The Onion reports that the Hubble Space Kaleidoscope finally went online Tuesday, capturing the first images which prove beyond a doubt that the universe is utterly crazy looking.

According to the article, the HSK features three fine-guidance optical control sensors, a wide field and planetary camera, a faint object spectrograph, and three primary rectangular plane mirrors inside a rotating 30-meter titanium tube. The object chamber, located on the end that gathers and focuses incoming light from the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum as well as the infrared and ultraviolet continua, is filled with 10,000 pounds of marbles, costume jewelry, beads, and the largest bits of colored glass ever produced.

Here’s a sample image of the crab nabula, taken with the space kaleidoscope.

And here’s an amateur photo of the same nebula I took with my backyard Dobsonian Teleidoscope.

Not nearly as nice, eh?

Weezer recently invited the audience to bring their own instruments, while they were taped for Nissan Live Sets. My friend Mike attended and had a blast. He’s one of the guitarists on the left.

More videos from this event here:

link

“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”

– Benjamin Franklin

Nearly 15 years ago, I was the software lead on a project called “Visions of Mars,” a digital time capsule of classic SF stories and visualizations about Mars that was sent to the red planet aboard the ambitious Mars-96 spacecraft, launched by Russia.

Produced by astronomical artist and visionary Jon Lomberg for the Planetary Society, the disc contained narration by Patrick Stewart, and audiovisual greetings from the late Carl Sagan, the late Arthur C. Clarke, and the late Judith Merril.

I worked closely with Jon Lomberg, visual designer Steve Johnson and eagle-eye editor Esther Gwynne to realize the original Visions of Mars, developing an enhanced version of the multimedia engine & authoring tool, Idaho, that I had originally designed for Time Warner. Some of the enhancements I developed for Visions of Mars, such as the iptScrae programming language, eventually found their way into my mid-90s Avatar chat system, The Palace.

Unfortunately, the Russian spacecraft never made it to Mars - there was a malfunction and it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific. The original 200 MB mini CD contained in that spacecraft is likely a home for ocean critters now, if it survived the descent at all.

I’m very proud to say that my software, bugs and all, finally made it to Mars last Sunday. A copy of “Visions of Mars” is on the “Messages from Earth” DVD pictured here, mounted on the Phoenix lander. It shares space on the DVD with a quarter million names sent to NASA over the Internet.

Although the disc appears to be exposed to the elements, it is playing side down, and made of more durable silica, rather than polycarbonate. Jon Lomberg says that “Informed estimates of the lifetime seem to offer assured legibility for 500 years and possible legibility for several millennia.”

Let’s hope who ever eventually tries to play it has a copy of Windows 3.1 :)

My ears burn when I see boldface type.

You’ve probably googled yourself before. Being a huge egomaniac with access to power tools, I’ve turned googling yourself into a colossal waste of bandwidth. Pathetic, really… but perhaps you’d like to wallow in your own navel as well?

I use various services to monitor for mentions of my name on blogs, discussion boards and twitter. These services can perform searches on keywords and return the results as an RSS feed.

I’ve collected together a number of these egocentric RSS feeds into my favorite RSS reader, (Vienna), which polls each one every 30 minutes. My ears burn when I see those particular feeds go boldface, indicating that someone is talking about me.

Here are some sites which offer RSS search services for egomanics:

• BLOG SEARCH
  • BlogPulse (and here’s my egocentrism feed)
  • Google Blog Search (my feed)
  • Ice Rocket (my feed)
  • Technorati (my feed)
• TWITTER
  • Summize (my feed)
• DISCUSSION BOARDS
  • BoardReader (my feed)
• PHOTOS
  • Flickr Feeds (my feed)

Found some other good egocentric RSS searches? Let me know and I’ll add ‘em to the list.

Engineers who use the phrase “Best Practices” to rationalize doing, or not doing things.

This strikes me as a lazy way to state an opinion, and make it sound more authoritative. If something works, or doesn’t work, explain precisely why. Don’t just invoke the nebulous specter of “Best Practices”.

Via Hacker News, here’s an account by Thinking Machines founder Danny Hillis about the early days of the company that produced the amazing Connection Machine, and their unlikely employee, Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. A fascinating and beautifully written account.

link

The Spinning Oracle is a magic trick derived from my Wheel of Lunch project that wlil give you about 60 seconds of amusement.

The effectiveness of magic is greatly reduced when tricks are performed more than once — so try to resist the temptation to view the trick twice. Instead, share it with a friend!

You may notice in the blog articles below, a little “W” icon next to some of the Wikipedia links, and a little film-strip icon next to some YouTube links. Those are placed by Apture, a blog-annotation service I’m beta-testing that allows you to preview that content without leaving the blog.

I kind of like it, but I’m still not sure if I like it enough to keep it. I like making the Wikipedia references more convenient to see, but I absolutely despise the “walled garden” approach to viewer retention, and I worry that this veers a little too far in that direction, so I may dismantle it in a few days or weeks.

If you have an opinion, or if it horribly breaks for you, let me know in the comments accompanying this post.

In the meantime, enjoy this movie of the Battle of Kruger and this unrelated article on hedgehogs.