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Planet Dave! Saturday, April 30, 2005
Serenity Trailer
The trailer for the upcoming Firefly movie Serenity is now online. If you've never seen an episode of Firefly, come on over sometime and I'll show you the whole season. The trailer looks great, but there are about three little jokes that probably would've been better without a preview. I begin to understand how some people go to enormous lengths to remain spoiler free. Anyway, Serenity will be in theaters on September 30th. I'm so there. Also online is the latest Batman Begins trailer. It looks fantastic. I'm already starting to mercifully forget the last several batman movies. That'll be out on June 15th. And everyone knows that Hitchhiker's Guide is out, right?
Friday, April 29, 2005
A Star of Space and Film
From an early February /. post, "Three years ago, light from V838 Monocerotis (a star about 20,000 light years from us) reached the Earth that showed the star exploding. The more politically correct term for what happened is "stellar outburst." In the time since, images from a pulse of light released during the outburst have been arriving here on Earth. In October of 2004, Hubble captured a beautiful image of the scene with the pulse lighting up interstellar gasses that encapsulated the area around this red giant (a star 600,000 times brighter than our Sun). The release of this photo just days ago seems rather timely, as it appears that some of Hubble's funding may be cut in the near future. There is also talk of eliminating the program entirely." The cool thing about this is that the dust cloud surrounding the star is at least six light years in diameter. So as time goes on and light reaches different parts of the cloud, reflects and eventually reaches Earth, we can learn about the internal structure of the cloud. At some point I found a series of pictures of this star, but I couldn't find them today.
Thursday, April 28, 2005
Stupid People Learn about Australia
A friend of mine posted some interesting questions recieved by an Australian tourism web site. She doesn't mention which tourism web site, so I've been unable to verify this list. But I know the part about the drop bears is real. I read about it on the Internet.
Funkadelic Calendar
A few people have commented on the calendar I carry in my bag. Here's where I got it. Well, I don't actually have the whole thing, I just print it out in three month chunks.
Urban Legends
Got too much free time on your hands? Try browsing through Snopes' 25 Hottest Urban Legends.
PlanetDave How To - Kick Someone's Ass with an Umbrella
From Boing Boing, "This 1901 illustrated article from Pearson's Magazine describes an unstoppable technique for defending yourself with a cane or umbrella." I'll have to study this style for Ring.
Volatility of Human Memory
From /., "Scientific Americans looks into the human brain, trying to figure out why some events just tend to stick in our memories forever, while the others are gone." Kind of a mind-bender of a read.
Machine Learns Games
From /., "New Scientist is reporting that UK researchers have created a computer that can learn rock, paper, scissors by observing humans. CogVis uses visual information to recognize events and objects in addition to learning by observing."
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Dave is, in fact, alive.
After neglecting my site for almost two months, I'm back. My World of Warcraft habit has tapered off to the point where I can once again do other computer related activities in my free time. Keep in mind, though, that I still reserve the right to take unannounced sabbaticals from PlanetDave.net. Oh, on a completely unrelated note, does anyone want a Gmail invite? I've got a half dozen of them that I haven't given out yet.
Update: GMail is Google's free web mail thing. Up sides, it's free, you get a gig of space, and you can search through your emails. Down sides, you need to supply your own network connection, and since they want you to use the search feature you can't organize your emails into folders.
Boing Boing: Claude Shannon, master juggler and juggling robot builder
From Boing Boing, "The late Claude Shannon is recognized as the father of information theory, but he was also a juggling enthusiast (he liked to juggle and ride his unicycle up and down the halls of Bell Labs), as well as an animatronic maker. My mind is reeling after watching this movie clip of his juggling robots." This really has to be seen to be believed.
Police Hunt Poo Protesters
Ok, this story dates back to January, but it's still worth a read. Turns out some pranksters in Germany are making a political statement by planting George W. Bush flags in piles of dog poop. Boing Boing has a nice picture of it. My favorite part of the article is the legal analysis at the bottom.
Planet Dave How To - Modify Your Microwave to Melt Iron
Found this at BoingBoing.net. It's a description of some experimentation into melting bronze, silver, white metal, and iron in a conventional microwave. What I found most disconcerting is how trivial the modifications were.
Build Your Own Rotary-Dial Cell Phone
From /., "Yet another indicator of how unrepresentative of the main Slashdot crowd I am (meaning 'old') is that, like vinyl records, 8-track tapes, and Pintos, I can remember when rotary dial phones were items of everyday use, and not some object of retro-cool pseudo-nostalgia. Imagine my delight, then at finding this project in which an old rotary phone is turned into a cell phone. To give credit where its due, I originally found it linked from Hack A Day. I know nothing about home-built electronics projects, but this is enough to make me want to learn. If this catches on, imagine what they'll have to do to those 'turn off your cell phone' messages that play in movie theatres." Hack-a-Day has a lot of cool stuff, like this USB battery hack.