Rocket Surgery

I saw this and it tickled me.

Japanese Bottled Water

I have designed two new bumper stickers in a shameless attempt to make a buck.

These can actually be ordered at http://www.cafepress.com/mattharrah.  Such a deal!!

Skeptical about the claims from all the hyperventilating environmentalist whack-jobs?  Don’t believe that all the heat waves, cold waves, tornadoes, earthquakes, locust swarms, and toenail fungus infections across the planet are due to global warming?  Think that the fact that the polar ice caps melting on Mars might just suggest that solar activity and not humans are the cause of the one (gasp!) degree increase in temperatures over the past 100 years?

Then join me in celebrating Carbon Belch Day on June 12.  A day for lighting cigars, idling your car engine, leaving all the lights on, and turning the A/C down to 60 degrees.  A day for throwing your aluminum cans in the trash, taking a long shower, and leaving the water running while you brush your teeth.  A glorious day for cutting the grass using a gas-powered mower; for doing a half-load of laundry (both the washer and the dryer!); and for feeding the poor starving plants of the world by pumping tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

C’mon!! Thumb your nose at the religion science of global warming and express your support for capitalism and western civilization!

I was watching Cosmos on the Discovery Channel last night and it got me thinking - what kind of software is out there for visualizing the solar system and the distances between the planets/moons, etc.?

I discovered Celestia, a very cool piece of open source software that is to the Solar System what Google Earth is to Earth.

They use awesome satellite and telescope images to texture map bodies in the galaxy. These bodies are accurately located in space based on the current time, or whatever time you want. You can move around in space, go to the surface of planets and moons, pan and zoom, optionally hide/show the lines of constellations, etc. There’s a neat feature that will calculate eclipses, both lunar and solar, on any body. You can see the paths that the comets follow, find satellites that we have launched (such as the Cassini spacecraft and the Hubble telescope), and It’s a great way to waste time and get a sense of just how big and small everything is relative to everything else.

Other neat features include:

• Speeding up/slowing down/reversing time
• Traveling out of the solar system to other stars
• Zooming out of the Milky Way
• Have it display reference vectors to show which direction the planet is moving, around what axis it spins, and which way to the Sun
• Have the virtual camera enter a synchronous orbit around the body, or follow one planet in its orbit while continually pointing toward another

Highly recommended.

For all the people who want the nanny state:

Let’s compare hotel heiress Paris Hilton with President George W. Bush:

	Paris Hilton	George W. Bush
Intellect of a pencil
Drives drunk
Got where they are entirely through family connections
Wealthy
Famous
Embarrass themselves on a daily basis
Semi-attractive female
Served in Vietnam during the war

Bah humbug.

I tried this with my kids, and I don’t think I used enough food coloring, because the reaction wasn’t as pronounced as it is in this video, but it was still pretty cool.  I think the problem in my case was that we used low-fat milk.  Whole milk would have more fat which would have a better reaction to the soap.

On his blog “Huikau?” my friend Mike wrote a post entitled “You know you’re getting old when” and he got me started. If imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, I believe he will forgive me for blatantly stealing his topic and running with it myself for a bit.

So, You know you’re old when:

• You know what Daisywheel and NLQ printers were
• You remember Kaypro
• You ever worked on a “Trash 80″
• You remember the IBM PC Jr and those chiclet keys
• You ever owned a copy of Turbo Prolog
• You remember your first 14.4 modem and thought it was blazingly fast
• You bought a hardcard once
• You ever cut notches in your 5-1/4″diskettes so you could use both sides