Tales Of Brave Ulysses

Look at these incredible images taken by the European Southern Observatory in Chile. It is an extreme close up of the galaxy NGC 1097, which lies about 45 million light years away in the direction of Fornax. It is a barred spiral galaxy with an active galactic core. That means astronomers believe a massive black hole lies at the center of this galaxy, much like our own Milky Way.

This is the full image of the galaxy…

And here is the extreme close up of the galaxy’s central core.

Clean up the image a bit to highlight the very center of the active core, and look! It’s a cosmic drainhole!

Via wood s lot, one of my absolute favorites, here is Sleepy City | urban photography, a fascinating time sink I urge everyone to explore. Makes me think back to the heady days at Beloit, skulking around in the abandoned Morse Ingersoll factory and the campus steam tunnels.

Salon’s Audiofile column has a selection of poems read by Robert Frost available as a daily download. Bravo – always good to hear poetry recited, even if it is just an mp3 downloaded from the internet.

Just let me drop this in here: Macworld’s OS X hints column is extremely useful. For example:

Tab to All Fields in Mozilla and Firefox Forms

Although Safari is now the dominant browser for OS X users, there are a number of excellent alternatives. Two of the best are Mozilla and Firefox (both available at www.mozilla.org), which offer greater customization and control over your Web-browsing experience than Safari does. However, the first time you use one of these browsers on a Web form, you’ll probably be surprised to find that using the tab key doesn’t take you to every field and pop-up menu on the form-so you must reach for the mouse to handle the pop-up menus. Especially on long forms, this can be a real waste of time, as you move from mouse to keyboard and back again. Luckily, there’s an easy (albeit somewhat obscure) way to change this tab behavior on forms.

Launch either browser, and type about:config into the URL bar. When you press return, you’ll see a long list of odd-looking names and values (see “Power Tabbing”). These are various user-controllable preferences, the majority of which are not accessible via the programs’ preferences. The accessibility.tabfocus variable is the one you need to modify. Double-click on that row, and a small dialog box will appear, showing the variable’s name and a text-input line. Select the input line and type 7 ; then click on OK. You should see your new value reflected on the about:config page.

So what did you just do? The default value of 1 means “tab to just text controls,” while 7 means “tab to text controls, other form elements, and links.” From now on, the tab key will select everything on a form, along with any hyperlinks on the page. If you’d rather not also select the links with the tab key, change the 7 to a 3, which means “tab to text controls and other form elements only.”

How can you learn more about these variables, their effects, and their various possible values? There aren’t any definitive references on the Web, but a good starting point is the Other Useful Preferences section of the Customizing Mozilla page: www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html#prefs.

From there, if you’re still interested in learning more, you might try doing a Web search for the term mozilla prefs.

Came across a slew of religion related article this past weekend. Let’s take a look:

• First I found this interesting story from the Times on how religion is not directly correlated with social/moral lifestyles. Comparing the United States against more secular European and Asian societies, America came out far below these godless, immoral countries in their rates of teenage pregnancy, violent crimes, abortion, and suicide. You’re damned if you do, I guess.
  
• From the damned if you don’t corner, comes this New York Times article on American religion’s fascination with the apocalypse, a fixation long associated with Christianity. It’s become so popular nowadays even non-evangelical churches are adopting the rhetoric and symbolism of the end times. As the article says, announcing a sermon on the sign outside that says ‘Our Obligation to the Poor’ can’t hold a candle to ‘The Internet and the Antichrist.’

Caught a few quality gems on the old god box this weekend, stuff I’d never seen before and found quite enjoyable.

• History Detectives – a PBS program that ran late Saturday night I think. I was just passing by on a channel surfing spree when I caught this interesting program about historians, conservators and archivists researching artifacts for people. This particular episode featured the historians tracking down some unknown early drawings from a Polish-American artist and a scrap of what might have been a Civil War era balloon. Definitely worth catching again, though I got the feeling it was a last minute replacement in KGTF’s lineup that night.
  
• Black Narcissus – Again, I caught this one while channel surfing. I didn’t catch the first half hour or so of this movie because I was in and out of the house working on my bicycle, but I was really impressed once I came into the house and started watching it in earnest. It’s about a group of nuns that establish a convent high in the Himalayas, inside a palace festooned with salacious sculptures. Apparently all the carnality depicted in stone gets to one of the nuns, leading to a tragic denouement with the station agent and the abbess in the valley below. A real find on Turner Classic Movies.
  
• La Grand Illusion – I kept it on TCM after Black Narcissus and I was rewarded with this absolute jewel of a movie. It’s a war movie, it’s a prison movie. Think of it as the template from which Stalag 17, The Bridge Over the River Kwai and The Great Escape were cut. They are all great movies, but this was the mold from which they are but copies. It concerns a group of French officers captured during World War I, their life in camp and their efforts at escape. Two prisoners in particular are followed, Lt. Marechal, a former mechanic turned pilot, and Capt. de Boeldieu, a career officer from a long line of aristocrats. The other French officers keep their distance from the aloof de Boeldieu, who has more in common with the prison commandant, Capt. von Rauffenstein, another career officer and German aristocrat. These two men realize the days of their class are numbered, that no matter who wins the Great War, they will lose everything.

Well that’s it. I just wanted to throw this out there. I wanted it understood that I do watch television, I just don’t watch crap. Hell, this was just what I watched on Saturday afternoon and evening. Yesterday I watched a baseball game in the morning and NOVA in the evening. And NOVA actually kinda sucked. It was an entire hour devoted to bowerbirds. It was a well done show, just not that interesting to me. I got the sense that this was a pet project of David Attenborough’s, and PBS just doesn’t say no to Sir David Attenborough. The guy’s the Pope of Chili Town as far as public television is concerned.

Geologists have located a submarine volcano off the western coast of Mexico that yields elusive ‘popping rocks,’ which explode when brought to the surface. No word on whether Coca Cola is involved with these Pop Rocks at this point.

Well I’m glad Jimbo rose to the occassion and decided to mention a certain humorous story on his weblog. After all, I’m trying to raise the standards over here…

This is another image which inspires me. Taken from Jim Breen’s Ukiyo-E Gallery, which has plenty of other links to other ukiyo-e galleries on the internet.

Excellent, most excellent. Turns out the Coen Brothers based The Big Lebowski on a real ‘Dude’ who they met in the early 80’s. Jeff Dowd goes by the moniker ‘the Dude’ and served as the model for Jeff Bridges’ character in the 1998 movie.

His Dudeness is a film producer known for his laid back lifestyle and boisterous charm. Damn, I feel like spending the afternoon bowling and drinking Caucasians now. Seeing as I am a veritable Dude myself, this sounds like a damn good idea.

Whatever happens, the Dude abides man, the Dude abides.

Scientists have come up with a simple, effective design for a wave powered generator, eliminating many of the complexities that have hampered earlier conceptual designs for power generation from ocean waves. An electrical coil attached to a moored buoy is passed through a stack of magnets secured to the ocean floor, generating an alternating electrical current. This design is much simpler than other conceptual generators, eliminating the troublesome hydraulics or rotary designs.

Interest is high in developing wave generation capabilities. Studies show that wave farms placed in strategic locations would be active approximately 50% of the time, as opposed to some wind farm that are idle 75% of the time due to lack of appreciable winds.

Speaking of wind farms, some environmentalists are not all that keen on wind farms. In particular, the collection of windmills in the Altamont Pass east of San Francisco has long been a sore point. The problem is birds. Wind farms, with thousands of spinning wind mills generating electricity, are whirling deathtraps for birds. Particularly vulnerable are raptors like eagles and hawks. You’d think such sharp-eyed birds would be able to avoid great big wind mills, but then raptors don’t really look where they’re going; they are busy scouring the ground for mice and rabbits. The wind mills in Altamont Pass record 800 to 1300 bird strikes a year, a tremendous toll on these species.

I was reading through a stack of Scientific Americans this morning (catching up on my reading) and I came across and interesting article by Luis P. Villarreal from last December’s issue. Are Viruses Alive? discussed current thinking about viruses and whether they can be considered alive. The author thinks they exist of the fringes of life, and certainly are more active in evolution than climate change or other external factors since viruses deal in genetic material. Deciphering the human genome, scientists discovered bits of viral DNA in our genome. Viral genetic material is part of the genomes of most complex species, so apparently viruses can insert themselves into cells for long periods of time, even permanently. Towards the end of the article I read this shocking paragraph:

In fact, along with other researchers, Philip Bell of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and I contend that the cell nucleus itself is of viral origin. The advent of the nucleus – which differentiates eukaryotes (organisms whose cells contain a true nucleus), including humans, from prokaryotes, such as bacteria – cannot be satisfactorily explained solely by the gradual adaptation of prokaryotic cells until they became eukaryotic. Rather the nucleus may have evolved from a persisting large DNA virus that made a permanent home within prokaryotes. Some support for this idea comes from sequence data showing that the gene for a DNA polymerase (a DNA-copying enzyme) in the virus called T4, which infects bacteria, is closely related to other DNA polymerase genes in both eukaryotes and the viruses that infect them. Patrick Forterre of the University of Paris-Sud has also analyzed the enzymes responsible for DNA replication and has concluded that the genes for such enzymes in eukaryotes probably have a viral origin.

Got a lot of cool links to mention in a short span of time, so let’s jump right into it!

• The First Biplanes Were Dinosaurs – Here’s a neat little dino-fact. Looks like the first flying dinosaurs actually had two sets of wings that they used to glide from tree to tree. Take that Wright Brothers.
  
• iBiblio’s Web Museum – A wonderful time waster for the art lover. Lots to look at and enjoy.
  
• Hans Memling’s Faces – Slate gets into the art links with this nice essay and series of images.
  
• More Hobbits, Again – After yesterday’s mention of homo floresiensis, how about some more stuff about the micro-man of Flores and his tiny brain? One thing’s for sure, these paleoanthropologists are a fractious bunch.
  
• Andromeda in Infrared – The Spitzer Infrared Telescope took these incredibly detailed images of the Andromeda galaxy in infrared, revealing a ring of star formation throughout our neighboring galaxy.
  
• Star Formation in the Center of the Milky Way – From Andromeda to our own galaxy… The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has recorded evidence of star formation in our own galaxy, in a most unlikely location. Chandra imaged hot, young stars impossibly close to the center of the Milky Way, home to a voracious super-massive black hole. Apparently the black hole can create as well as destroy.
  
• Robot to Explore Pyramid of Cheops – A robot constructed by the University of Singapore is set to explore the Great Pyramid at Giza. The robot is designed to ascend through narrow ventilation shafts ascending from a chamber deep inside the ancient pyramid. Earlier attempts to plumb the depths of these shafts ended at closed stone doors. This new robot is equipped with a drill to pierce through the doors and explore for possible chambers beyond.

So Homo floresiensis is back in the news again, with more fossil remains described by the archaeologists that announced the shocking dwarf species last year. They describe fossils from nine individuals found in the cave, all sharing similar features and spanning 80,000 years of habitation. To me, 80,000 years of dwarf fossils kind of crushes the alternate hypotheses proposed last year that the single individual originally described was a modern human who suffered severe micro-encephaly.

Check out this cool animaton of the Saturn moon Rhea passing behind Dione, a series of images taken by Cassini

An article well worth reading about the religious experience.

This is the coolest add-on for a cellphone, ever. I can think of nothing cooler, especially now that I’ve cancelled my land line and use nothing but my cellphone and skype to make all my calls. I wonder if I could get one of these to plug into my computer? I could really get into that retro vibe, jamming the phone between my shoulder and my ear and yakking away. All these new-fangled headsets with the boom mikes make you look like a dork anyway.

So how about a quick highway construction update: After months of inactivity, International Bridge Construction finally laid down the top layer of non-skid asphalt about two weeks ago. This final section down to the Ylig River Bridge is ready for striping, but the construction crews are once again nowhere to be found. It’s like they don’t want to finish working on this project. Apparently DPW has finally decided to start fining this lackadaisical construction company $1,400 a day. Apparently they missed their completion deadline of last week, and IBC is now liable for these fines.

That’s just great, but I am pretty damn sure the original timeline was for this construction to end in November 2003. That’s almost two years ago, at $1,400 per day… I think I’ve just solved the government’s budget crisis! That’s well over a million dollars in late fees right there!

Just about two weeks ago now there was a water main break underneath the new highway. This happened about a quarter mile up the road from my house. Of course GWA tore open a huge hole in the road bed and since they have made it amply clear that they are not in the business of fixing their gashes in Guam’s roadways, there is a large, dangerous, gravel-filled hole in Route 4. Or actually, they placed a wobbly iron plate atop the gravel a couple days ago, so I guess that means it is fixed.

Looking at the latest issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (the guys that maintain the Doomsday Clock), I found this chilling map prepared by FEMA. It shows the amount of radiation expected to fall on the continental United States after a Soviet attack, by county. Look at how almost my entire home state of Missouri would have been reduced to a glowing cinder. Almost the entire state was classified as a Very High Risk area with exposure to over 15,000 roentgens. A dose of 500 roentgens for over 5 hours is lethal for humans.

In fact, the entire continental United States would have been subject to dangerously high amounts of radioactivity:

If the fallout levels that characterize a Low Risk Fallout area should occur, debilitating illness and possible death are certain for resident populations without adequate shelter.

I love this painting…

VAN GOGH, Vincent
Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum
September 1888
Oil on canvas
81×65.5 cm
Rijksmuseum Kroller-Mueller, Otterlo