Monica

Today's entry at Astronomy Picture of the Day introduced me to the Galaxy Garden, a detailed representation of our galaxy in foliage form (1 foot = 1000 light years). Nifty! It has some very nice touches, like the gravity well at the center. If I should ever find myself in Koma I want to go take a closer look.

Neat visualization #1: the scale of the universe, showing how big (and small) things are. Link from filkerdave.

Ooh, pretty: when Planet Earth looks like art. Link from browngirl.

Overheard at work: "Every time a developer cries, a tester gets his horns".

Neat visualization #2, from a coworker: 200 counteries, 200 years, 4 minutes.

I had sometimes wondered what the point of bots was -- what does somebody get out of creating bogus LJ accounts just to add and remove friends? (At least when they post nonsense comments they might be testing security for when the spam comes later.) Bots on Livejournal explored helps answer that question. Link from alienor.

Graph paper on demand (other types too). Thanks, loosecanon; I can never find the right size graph paper lying around when I need it.

A handy tool: bandwidth meter, because the router reports theoretical, not actual, connection speed.

And a request for links (or other input): does anybody have midrash or torah commentary on the light of creation (meaning the light of that first day)? I have the couple passasges from B'reishit Rabbah quoted in Sefer Ha-Aggadah and I have the Rashi; any other biggies? I was asked to teach a segment of a class in a few days.

It's entertaining when malware distributors are both bold and stupid, like with this email I got today: "Dear customer, we have disabled your email account because we believe it has been compromised. To restore, run the attached executable and use the following password: 12345". (Yes, it was sent in the clear.) How many things are wrong with that ploy? Sheesh.

Serendipitiously, 15 minutes after seeing that scam I saw this excellent tutorial on password management by vonstrassburg. No, not the "how to choose a good password" hints you already know, but, rather, how to deal with the fact that that doesn't really work. I particularly like his suggestions for managing the database file.

From browngirl: Mordor or Iceland? Match the pictures to the source.

I have recently been participating in a small discussion of renaissance music notation... on a mailing list for Jewish worship. No, I didn't start it, but I could hardly let those comments just sit there... And now I have pointers to other editions of Salamone Rossi's music that seem worth investigating (Don Harran in particular). The edition I have is funky; the music is fine, but it's a transcription of a 19th-century French edition and Hebrew transliterated into French phonemes breaks my brain. I transcribe pieces from this book if our choir is going to do them. (What I really want to see is a facsimile edition...)

This tiny horse (link from anastasiav) gave me a serious case of the "aww, cute!"s.

Some iGoogle plug-in served me this cat picture, and all I could think was "yeah, I've had days like that". It's tempting to turn it into a userpic, but I don't know whose property it is.

Erik sometimes makes a squeaking sound now where I would have expected a meow to come out. He still has a full-voiced meow, so it's not like he's caught kitty laryngitis or something, but it's still odd. Embla's normal mode is a sort of chirp (I've only heard her actually meow two or three times), but this sort of thing is new for Erik. Weird.

Dani pointed me to Fantasy In Miniature. here are three that caught my fancy. I have just doubled the subscriptions to fantasyinmin. (I wonder who the other one is.)

From siderea: The C Programming Language by Kernighan & Ritchie & Lovecraft.

Toleration versus diversity (David Friedman) was an interesting read for me.

Chat-based ask-the-rabbi service, for when email is too slow and asynchronous. Apparently they also do SMS. (It's Chabad, though they don't make it particularly easy to discover that.)

Everything I know about work, I learned in the SCA, by metahacker.

Pumpkins in prison, a photo by ticklethepear. (Though it looks like they might be able to break out if they really had to.)

dagonell wrote that we show our humanity most in how we treat the weak, such as this aid for an ailing penguin. Neat!

From a locked post (I'll happily credit you if you like): Shopping while Black: a social experiment.

From a coworker: this wedding gift won't open until it's in the right location. Only 50 tries. Fun!

What cats would say to you if they could talk (GraphJam).

I enjoy Bill Walsh's writings on language and copy-editing, such as common punctuation problems. And sometimes he makes me laugh, as in this work of a punctuation vigilante.

(Aside: RSS feeds to LJ seem to be broken again.)

And now for something completely different...

The husband of a member of the Debatable Choir posted video from our Pennsic performance.

I didn't know enough chemistry to fully parse this geeky comic by ohiblather, but I still laughed out loud when I saw it.

xiphias reports research that seems to be begging for an IgNobel award. As he points out, it's worthy because first it makes you laugh and then it makes you think. I mean, what publishable conclusion would you expect from researchers doing an MRI on a dead salmon?

I feel fortunate that "talk like a pirate day" fell on Rosh Hashana, meaning I was shielded from most of the antics. But I enjoyed top ten halachic problems for a Jewish pirate, forwarded by dglenn. Should I be worried that I have defensible answers for several of them?

Fun website mash-ups from metahacker and others. From one of the comments: "OKAmazon: People who had sex with this person also liked..."

Signal boost: kyleri makes hand creams, lip balms, soaps, and similar items, and she is currently having a sale. I bought some of her creams at Pennsic and am happy with the results.

I haven't turned off the spelling checker in Firefox on this machine yet because I do sometimes make typos that it catches, but this post almost made me do so. :-)

Dear Pittsburgh CLO: I gave you my phone number so you could contact me if there were problems with my theatre tickets. You lost points by calling to ask for a charitable donation, and you lost lots of points when your agent argued with my labelling of the call as a solicitation. His claim: you're not selling anything but asking for a donation, so that's not a solicitation. I recommend you buy him a dictionary. Unfortunately, you'll be doing it with your own money, not mine.

I'm used to size variation in women's clothing. (Why oh why can't women's jeans use waist and inseam like men's?) And I'm used to minor variations in shoes in US sizes (I seem to wear a size 7.75, which doesn't exist). I had not realized that there is significant variation in sizes on the (tighter) European scale. The size-38 Naot sandals I just tried are nearly half an inch shorter than the size-38 Birkies that fit (and that I bought). They're both the same style, your basic two-strap slip-in sandal.

Dani's company watched searching for evil recently. It's an overview of Internet security issues -- probably nothing new, but he spoke well of it so I want to bookmark it for when I've got a spare hour.

IANA considerations for TLAs was making the rounds at my company this week.

Via goldsquare comes this bizarre story: a man lost parental rights to his younger child, appealed, and was then killed in a car accident. Now state child-welfare agents want to support the appeal, so the child can share in his estate. The court says this is uncharted territory.

Specialized seasonal question: can anyone tell me, in the next 8 hours, if I use high-holy-day melodies in Hallel for Rosh Chodesh tomorrow morning? It's the last day of Av, not the first day of Elul (so we don't blow shofar yet).

( funny image and video behind the cut )

Last week Erik spent the day at the vet's for an ultrasound (everything looks good, they said; awaiting formal report). When I picked him up, the person at the desk asked me to sign a photo release. It turns out that this was their day to take photos of staff members for their web site, and since my vet had made a special trip just to be there for this ultrasound, she asked that Erik join her in the picture. :-) (No, it's not on the web site yet.)

Thanks to those who gave me DTV advice. I had the wrong mental model for the converter box: I was thinking of it as a passive device, like an antenna, when it is more like a cable box. I don't think I'd realized before today that I will have to always set the channel on the box and not the VCR. That makes recording shows more of a hassle, but I watch little-enough TV that it probably won't be a big hassle. Still, one of the reasons I've never been interested in higher levels of cable service (except for B5's TNT year) is that the box displaces the tuner in my VCR, making recording more error-prone. Of course, VCRs themselves are on the way out at this point, so perhaps I should be looking for a DVR that does not involve a subscription service. (Again, don't watch enough TV to justify paying for a service.) I want to be able to program something and mostly forget about it until I'm ready to watch accumulated shows.

We saw Star Trek this weekend. If you don't think about the plot or the science too hard it's a good movie -- which is pretty much the calibration I expect from Trek. I wonder if the reset will lead to more TV shows or if it's just a movie franchise at this point.

Speaking of movies, thanks to osewalrus for passing on I'm a Marvel / I'm a DC (YouTube).

A seasonal note: a different kind of Omer calendar. Y'see, Jews are supposed to count the 50 days from Pesach to Shavuot, each night. Sometimes it's hard to remember, so people have come up with various reminder schemes. This one builds on the near-universal motivational properties of chocolate. :-) (Some commenters compare it to a chocolate Advent calendar. Advent calendars are completely outside my experience; sounds like I missed out on something tasty as a kid.)

Seen in passing, a useful-looking URL to have on hand: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/.

Finally (below the cut due to image size) a cartoon that made me laugh out loud. I didn't particularly expect to find it on Language Log, but I'm glad they posted it so I could see it.
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15 most strange buildings in the world is bizarre. While it's not the strangest, I am fond of the library that looks like a shelf full of books.

Dani's comfort foods include shepherd's pie, which was not part of my upbringing. I've made the version from Cooking for Engineers a couple times, substituting margarine for the butter because of kashrut and beef for the lamb because of availability, but he says it's not quite right. I asked him to do some searching and he reports that everything that looks right involves milk or cheese, which is of course a problem. Do any of my kosher or lactose-intolerant readers have a favorite recipe?

A friend recently burned DVDs from some treasured old videotapes, but our DVD player won't play them. (The computers will.) Google tells me that this is a common problem, especially with older players. There are the competing standards of DVD+R and DVD-R; the documentation for our player mentions neither by name. (These discs are DVD+R.) This happened once before and I assumed a bad disc; now I suspect the problem is the player. We bought our DVD player, a region-free Sampo, when the first season of The West Wing was released in the UK, which was apparently 2002.

I could get this video adapter for my iBook for $19. There might be other benefits to that too, though streaming Hulu might not be one of them (video seems jumpy). Or it appears that region-free DVDs have come way down in price, so maybe we should replace our player. Maybe with this ($58 and I've heard of the manufacturer) or this ($40, no reviews, and never heard of the maker). These are the results of half an hour of surfing; if anyone reading this has opinions, I'd love to hear 'em.

Recently I've seen a few "bot" LJ accounts go by -- users that seem to subscribe to people at random but don't do anything else (so they're not, say, making harrassing comments), and then the accounts get nuked. The last one I got was Russian, as I gather many are. I don't really care if such accounts show up as subscribers, but I find myself wondering two things: what do they get out of it, and why do some folks get upset enough to get the accounts suspended? What am I missing?

Query to the brain trust: I have USB headphones that include a microphone. What free software can I use to record voice from that microphone (preferably on Windows XP but I also have an iBook with OS 10.4 available) and produce something like WAV files? (I know I'm not going to get stellar audio quality from this setup; that's ok. The immediate goal is to record torah chanting -- think "teaching tapes", except no one uses tape any more.)

Followup on UJF: I spoke with the campaign manager on Friday and she was very apologetic. She promised to take appropriate action. (I've updated the original entry to reflect this.)

This week my employer's landlord started giving preferred parking spots to people driving green vehicles (definition not provided). Not that I'm going to turn down the convenience (my Honda Fit qualifies), but as one of my coworkers pointed out, are those the cars for which they want to minimize driving? (Should we try to get the gas guzzlers to stop on the first floor instead?) I used to always park on the top indoor floor, mostly so I could park in the same place every day and not have to worry about remembering at the end of the day. Now that I think about it, that decision represented about 2-3% of my commuting distance.

You know that "25 things about me" meme that's been going around? Maybe it's older than you thought. Or maybe not. :-)

The local SCA got some decent TV coverage recently.

Via jducoeur: Facebook company secrets were revealed by someone who applied paper analogies to digital media. Oops. No, white-out doesn't work on bits. (From the news story it sounds like it might have been the court that screwed up, which presumably means they can't sue anyone for the leak.)

Birkat ha Chamah is a once-every-28-years observance, and it's coming up this April. I wonder if anyone local is doing anything for this. It sounds kind of peculiar, but it'll be a while before I could next satisfy my curiosity. (The timing is inconvenient with respect to Pesach, however.)

Glow-in-the-dark body cream, pointed out by browngirl.

Thanks to xiphias for pointing out this comic to me: ( moderately-large image )

Having completed the first pass at digitizing or replacing our folk music on old media (we still need to do some proof-listening), Dani and I are merging our iTunes libraries so this might be easier going forward. Oof. We're up to "S" so far. "T" is big because it includes all the "The"s. Tracking changes (e.g. to tagging) going forward is still going to be a bit of a challenge.

Was Joe Biden president of the US for about 5 minutes today? (We were watching in a conference room at work, and it was several minutes past noon before they got to Obama's swearing-in. So I'm curious.)

In English we say "it's all Greek to me". What do speakers of other languages say? Whom do they implicate? Wonder no more; Language Log has a nice graph of some of these. I admit to being surprised by China's designee.

What if the stop sign were designed by corporations? (link from filkerdave)

As dsrtao said, an airline charging a cancellation fee when they rebooked you on a downed flight is near-canonical chutzpah. (Yes, I saw the note that they recanted.)

This story of a mailing list gone wrong (from Microsoft) made me laugh. And sigh, because while I haven't had to deal with quite that level of mess, even 20ish years after mailing lists started to become broadly accessible, there are still an awful lot of people out there who don't behave appropriately.

There's an interesting discussion of filtering and politeness on social networks over on CommYou.

Note to self: if Shalom Hartman Institute is too expensive this summer, the Aleph kallah might be an alternative. It could be good or it could be too esoteric for me; I can't tell from the available information. When they post class descriptions I'll have a better idea. I had a similar concern about NHC but it turned out to be good, so I'm keeping an open mind. Has anyone reading this gone to one of these?

As we go through the process of digitizing our non-digital music and ripping the CDs, both Dani and I have had multiple instances of iTunes crapping out on us in various ways. Usually the failure mode is that it takes over all the CPU, won't respond, and forces a reboot. Or it'll just decide to stop paying attention to the CD drive and not acknowledge the disc I just put in. Is this iTunes' doing, or Windows'?

Anyway, yesterday we ripped about 100 folk CDs. Progress. I've been going through tape-recorded Clam Chowder concerts. I hope to one day identify the source of the five stray tracks at the end of another concert tape -- a tape I had actually catalogued at the time, but I didn't record those additions. Hmm.

Links:

One Velociraptor Per Child, from jducoeur. I hope they're offering a buy-one-get-one program; Dani really wants his own velociraptor.

From shalmestere: dressage... with a camel (video). I didn't know they could do that.

From siderea: feline cavalry (video).

kyleri passed on this twist on animal rescue.

From a locked post: curry can stave off Alzheimers?. If so, I'm even happier that Sree's is now selling Indian food across the street from my office.