Check this out:
It’s the aurora australis, or southern lights, seen from above! It was taken May 29, 2010 from the International Space Station. Bad Astronomy talks about what causes aurorae in the blog post where I found the picture.
Seriously: The aurora. From space. How cool is that?
Irvine is dreadfully afraid you might think the dead grass is the result of poor maintenance.
Apparently, they’re also concerned that the old Grass Under Renovation signs might not be inclusive enough.
My calendar lists last Tuesday as “Election Patch Day.” (We had a state primary election, which fell on Microsoft’s second-Tuesday-of-the month schedule for releasing software updates.)
I guess you could consider elections to be patches keeping the government up to date.
Edit: On the other hand, there are usually two or more competing “patches” that disagree on how to fix the problems, and even what needs to be fixed.
Last night I noticed @BadAstronomer posting ideas for a Twitter meme, #fishpopstars. It’s pretty much what you’d expect: take a singer or band name and make a pun with the name of a fish.
Katie and I came up with these:
Some favorites from the event:
It looks like it’s still going on if you’re in the mood for fish puns.
If you went out to the movies in the US during 2009, there’s a good chance you saw a turn-off-your-phone PSA in which a movie about “robots from space” tries to negotiate blowing up Mount Rushmore.
In a case of life imitating art, the National Park Service is currently battling Transformers 3 — a movie about robots from space — over just what they can and can’t do with a national monument!
Okay, you can’t blow up a national monument, but…
Bill Line, Park Service spokesman, said the producers “have asked to do some things that simply are not done on the National Mall,” among them staging a “car race” along the Mall’s gravel paths and flooding it with artificial light in order to shoot at night.
Apparently it’s not unique to Transformers 3, but a fairly frequent battle between the park service and film producers, which means Sprint’s video isn’t just a funny story, but a bit of an in-joke to those familiar with the industry.
Hmm, any chance the new movie will have a chorus singing “Robots from space!” in the background?
Whenever I visit a Dreamwidth journal and leave it open in a tab, I always find myself wondering why I was looking at the Debian GNU/Linux website. For possibly obvious reasons:
I can’t imagine how I keep mixing up a dark red 1½-turn counterclockwise spiral with a dark red 1½-turn clockwise spiral! 😀
Twitter writes that link length shouldn’t matter, but the zillions of URL shortening services out there show that, for now, it does.
But why?
There are two main reasons to shorten* a link:
Right now, with Twitter messages limited to 140 characters and links forced to share that space with the rest of the post, URL shorteners are critical. But they’re working on a plan to accept longer URLs, and specifically shorten them for SMS messages. The full link will be available on the Twitter website, desktop clients, and other platforms that don’t have that hard and fast limit.
That will cut down on the demand for shorteners, but they’ll still be useful.
For one thing, there are other microblogging platforms out there like StatusNet.
For another, there’s email.
IIRC, the first URL shorteners launched because email programs often break up really long lines, including really long URLs. In plain-text messages, that leaves links not just unclickable, but inconvenient even to copy and paste, because you have to copy each line separately and paste them together. This will continue to be an issue as long as people continue to put visible URLs in email.
And then there’s the human factor. It might not be easy to remember http://is.gd/cGE8V, but it certainly takes a lot less time to write it on a scrap of paper than http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/07/hard-to-port-eject-goose-eject/.
Which of those URLs would you rather type on your keyboard? Or worse, on your mobile phone?
*In this case, I mean making it really short and cryptic. There are plenty of reasons to keep links readable and sort of short.
