Monthly Archives: March 2005

Zelda

Boy I wasted a ton of time playing this game back in the day. I think I majored in Legend of Zelda actually. Too bad this is only for PC and not Mac.

Bryonn Bain In The Village Voice

These two articles are very interesting.

  • In 1999, Bryonn Bain, his brother and his cousin were arrested for ‘walking while black’ from a Manhattan night club. It didn’t matter that Mr. Bain was a second year law student at Harvard, it didn’t matter that he was class president of his class at Columbia for four years. He was black, he was arrested.
  • Freakily, Bryonn Bain was arrested again in 2002 during a routine traffic stop and jailed for several days because of identity theft. Some lowlife used his name when he was arrested and three warrants were issued for an innocent. During his incarceration his legal aide lawyer told him he was mentally ill when he told her he went to Harvard Law School and currenly taught at Columbia. The police, judges and lawyers all scoffed at his claims of innocence and mistaken identity. When his family came and paid his bail he still had to spend another night behind bars because the jail didn’t have the form that needed to be stamped.

Qietus

Is that even a word? Don’t know…

Anyway sorry for the silence. Blogger is once again slowing to a crawl. I’ve started posting rambling blathers over on Tales of Brave Ulysses, the WordPress blog I put up last month. I am still taking it for a test drive, but so far, so good. I might just abandon this site and shitty Blogger service permanently.

Dawn Set To Rise

Okay, that’s a pretty bad pun. NASA is set to launch another amazing probe into space next year, the Dawn Mission to Ceres and Vesta, the two largest objects in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. I was excited about the impending New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, but this adventure will be just as exciting. The asteroid belt is one of those great mysteries of the solar system. How did the asteroids form? Why isn’t there a planet there?

iPod Oddities

Like most folks with an iPod, I mostly put the thing on shuffle and let it spit out 4,500 tunes in pseudo-random order. I haven’t seen anything documented, but I am pretty sure it puts tunes that I’ve listened to before towards the front of the shuffle playlist. I think it sorta stacks the deck that way. I can think of no other reason why the iTrip FM tuner mp3’s keep popping up so damn often. There’s only a couple dozen of them in there, but it seems like every sixth tune is a series of blips and beeps to the iTrip. That becomes annoying.

A couple other oddities:

  • I’ve been taking the iPod with me on my evening walks up into Yoña. Three times now the iPod has played Strange Fire just as I walk by St. Francis Church. Weird…
  • Strange synchronicity: I just finished listening to Miles Davis’ version of Concierto De Aranjuez from Sketches of Spain, and it went directly into Julian Bream playing the exact same adagio movement from Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. Is the iPod psychic?

WordPress Good, Blogger Bad

That pretty much sums it up. Blogger continues to choke and sputter over at my other site. I think the time has come to abandon Blogger and move entirely to WordPress. Breaking up is hard to do, but I think it’s for the best.

Anatahan Erupts Again

The volcano on Anatahan erupted again over the weekend, spewing ash high into the atmosphere. The eruption subsided quickly, but fresh lava was spotted flowing from the volcano.

I recently saw a NOVA about volcano eruptions; the program discussed a new technique for predicting eruptions based on harmonic seismicity or something. I wonder if the geologists would be interested in studying Anatahan? The darn thing keeps erupting every couple months, I’m sure scientists wouldn’t mind coming to Micronesia for a little R & R – research and reporting.

Anatahan Erupts Again

The volcano on Anatahan erupted again over the weekend, spewing ash high into the atmosphere. The eruption subsided quickly, but fresh lava was spotted flowing from the volcano.

I recently saw a NOVA about volcano eruptions; the program discussed a new technique for predicting eruptions based on harmonic seismicity or something. I wonder if the geologists would be interested in studying Anatahan? The darn thing keeps erupting every couple months, I’m sure scientists wouldn’t mind coming to Micronesia for a little R & R – research and reporting.

Off To Pluto

You learn something new everyday. I vaguely remembering hearing about a planned NASA mission to Pluto, the furthest planet from the sun, a few years ago. I thought it was on the ‘that would sure be nice’ wish list and not actually being developed.

Well, call me stupid. Not only is the New Horizons mission to Pluto planned, that damn thing is built and waiting a launch window in January 2006. That’s 10 months away.

Remember how long it took Cassini to reach Saturn? That probe was launched in a cloud of protest back in October 1997 and it finally reached Saturn last summer. That was a voyage of almost seven years to reach Saturn. Pluto is far, far beyond Saturn – over four times farther away.

Thanks to the massive Atlas booster and an extra third stage rocket, New Horizons will be be the fastest spacecraft yet launched from Earth. The craft will zip along at 96,000 miles per hour. At that speed a spacecraft could fly from the Earth to the Moon in 4 hours. But Pluto is so distant it will take over nine years for New Horizons to reach the icy world. The probe will reach Pluto in July 2015 and hopefully continue on into the Kuiper Belt, the mysterious frozen realm of comets. NASA hopes to propel New Horizons beyond Pluto and past a couple of these distant snowballs at the edge of the solar system.

Jurassic Park?

Paleontologists discovered soft tissue samples from inside a 60 million year old T. rex thigh bone. They recovered blood vessels, blood cells, and bone marrow. They are still researching the find to discover if any DNA was preserved inside the fossil.