Well, it appears that NASA has created an robotic nose to sniff the air in the space station.
It’s called the ENose, but as all Futurama fans, yours truly included, know, it should be called the Smell-O-Scope.
Category: 40yrs
Succumbing to Peer Pressure
Palin giving a post turkey pardon interview while other turkies are slaughtered behind her.
I didn’t want to post this, but the peer pressure from the liberal blogosphere proved too strong.
Damn you John Aravosis!
Truth be told, I also saw this on MSNBC Countdown, where they blurred out the nasty bits, and supplied some very amusing headlines to go along with it. (click on picture for full size)
Headliner You Don’t Expect
Indian Navy Destroys Pirate Ship.
I find it odd on so many levels.
BTW, the proximate cause of the piracy is that because there is no government in Somalia, fishing fleets from various nations have strip mined the waters off the coast, leaving fisherman with no other means of support.
Cheney Shows Biden Around His House
The original is here.
Obituary: Eugene Kaza
He was band teacher in high school, and a rather a force of nature.
After suffering through an elementary school concert, I sent him a letter of apology for the pain I undoubtedly caused him, as I was without question the worst trombone player in the history of Woodrow Wilson High School.
Good Prank
Well, it looks like a bunch of pranksters created a phony New York Times, and handed it out in major cities:
The Associated Press reported that copies of the spoof paper were also handed out in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, and that the pranksters — who included a film promoter, three unnamed Times employees and Steven Lambert, an art professor — financed the paper with small online contributions and created the paper to urge President-elect Barack Obama to keep his campaign promise
The usual suspects for organizing this are the Yes Men, and there is a web page, which, at least for me, is not that Firefox friendly.
This Economy is So Bad
I Think that I Bled Internally
Friday night services.
USY, the teen youth group, did their own toon for the closing prayer Adon Olam…..Not surprising, it can be done to any tune I’ve ever heard.
That being said, why did they have to do it to the tune of the J. Giles song “Angel is a Centerfold.”
**shudder**
Blue Eggs and Ham
I’m Matthew Saroff, and I approve this breakfast.
Got to Use the 3d Printer at Work
Well, I got to use the 3d printer for the first time at work.
Nothing major, just some wells for some tubes to sit in to see if we can adapt a device to a different configuration.
It’s king of neat. The machine puts out 2 resins, one is water soluble, and is used to create the initial base on the plate where the other permanent resin, PE I believe, is extruded from the print head in very fine lines.
I’m making something about the size of about a sandwich, and it takes 13 hours to make it.
Unfortunately, the capabilities of a cell phone camera and camcorder do not really capture enough detail to show this as it appears in person.
It’s wicked cool to watch.
Video below:
Ok, So I’m In Line to Vote, and Blogging From My Phone
Because Maryland does not have early voting.
I wasn’t there when polls opened, because it’s my mom’s Yarzheit,* so I was at Shul to say Kaddish.
In all liklihood, mom would have appreciated the voting more than the Kaddish.
I will vote straight Democrat, not crooked Republican, and I will vot yes on Question 1, allowing for early voting, but no on Question 2, slot parlors.
I don’t think that it will raise much money, and that it is a give away to the race tracks.
Additionally, I think that it is very bad policy to rely too heavily on “sin taxes” and related revenues for too much of the budget. It makes people think that taxes are punishment, when they are dues to live in our society.
The line is pretty long, and someone said that when the polls opened, the line snaked through the parking lot.
In any case, thank God that this election will be over in a few hours.
*Anniversary of her death in the Jewish Lunar Calendar.
A prayer said by mourners and people observing Yarzheit. Interestingly enough, it’s in the now almost dead language of Aramaic, as opposed to most of the prayer book, which is in Hebrew. The languages are very similar though, with most of the differences being in the pronunciation of vowels. You need to have at least 10 people praying together to say
So I won’t have to go through this crap to vote again.
Hey, I Worked on This!!!!
In 1996, I was brought in to work at what was then Loral Vought Systems to work on navalization issues for the VT1 missile, which was the missile for the Crotale NG system from Thompson CSF.
Now, they have adapted the missile for vertical launch, and made a successful launch.
It’s a fairly simple point defense system, roughly analagous to Seawolf, in that the launcher mounted fire control system guides the missile to the target, andt here is no seeker on the missile.
Since I’ve worked on the system, Thomson CSF become the French defense behemouth Thales.
Truth be told, I’m kind of surprised that they are still developing the missile. It feels like an awful long time ago.
It’s why I can claim to be a “rocket scientist”
Seriously, Do Chriso-Fascists even Read the Bible?
The grand high priestess of snark, Wonkette, notes that a Christian group has called for prayer to repair the broken financial system.
While the obvious rejoinder would be something about chasing money lenders out of the temple, that’s not my holy book, but Christo-Fascist (she says it’s because of gay marriage) nutcase Cindy Jacobs has done me the favor of allowing me to go seriously Old Testament* on these folks:
For these and other reasons Cindy is calling for a Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies on Wednesday, October 29, 2008. They are calling for prayer for the stock markets, banks, and financial institutions of the world on the date the stock market crashed in 1929. They are meeting at the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve Bank, and its 12 principal branches around the US that day.
“We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems,” she said. “While we do not have the full revelation of all this will entail, we do know that without intercession, economies will crumble.”
(emphasis mine)
Umm…Folks, bull, as in adult male cow, as in it was once a CALF, and Bronze is a GOLD colored alloy…..Gold….Calf….does that ring a bell?
On a more amusing note, that photograph really does look like the one from The Ten Commandments
*Normally, I do not use the term, “Old Testament”, I use the term Tanakh, because “Old Testament” implies that there is a “New Testament” out there, which is somehow divinely connected, and I do not accept the divinity of the Christian bible. In this case, however, the phrase, “Going seriously Tanach on these folks,” loses something in the translation.
Porsche-Doppelkupplungsgetriebe
That is the name for Porsche’s new electronic automatic transmission on its 911.
You gotta love the German language.
Quote of the Day
Perhaps it’s the quote of the campaign, from Political Wire:
‘The reason the Republicans found Joe the Plumber was to find someone hanging around a toilet other than Larry Craig.’
— James Carville
I Recall an Anime Movie About This
Specifically Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle.
Only this one is real, or at least in prototype state courtesy of those wacky Danes from art collective N55 in Copenhagen.
The theory is that when rising ocean levels from global warming make your current location to wet, the house walks somewhere else.
Reminds me of that bit of dialogue from a Get Smart episode:
99: What’s that?
Max: An electric snake, we’ll send it it to get
information.99: What does it run on?
Max: Tiny Little Feet.
Heh.
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
OK, my 6 week stint of unemployment, actually.
More accurately, this is about the fact that I started an old/new job.
I returned to work at a medical device manufacturer after an 11 months away.
I literally went back to my old cube, and my old phone was there, along with notes from when I was last there and my old voice mail was still active, complete with a message from January of this year, though I still had to wait a bit for my computer login to be created.
It says less about the ebb and flow of employment there than it does about the quality of my cube.
There is a big honking column in the middle of it, which makes it less than desirable.
It will be nice not to be working military (too much dealing with Generals complaining about the colors of power point slides) and nuclear power (the more know, the less I like industry. Cleaning up when you are done generating power is too damn expensive).
Futurama Got There First
With Dr. Hubert J. Farnsworth’s Smell-o-Scope, but, “NASA has commissioned a British chemist to recreate the fragrance of outer space,” for astronauts in training.
This will actually be a difficult job, as the smell has been described as, “smell of fried steak, hot metal and even welding a motorbike.”
Is space no one can smell you…….I dunno…any suggestions for a twist on the Alien catch phrase?
OK, This just Squicks Me Out
US scientists believe it could be possible to use artificial electric eel cells grafted into the human body to generate power for cybernetic implant devices. The pseudo-electrocytes would harvest the necessary energy from body fats and sugars.
Shudder
