A transient lunar phenomenon…?

[Via Bad Astronomy]

Doctor Whoville. Too cute for words.

[Via pie ninja, commenting at MetaFilter]

I'd say this list of The 15 Most Delightful Internet Films of 2011 contains at least two entries that should be on anybody's list.

• Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS, because it's a view of Earth that very few human beings have ever seen.
• Murmuration, because it's something we've all seen, but probably not on that scale and most likely not in such still, quiet conditions. I find watching it oddly soothing.

Having said that, there are a good half dozen items on Eric Spiegelman's list that I hadn't seen before and haven't had the time to watch tonight, so I may have to come back and edit this post once I've caught up.

Frank Keating's article on the best of 2011's letters to the editor finds room for a reminder of a classic of years gone by:

Memories here a week ago of the late John Arlott stirred a friend to send the cutting he had hoarded for 35 years of a long-forgotten letter to the editor after John and I had enjoyed a lunch at Lord's on the day we reported on the start of a new cricketing summer. It was from Catherine Waterson of Bishopbriggs, Glasgow: "Sir, I see that the English cricket season has begun in typically changeable weather. So changeable that the sun did not once come out at Lord's for John Arlott on page 20 but shone all day for Frank Keating on page 21. Yours sincerely."

No doubt Keating's summons to appear before the Leveson Inquiry to account for himself is in the post.

Mary Beard describes a strange custom engaged in by tourists/fans of Romeo and Juliet upon visiting the 'House of Juliet' in Verona:

[The] weirdest thing was the 1970's bronze statue of Juliet standing just underneath the balcony. It was clear from the 'polish', and by watching what people actually did, that one hallowed custom was to go up and grasp Juliet's right breast, and have your photo taken in the act. This was the sport of almost every visitor from the seven year olds to the seventy-something, male and female. A few looked a bit embarrassed. Most entered into the spirit of the fondle.

Neil deGrasse Tyson brings us An Engineering Flowchart:

[Via Signal vs. Noise]

Despite the fact that I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've had cause to design an icon over the course of the last decade, I'm sorely tempted to treat myself to a copy of The Icon Handbook by Jon Hicks just on the basis of the quantity and quality of eye candy on display therein:

This is a book that I've been wanting to write for a long time. Whenever I've looked for a book on this subject, the only available publications are reference guides that simply reproduce as many symbols as possible. Where books have gone into theory, they were published decades before desktop computers, and therefore miss the most relevant and active context of icon use. Sometimes the topic is covered as a part of a book about logo design, and amounts to little more than a page or two. So I've set out to create the manual, reference guide and coffee table book that I always desired. [...]

A sample of the book's content can be downloaded from the publisher's site if you want to see what I mean.

[For the record: I have no connection with Jon Hicks, other than having read his journal for some years now and admired his Helvetireader theme for Google Reader. All the evidence is that he knows what he's talking about.]

The Bombadil-Dark Santa connection…

The following paper was posted to the usenet newsgroup, rec.arts.sf.written, by a person posting under the name "Sea Wasp". The circumstances whereby he acquired a copy of the paper were not related. The matter is under investigation by They Who Shall Not Be Named.

(the following is a transcript of a paper presented by Eukonidor at the Fifth Age Conference on Arisia to the delegation from Middle-Earth)

THE SYMMETRY of CORRUPTION:
An Examination of the History of
the One Ring subsequent to the
"War of the Ring", and the
Implications Thereof for the
Future of Civilization

As is well known, at the conclusion of the Third Age of Middle-Earth, the One Ruling Ring fell into the Cracks of Doom and was destroyed, obliterating the works directly tied to the One and undoing the Dark Lord Sauron entirely.

Unfortunately, that which is "well-known" can often be incorrect. Subsequent events of a disquieting nature demonstrate all too conclusively that in point of fact not only was the One not destroyed, but it was also taken up by a being more than capable of utilizing it for its own purposes. [...]

While I was checking my archives to see if I'd linked to this already, I came across a post from almost exactly nine years ago about alternate versions of The Lord of the Rings that's worth a look if this is your sort of thing.¹ Be sure to read the comments, which added another couple of links to still more worthwhile material.

[Via kengr, posting here]

1. A couple of the links have succumbed to rot, but most are still good. ↩

The Email Person at Amazon Web Services is Really, Really Excited.

[Via Waxy.org]

Saturn is big. Really big. And beautiful with it.

Get Your Censor On.



[Via jwz]

Filmography 2011 is a terrific montage of big moments from the films of 2011.¹

1. Albeit one that serves as a stark reminder of just how little time I've spent inside a cinema this year. Unlike Stu, who appears to have more than compensated for his retreat from the big screen by way of his LOVEFiLM subscription, I'm afraid I'm just getting lazy in my old age. I dread to think how many films I have queued up on my DVR, forlornly waiting for me to give them a couple of hours of my time… ↩

HTTP Status Cats.¹

[Via MetaFilter]

1. To do: edit WordPress configuration to include local copies of the appropriate images in error pages. ↩

Robin Hardy, best known as the director of the original¹ version of The Wicker Man, has written and directed a belated prequel/reimagining called The Wicker Tree.

As a rule I work on the assumption that any instance where a writer or director revisits their best work a couple of decades on is likely to disappoint: given that this sequel is getting a release almost four decades on from the original part of me wishes he'd left well alone, even as I wish him luck.

The trailer looks OK but nothing special, so I'm going to choose to be cautiously optimistic but wait for the reviews.

1. i.e. Nicolas Cage-free. ↩

Nancy Friedman's Words of the Year 2011 post introduced me to this doozy:

Nontraditional start. How Mrs. Newt Gingrich's best friend, Karen Olson, diplomatically labeled the adulterous affair that led to GOP presidential candidate Mr. Newt Gingrich's third wedding: "'They're a great couple,' she said, 'that had a nontraditional start.'" The phrase joins "hiking the Appalachian Trail" in the lexicon of creative euphemisms for adultery. My nominee for "Most Euphemistic Word."

Theodore W. Gray of Wolfram Research, Inc. on technology:

Technology's greatest contribution is to permit people to be incompetent at a larger and larger range of things.  Only by embracing such incompetence is the human race able to progress.

[Via Memex 1.1]

How would they vote? is fanfic with a somewhat unusual focus. Take, for example, The Breakfast Club's "Princess", Claire Standish:

Soon after joining the Breakfast Club, Claire realised there was more to life than pearl earrings and skiing trips to Colorado. Where was the reward in having life delivered to you on a silver platter?

Enter John Bender. While Bender had started off as simply a grab for attention from her quibbling parents, it soon became apparent that he was much more than that. Reforming John Bender would become Claire's personal Fix-Her-Upper, the challenge that would bring fulfilment to her otherwise vacuous life. And she loved him for it.

Despite initial misgivings about Bender, Claire's conservative parents came round to the young man, admiring his 'organic entrepreneurial spirit' and it wasn't long before the couple was happily married. Claire studied PR and encouraged John to enrol in a community college course in business studies. When he wavered with his software design idea, she pushed him forward.

She was also successful in her own right. Upon graduating, she entered into a big-name PR firm and managed several big accounts during the early '90s, including for Sega, Pepsi Max, and Janet Jackson. She voted Clinton in '92, purely out of respect for his rapport with the common man, but swung right in 2000, under the influence of her husband's anti-tax, small government crusade.

By 2008, Claire's talent for PR had started to get noticed by the right people in Washington. When she received a call to help out a struggling Hilary Clinton in the race against Obama to secure the Democratic nomination, Claire couldn't refuse. That fall she came up with her best idea yet – the infamous 'red phone' ad.

Despite Clinton's failed run at the presidency, Claire stayed in Washington and it wasn't long before she had made the seamless transition from Clinton to the other side of politics, recruited by the Koch brothers to work on strategies for undermining the Obama administration in the lead-up to 2012.

The focus of the site seems to be on characters from US and Australian TV, which leaves something of a gap in the market. What would Detective Inspector Jack Regan have made of members of the Met being bussed up to the Yorkshire coalfields to put striking miners in their place? Would Tom Good, having presumably ended the 1970s as a classic wooly Liberal, have ended up in the Green Party, or been seduced by New Labour? Would Alan B'Stard still be a Tory?¹

[Via MetaFilter]

1. OK. Stupid question! ↩

Can anyone think of one good reason why David Attenborough performing What A Wonderful World should not be this year's Xmas Number 1 single? Just one… Anyone…?

Thought not…

Emily Lakdawalla reports from the 2011 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union:

Voyager 1 is very close to the heliopause. Last year at this time, the Voyager team reported that the outward-directed speed of the solar wind had dropped nearly to zero. With this observation and a mental model of the way the boundary between the solar wind and the interstellar medium should work, they formed a hypothesis: we are near the heliopause, and the direction of the energetic particles that Voyager 1 can measure should be shifting from the outward and east-west directed flow to a north-south one, the direction of the interstellar medium. So the simple experiment that the scientists needed to do to test their hypothesis was to measure the north-south flow of energetic particles. They predicted that they should be seeing increased north-south flow, matching the interstellar medium.

There are three cool aspects to what happened next.

1. In order to perform the experiment the scientists would have to get Voyager 1 to change orientation – something it last managed 21 years ago. Not only did Voyager 1 pull this off, but it did so four times so that they could check their findings.
2. The scientists found that their eminently plausible hypothesis was completely unsupported by the evidence Voyager produced. Cue much scratching of heads, and the formulation of a new hypothesis.
3. With any luck,¹ Voyager still will be around to test that hypothesis in due course.

Given that Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and is still producing worthwhile scientific data thirty-plus years on, it must be the most cost-effective satellite in the history of space exploration.

1. And assuming that it doesn't end up taking a detour and coming back as Vejur. ↩

Sometimes a picture truly is worth a thousand words.