Rambles at starchamber.com

I like Edupage, but I wish they had a way to view the up-to-date issue of their newsletter without making me subscribe to yet another mailing list.

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I’ve been poking around with Birth Sky stuff again. The basic idea is finding planetary ephemeris data on the web and then plotting it automatically, maybe every day. I’m using MATLAB to generate the chart: here’s an early example. I’ve found several good ephemeris sites.

Your sky is good. They’re in Switzerland and have a secondary [...]

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A first-person account of the nearly disastrous Amercian Airlines flight 63 from Paris to Miami: acme’s Journal (189). Before blogging came along, it’s hard to think of a way this would have appeared so quickly without being mediated by journalists.

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Check out this cool picture of the Himalayas taken from the space station: Himalayan Horizon From Space. I continue to be amazed at the high quality and highly-linked content put together by the folks at NASA’s “Astronomy Picture of the Day”.

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My oldest brother, bless his heart, celebrates his birthday today, making it fully four days closer to Christmas than my own birthday. This means that, while I can bemoan my fate at having a birthday so close to Christmas, I still get to chuckle at him, because his is positively hiding in the shadow of [...]

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The Taxonomy browser at NCBI looks cool, but I can’t figure out how to use it. In case you forgot, the complete taxonomic nomenclature for humans goes like this: Eukaryota; Metazoa; Chordata; Craniata; Vertebrata; Euteleostomi; Mammalia; Eutheria; Primates; Catarrhini; Hominidae; Homo sapiens.

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LUGNET (Lego User’s Group network) is a wonder of our age. As far as I can tell it was put together by two Lego-lovers (Todd Lehman and Suzanne Rich), and it is probably the best community site I have yet seen on the web. Be sure and look at their usenet interface.

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Every time I go back to Matt Welch’s warblog, I find more good stuff. Read his recent essay about how blog coverage of this war is beating the big media coverage. Fun reading.

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Nice spoken-word commentary on life in Afghanistan from photojournalist James Hill at The New York Times

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Play Pong on the side of a German building with Blinkenlights Interactive.

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