Fusion Panda

I was home today from work, I've had a cold since Friday but it seemed to be at its worst last night and today.

While perusing the internets, this short blurb on io9 pretty much totally blew my mind:

http://io9.com/5890501/captain-planets-planeteers-were-secretly-the-kids-from-the-magic-school-bus

I suppose this basically makes the Magic School Bus a prequel to Captain Planet.

And as the comments point out, River Song basically is Ms. Frizzle.

Wow, apparently lots of other people have already come to this conclusion as well.

I need to make some new avatars for things I write about these days. Something for weather, probably a Doctor Who one...

I suppose it makes sense that tornado season has gotten off to an early start, considering that winter never really seemed to ever take hold this year.

No tornadoes right here, but there was a tornado watch yesterday, temperatures in the 60s and some lightning and thunder yesterday evening. It looks like there's the potential for another outbreak (more likely in Southwest Ohio and points south) tomorrow.

I came across this video on YouTube the other day, which is an animation of the national weather radar mosaic from May 2, 1997 to December 31, 2011. 14 years of weather in a 33-minute time lapse:


Besides the realization that I was only 16 years old on the day this animation begins, I think it's interesting to watch the weather patterns, especially the seasonal variations, like lake effect snow on the back end of winter storms, or to search out particular days. September 11th 2001 was a pretty clear day nation-wide, and the last week of August 2005 was when Katrina went across South Florida and then up into Louisiana.

I wonder if there are any other particularly interesting days. There were those super tornado outbreaks last spring, I'm not sure what days those were though.

The Ohio Pinball Show is only a week-and-a-half away (March 10th), and Mom and I pretty excited about it.

On Slashdot today I saw this video of review of the new Seattle Pinball Museum. It seems like a really cool place:

http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/02/27/2340229/slashdot-visits-the-seattle-pinball-museum-video

Well, I had planned to start writing in my LiveJournal again today, and figured I would just start off with some random fun links that I had picked up.

But now it's only 9:30 and I'm seriously considering just calling it quits for the day and getting into bed in defeat.

My job description is changing in ways I don't like, and with no additional training, so work (which was already not a particularly fun place) is about to get a whole lot worse.

And then I finally got home today, and in the process of taking care of a monetary matter in a timely fashion, I have instead screwed it up in such a way that will cost me (theoretical) money and probably greatly disappoint my parents.

And pretty much the only thing that matters more to me than the state of my job is disappointing my parents, so... I'm pretty much batting 1.000 today.

Not a good day.

There was an episode of Portlandia recently in which the two main characters watch all of Battlestar Galactica over a period of a couple of days and become obsessed with finding Ronald D. Moore so he can write more episodes.

They track someone down in Portland that happens to be Ronald D. Moore but not the Ronald D. Moore, but he goes along with it.

I haven't seen the full episode, but this clip, which features Edward James Olmos, James Callis and Ronald D. Moore himself, really makes me want to check it out:


I particularly like the ending.

Test of links:

Wikipedia

Test of bold text

I keep trying to edit that last entry so it's not just a wall of text, but for some reason it's not changing. The official LiveJournal android application really sucks, I think I may try out one of the other ones instead.

Just one mostly stress-free day would be great right now. I'm dogsitting in Brecksville this weekend. I woke up this morning after a very long and very not enjoyable low-level nightmare. In the dream, two different people, one of them a relative and one of them a friend from college that I don't see very often, both died, unexpectedly, from unrelated illnesses. It sucked. It was the sort of dream where you aren't scared or terrified, there was just a lot of sadness and despair. So not the best start to the morning. I fed Jake, let him out, and then drove back to my apartment. I noticed that my tire pressure light was on, which I attributed to the cold weather the last couple of days, and resolved to top off my tires later in the day. Today would have been Bob's birthday, and Jim offered to take Melissa, Ashley, and I up to see his grave in Lutheran Cemetery in Brooklyn and lunch afterwards. We didn't get back until about 3:00; I really needed to go into work, but since I needed to be back up in Brecksville by 5:00 or so to let Jake out, I decided to do some quick cleaning and laundry instead. I'm way behind in just about any type of home chores because I've been working so much. I made a quick run to Walmart, and decided to fill up my tires later. About 5:00 I left home. I planned to stop at Sheetz to use their air pump, but there was a line, so I went across the street to BP. The pump there isn't free, so I had to go in to get change. When I bent down to take the cap off my front driver's-side tire, I noticed a bit of a hissing noise, which was a little disconcerting, but when I pushed my pressure gauge onto the valve stem, it pushed into the tire about a half inch and then started hissing much louder. When I took it away it seemed to reset itself, so I shrugged and tried again. This time bits of metal fell away from the outside of the valve stem, and the entire stem fell into the tire, and at that point there was a loud PPPPSSSSSSSHHHHHH and the tire completely deflated in about 30 seconds. Great. Well, the good news was that I was in a gas station parking lot, not out on the street, and if it was going to deflate like that, I'm glad it was in a controlled situation, instead of while driving. But having a flat tire still ruins a day. I called Mom and Dad so I could ask someone that could think rationally for the most efficient way to replace the flat front left tire with another full-size tire using the least amount of jacks (the answer: jack the back left, remove the back left tire, replace with the spare, jack the left front, remove the flat, replace with the full-size back left tire). If I was just going to drive straight home it wouldn't matter, but I still needed to get up to Brecksville. I jacked the car up and put the plan into motion, but then ran into the problem I've faced in 2 out of 3 flat tires: not being able to get the lugnuts off. So I called AAA, and they arrived pretty quickly. It only took us five minutes, using his lugnut gun thing, to do the tire swap. It's amazing how tiny the spare is, but it works. So I very carefully drove up here, which wasn't fun, but not nearly as stressful as driving 2 hours at 45 mph in rural Washington State on a spare was. Fortunately I don't think Jake popped on the floor, at least as far as I can tell, and now I'm sitting here typing this up on my phone during commercial breaks in the OSU/Wisconsin game. I really need to work tomorrow, which sucks, and I need to get my car into the tire shop as soon as possible, hopefully on Monday. I'm hoping that it's an easy fix, since the issue seemed to be the valve stem. Better dreams tonight would be a good start.

I still don't feel like I've seen too many images of aurora and spaceships taken from the Internaional Space Station.

The NASA Earth Observatory put out a pretty cool satellite image of the Great Lakes that was taken on Sunday.

The light blue color in Lakes Michigan and Huron is caused by wind stirring up sediment, and the bight green color in Lake Erie is because of a huge algae bloom, apparently one of the largest ever, caused by calm winds and sunshine.

Make sure to click the image to see the larger version - there's a lot of great detail - you can also very clearly see the change in leaf color, most of Northeast Ohio is still pretty green but it's getting very orange in northern Michigan and east in the Appalachians of Pennsylvania.

Gregg mentioned the movie Evolution a couple of weeks ago, and I realized that I hadn't seen it since I first saw it in the theater back in 2001. I watched it again tonight.

It's not the greatest movie ever made, but I still really enjoy it; it has a great cast, it's funny, and the science isn't perfect but it's also pretty damn good for a movie that's not really meant to be taken all that seriously. I also had no idea that Sarah Silverman was in it, although very briefly. It's also a pretty amusing flashback to a decade ago. I'm pretty sure I haven't seen Orlando Jones (the make 7-Up Yours guy) or Seann William Scott (Stifler in "American Pie") in anything since, but then, I don't see a whole lot of movies.

Here's the best of the Make 7-Up Yours commercials, if you don't remember it:



I actually owned and wore that t-shirt.

I'm not really all that thrilled to admit it, but I'm at Aurora Farms at the moment, for probably the first time in 15 years or so (looking for an umbrella, weird enough).

 

There are two things here that are confusing to me:

 

1) There are a lot of Ontario license plates in the parking lot.  Now, I understand that the Canadian dollar is really strong right now, but why here?  Wouldn't some place in PA make more sense?  It's closer and they don't have sales tax on clothing.  I didn't even want to drive 30 minutes to come here;  Toronto is almost 5 hours away.

 

2)  The announcements over the loudspeakers here appear to be in two languages and two languages only.  That one of them is English is obvious, but the other is Japanese?

 

Not Spanish, probably the most-spoken second language in Ohio, not French for the Quebecois, not Mandarin, which I overheard being spoken more than once, but Japanese.  It seems like an odd choice to me.  Do tour groups stop here from the Turnpike?

 

Maybe the weirdest thing is that I felt so strongly about this that I tapped out this entry in the parking lot, although I have been meaning to use the LJ Android app some.

 

Beautiful day today too.

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

Title says it all. I don't even know what to say.

http://news.yahoo.com/arrested-development-announces-4th-season-movie-230333253.html

Sometimes many interests combine at once, and this is a good example of that for me.

During the summer months, NPR asked its listeners to vote for their favorite Science-Fiction and Fantasy books, to be compiled into a "100 Best" list. It wasn't a straight-up vote, they had a panel of experts review the nominations, and in the middle of August they released their list, which you can see here:

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139085843/your-picks-top-100-science-fiction-fantasy-books

It's pretty good as it is, but sometimes you might not want to just choose a book to read by simply going up or down the list, and that's where this awesome flowchart comes in.

The road from "Where should I start" to Hyperion, probably my favorite book on the list, goes like this:

Where should I start? (Fantasy/Sci-Fi) > No, can't I have both? > You can have it all. Into the future or the past? > Future > Math Geek? > No > What sounds more interesting: A dying sun or an impaling demon? > Bring on the Shrike.

It's even gone through a couple of updates, one of them after a comment by Neil Gaiman, who actually appears four times on the list.

I'd like to try and use this as a guide for some winter reading later this year. Out of the 100, I've read:

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hithchiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Dune by Frank Herbert (well, mostly)
A Song of Fire and Ice Series by George R.R. Martin (actually this one's only in progress - I'm about 2/3 through the first book)
1984 by George Orwell (a looong time ago though)
Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
American Gods by Neil Gaiman (apparently this is going to be made into an HBO series soon)
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

So only 14% of the total, but pretty heavily loaded at the top.

I was looking back at previous entries to see what photos I may have already written about this year; that was a stark reminder of just how little I've posted all year long.

It's probably best if I write about them in bite-size pieces. I've pretty much got all of my photos organized at this point, but I still need to do a lot of uploading.

I figured I'd start off with the National Cathedral from my weekend trip to Washington, DC back in June.

I visited the National Cathedral on my 8th grade class trip, and I remember being really impressed with it at that age. Mom had never been there before, so on our second day in DC, after visiting the WWII Memorial on the Mall and the International Spy Museum, we caught a cab out to the cathedral.

We may have lucked out on the time of our visit; the cathedral was damaged during the earthquake this summer, and is still mostly closed to tourists.

The whole building is impressive, but the highlight for me has to be the stained glass window with an actual moon rock in it, at the center of the red circle:


Although the cathedral is essentially finished, the stained glass is still being installed, from front to back, as funds come in, so the stained glass closer to the entrance (and up at the top, I'm not sure of the proper term for that, see photo below) has been installed more recently. In fact, everything in the upper level has been installed since my visit in 8th grade:


The rose window is unique because it's recessed into the building and doesn't receive any (or much?) direct sunlight - so the designer used faceted glass to redirect the light:


Not all of the great architecture is on the inside. This sculpture is part of a three-part creation series over the front doors, in this case the creation of day:


There are a few more photos over at my Flickr page.

And yes, it's true, Darth Vader can be found on the Northwest Tower (although I didn't see it, it's really high up!)

This is a pretty cool idea for lighting up bicycles, both to provide light for the rider and to improve the visibility of the bike:



It's hard to describe without just watching the video, but basically it's a series of outward-facing LEDs in a circle around each wheel, and when the bike starts spinning they only light up the front of the front wheel and the back of the back wheel. It seems like something out of Blade Runner, like the light-up umbrellas, which of course you can buy on ThinkGeek.

I'd probably need to riding my bike a lot more before I'd be thinking about getting these, but I thought it was a cool idea anyway. They have a Kickstarter page if you want to know more.

Last night and tonight I finally bothered to sit down and watch National Treasure and National Treasure: Book of Secrets in their entirety, after accidentally watching about 50% of Book of Secrets while I waited for my car to get worked on back in 2008.

I really enjoyed them both! I find Rotten Tomatoes scores to usually be very accurate, but in this case they differ from my own thoughts on the movies greatly (44% and 33%, respectively).

I've seen a few other movies lately as well:

Primer

I had never heard of Primer until it popped up on io9's "25 Classic Science Fiction Movies That Everybody Must Watch" list. It's an incredibly small budget movie (supposedly about $7000) about two engineers who accidentally invent a version of time travel in their garage. It is also without a doubt the most confusing movie I've ever seen in my life. Essentially they figure out that they can set a box up, turn it on, and then if they enter it a certain amount of time later, and remain in the box for the same amount of time, they can exit the box shortly after having turned it on the first place. As if that isn't confusing enough, the movie goes out of its way to not really bother to explain much of anything that's going on... ever. But I still really enjoyed it. In the words of a reviewer quoted by Wikipedia, "anybody who claims he fully understands what's going on in Primer after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar."

It's totally worth watching though. In particular I enjoyed the dialogue, which always sounded very real.

Sucker Punch

Great soundtrack. One of the worst movies I think I've ever seen.

The Hangover

Recently on Facebook I was lamenting that I couldn't think of any really good comedies that had come out recently. The last two movies that really made me laugh a lot were Hot Fuzz (2007) and Anchorman (2004). I was hoping someone could steer me in the direction of a really funny movie, something on the level of Tommy Boy, Naked Gun, or Austin Powers.

The Hangover got mentioned a lot, so this weekend I finally watched it. It was funny! But not that funny. I enjoyed it, I don't regret watching it, but it's not really a keeper either. I still may try The Bridesmaids as well. All indications are that the Hangover II is really bad. But then again, I enjoyed National Treasure, so anything's possible I suppose.

and finally:

Attack the Block

Mark and I watched this last week, and it was great. The story? An alien invasion, from the perspective of some teens in the projects (err... council estates) of London. We actually had to get subtitles for this one. I particularly liked that the plot made sense, they characters weren't completely stupid, and the originality of it all. The current "trend" in alien invasion movies seems to be the "see the invasion from the perspective of the bystanders," like Cloverfield, the newer War of the Worlds, or Skyline. But in this particular case, and without giving away a central plot point, the kids are actually at the focal point of what's going on. It's not just a little window into a much bigger picture.

Looking at that list of 25-best Sci-Fi movies, I still have a few I haven't watched yet: The Day The Earth Stood Still, Mad Max 2, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Moon. Come to think of it I'm not sure I've ever watched Alien either. Aliens, yes.

Work is really kicking my butt. It's been insanely busy, and I stay late, so that by the time I get home I'm completely exhausted. One nice thing (besides the apparent job security) is that the day, even though it's pretty long, seems to go by very fast.

But when I get into the "long day at work, come home, eat, sleep, repeat" routine, it's not just the days that seem to go fast, everything does. I can't believe tomorrow's already Friday, it seems like this week just began.

I cooled off this evening by rewatching the "Bender's Game" Futurama movie. For some reason I thought I didn't like it much when I first watched it, but I really enjoyed it this time.

I saw another great Space Station time-lapse again today. This one is Aurora Australis on September 17th:


At this rate I can probably make ISS time-lapses the main focus of my journal!

It seems like the Yahoo notifier, that's supposed to post to my Facebook page when I upload photos to my Flickr account, isn't working anymore. And just when I was resolved to try and fix it, Facebook goes ahead with another awful update that screws up the site even more.

I know this happens pretty regularly, and it usually plays out the same every time - people complain about it for a few days, then go right back to their usual Facebooking.

But I think I'm finally starting to get a little tired of Facebook. The fact is I can't reach all of my friends through it. Some of the most important people in my life don't even have Facebook accounts, and then plenty of others that do barely use it. I find it's most useful for keeping some degree of interaction with people that are at the far end of my list of friends - people that I probably wouldn't be in any real contact at all with.

Google+ is interesting to me, but mainly just by the fact that it's not Facebook, not so much that I really like it all that much. I'll probably investigate it a little more now. Ben and Mark were using it pretty actively for a couple of weeks, but I didn't even really notice until the activity seemed to already be cooling down a little bit.

And so I return to my decade-old LiveJournal. I always say I'm going to go back to writing, and for all I know this will flop just like all the previous times I've tried to restart, but I really feel like I could use the outlet, and weirdly enough, it's probably still one of the easier ways for me to share things with friends, since it doesn't require someone to make a profile to read it.

I'll start off by sharing this amazing time-lapse of photographs taken from the International Space Station at night, as it passes from near Vancouver, all the way south to the tip of South America, where the sun starts to rise. The city lights, glow on the edge of the atmosphere, and lightning from storms in the tropics are really incredible. Because these were taken as photos, and on the dark side of the planet, you can even see stars if you watch in HD. Usually there are no stars in photos taken in low earth orbit (if on the day side) because the glow from the earth creates too much contrast for the camera to pick them up:

Doctor Who starts back up in 7 more days, I can't wait!



I was reading a spoiler-free review of the first new episode from the Guardian the other day, and I particularly like the sound of this:

The series is heading in a bravely "hard sci-fi" direction for sure – the inevitable chat will be what the fabled "casual viewer" will make of it all. Yet as Moffat also pointed out: "Assuming an intelligent audience is a good idea and judging by our ratings, it's been a successful idea." (He also said he never goes online to read about the show, something else we know to be a lie.)

Also, I think this promo photo is really cool.