.
2. Remove the chrome “nut” (no comments necessary) – that should be only finger tight – from the front of the urinal plumbing.
3. Turn the embedded screw clockwise until the water to the urinal is shut off and the overflow ceases.
4. Look down at your now-wet shoes and quietly mutter “damn”.
5. With the screwdriver, tap on the bulbous area behind the nut (again – no comment necessary) to loosen any hard water particles that may have caused the overflow in the first place.
6. Carefully – turn the water back on, replace the nut and go on about your business. If for some reason, it begins to overflow again, shut it back off, make and post appropriate signage and contact the local authorities.

By working together comrades, we can assure a dry shoe future for ourselves and future generations.

(And by the way, if someone accidentally removes the official Corvus men’s room flathead screwdriver from it’s appointed place, we may find ourselves, literally, up sh*t creek without a paddle – well… p*ss creek anyway.)

BTW, I should note that where he mentions “turning the water off to the entire building” is not only funny, but entirely true — and yes, we scrambled to find a screwdriver the first couple of times it happened.

Score One for the Fat Kid is a band. They are from Cambridge, MA and just released their album “Plan B is for Suckers” back in March. They seem to be in a genre known as “math-rock”, and I don’t know if i’d say that. They remind me of something between Hum and maybe a little Uncle Tupelo thrown in there (at least the beginning of “Can You Name These Brain Structures”). Anyway, good pop-indie sensibilities with quirky lyrics and tight musicianship.

What really endeared me was this: an explanation of “the Creepy Claw” song that mentions Louisville and they name dropped the White Stripes, and they have a general disregard for music snobbery.

Oh, hey, I’ve got an idea — listen to a couple of tracks.

Woo! Hoo!

i saw an article in today’s Courier-Journal about an interesting project at the University of Kentucky College of Engineering called BIG BLUE (Baseline Inflatable Glider Balloon Launched Unmanned Experiment). Essentially, it’s a balloon-launched glider designed for atmospheres like Mars. Mars has an atmosphere that is 1% as dense as the Earth, so flying is MUCH harder. The cool thing about this plane is that the wings are deployed at an altitude of 100,000 feet. And they are just unfolded — they are inflated! But you can’t fly with non-rigid wings, right? Right. Well, those crafty sons-of-guns came up with the idea for a ultraviolet-hardening epoxy to harden the wings at altitude! Crazy stuff.

Anyway, NASA is partially funding this project, and they have an article about it’s test flight.

The official site (fairly crude) is linked above, but if you want to see some cool wind-tunnel footage of these wings, you can go here and some documentary footage of the launch can be viewed here.

I run a mail server on linux. the mail daemon is Postfix. the H Dizzle asked me about SPAM filtering. Spamassassin does a good job of killing SPAM. Google found me a nice HOWTO on using SpamAssassin with Postfix. I tested, it worked. Yay!

I just finished the page and documentation for snow2.js, a little javascript toy that makes explosive snow rain down upon your page!

i’ve been messing around with this little javascript snow-thing today whilst at work (it’s been a bit stop-and-go today, and I’m frazzled). I went to sleep late last night, and have been drinking coffee. While I feel great because I’ve been doing good work today, and there is snow outside, things are getting hectic on this project i’m on.

In that spirit, when you clicky on the snowflakes that are falling on this page, they explode.

You can pause them with the “pause snow” link over here –>

Chuck realizes that work is boring, hits the road to San Francisco, realizes that the Golden Gate bridge is the world’s longest tourist trap, and much more…

Peep it… Day 5 (Sunday, June 24, 2001)

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–BEGIN TRANSMISSION–

Day 4

So I yet enter another day in the great state of California. I getting pretty fucking bored of the stuff at SLAC, I’ve learned about all that im allowed to learn, and we have to wait for Dr. Brown to finish his work and go to the meetings(the colloboration meeting started today) There is SP work for us to do, but with the three of us being proficient in doing it, all the work is done in les than an hour.

SP: Simulation Production, the use of Monte Carlo (MC, a better random-number generator) techiniques to create a simulated high energy event(s), then use intelligent processing to recreate it ‘inside’ a virtual detector. This data then can be run through a third process of data analysis to try to reconstruct the original creation. This reconstruction process is the same one as actually used on the real detector data, and it helps the colloboration to fine tune the different processes.

Ok, that is what I do in a nutshell, I don’t do the fine tuning, or anything other than oversee that the computers are working on the assigned tasks correctly, and then update the database for the completed simulations, of course, there are millions of events simulated….

So, anyway, after several hours of boredom, we headed off to the mall, then a few more hours of boredom, but finially we got everyone together and headed north on highway ONE to SAN FRANSISCO! (song in my head…. ‘san-fran–sisko’)

So, we drove into SF, really nice, really big, really hilly. WE drove on Lombard street, the guiness records most curviest street in the world, saw some other shit, and ended up on pier 39, which is a popular tourist attraction, basically a floating mall, really big too.

It seems that everything in Sunny California is bigger: roads, buildings, trees(redwoods), you name it.

We ate at a lovely Italian restaraunt on the pier, I had the prawns, and then checked out the mall. IT was a Sunday nite, and much had already closed.

But then we had a lovely drive across the bay bridge to treasure island, then across the other half of the bay bridge to Oakland(about 4 miles long I estimated a definite Long Ass Bridge, or a LAB). Then north thru Oakland, a not so pretty city, to the other side of the Golden Gate bridge, we drove south across the bay again into SSan F on the golden gate bridge, its really big!

Cost $3 goddamn dollars too, and they dont charge you till AFTER the ride, what a racket!

Long drive home, then passed out at 1.30 in the am.

Chuck