You may have noticed some changes to the site. They were significant enough to warrant a new version, but not so significant as to go up a full number. I fixed some broken stuff, changed the template, and some other minor things. I also made changes to the moblog and took a bunch of photos from the MIA. (I was sneaky this time so no one would catch me taking photos)
Bonus points to anyone other than Pete who can figure out the reference in the title of the post.
I finally broke down and got myself an ipod today. I got the 40gb model. 40gb is just ridiculous. I took it out to Barnes & Nobel tonight and it worked flawlessly. The DC car adaptor worked well too. I have some small gripes about it, but nothing major so far.
BTW, what do you call a bunch of middle aged men with laptops drinking coffee? Barnes & Nobel Eden Prarie on Sunday night.
One of things I’ve been doing with this diet is exploring different types of cheeses. I’ve come to really like Gruyere, a cheese from Switzerland. Its usually used in fondue, but I’ve had a hard and soft version and liked them both. I even tried some limburger…………my god was that awful. Jarlsberg, Emmental, Gouda, Edam, and Roquefort are all cheeses I’ve tried recently. I can’t say I’m too big of a fan of blue cheeses, but I have come to appreciate the sharper, harder, and aged cheeses.
I’ve also been eating more nuts, but there aren’t a whole lot of nuts out there to sample.
If you have the chance to have bison, do it. Its more expensive than beef so its not an everyday type of thing, but its well worth the experience. Bison burgers rock.
At B&N this evening I started reading Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers by Jan Gullberg. Imagine a single textbook you could use upto graduate study in Mathematics. That is this book….almost. It doens’t go too indepth into anything, but it covers everything. I bought it just to have as a reference.
I saw 50 First Dates last night. It was much better than I though it would be. I like how they didn’t pull the romantic comedy formula out and have a predictable ending.
I’m making my quarterly pilgramage to the Minneapolis Institute of Art today. Hopefull I’ll have some photos.
This week I’ll be handing in my first College 2.0 paper. Its on asteroid impacts with earth.
My astronomy course has a project that you have to do over the course of a semester which involves tracking where the moon is. You have to do 15 observations. On my second observation I got the moon right at its transit (it was on the meridian that extends due south through the zenith). The way you are to measure the moon is by the number of fists from the meridian it is at any observation. By catching it at the transit, I had a very simple zero fists. (a fist is literally your fist).
It didn’t take me long to realize that this was the way to go. The ‘fist’ seemed (and is) a very inexact measurement. A little bit of math, and you can figure out that the transit time of the moon advances 48.8 minutes per day. (360 (degrees in a circle) /29.5 (days in a lunar month) /15 (degrees in an hour) * 60 (minutes in an hour)) So, the entire observation project comes down to an exercie of making sure you observe at the right time (transit) and at the right conditions (clear). Even if my observation time isn’t perfect, its still a margin of error much less than trying to measure the angular distance with your fist (especially over many fists). Today it was roughly at transit at 8:00am, and yesterday roughly at 7:00am. Clearly, one of the two (if not both) can’t be exactly correct, but the moon was a meaure of 0, or a fraction of a fist from the meridian at the time. Its also hard to eyeball the perfect transit of the moon.
I for about the last two weeks we’ve had overcast skys most of the time, and that was when the transit was really late at night, so I didn’t miss anything, nor did I want to wake up just to look at the moon when its -15.
So tomorrow, the transit should be at about 9:00am, give or take 10 minutes.
I’m writing this at the bar at the Apple Valley Old Chicago. They have free 802.11b access, which rocks. Everyone looks at my laptop and says “wow. its small!”…………story of my life.
Cherian is sitting here and we got a weblog up and running for the Center for Public Speaking. its has quickly become the #1 extemp camp in the country. This year they are doing the full slate of IE events as well as extemp. I’m a “guest lecturer”.
Drinking while updating your weblog is a good thing. I’m having a “Sour Caesar” (see the archives for a discription).
I’m pretty pleased at the progress the extempers are making at Apple Valley. We aren’t burning up the circuit yet, but we are making really good progress. I hope the situation will be very different come April. (Assuming dumb fuck kids don’t take off in the middle of practice and never come back because they think I’ve some goddam pushover)
In addition to Mathematica, I should mention that the latest versions of Firebird (now FireFox) and Thunderbird are out from Mozilla.org. Winamp 5 is also out and its finally a release better than Winamp 2.x.
The new browser release is really an improvement. I never use IE anymore (unless there is some MS thing where they make you). With FireFox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice, there is no reason to use any MS products on top of Windows. None. If I only understood the Linux file system better.