Geminid Meteor Shower 2010 Time-Lapse Movie

I’ve taken my 686 photos of the 2010 Geminid meteor shower on December 13/14 and transformed them into the following high-definition (1080p), time-lapse movie, which I hope you will enjoy. It spans 6¼ hours of time in two minutes, contains approximately 34 meteors, several airplanes, and a couple of satellites. Also, you get to watch the sky as it appears to rotate around the polestar, Polaris.

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Flame Leaf Sumac

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Geminids with a Side of Turkey

I spent the night of December 13/14 in my favorite meteor watching field on the Bamberger Ranch Preserve (thanks to David and Lois, respectively, for making that possible). I was counting, and, most of all, trying to photograph, Geminid meteors. Watching commenced in earnest only after I’d finished setting-up my camera and started it clicking away at 11:56 PM. It was freezing up there, and when

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’Twas the Night Before Christmas — In the Computation Center

I forgot to post this last year, which was when I discovered it during my effort to locate and preserve the rapidly disappearing history of The University of Texas at Austin Computation Center, but this year I shall not forget. So, without further ado, for the computational old-timers amongst us, I offer “Twas the Night Before Christmas — In the Computation Center” by Kathy Atkins, from the

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Good article on Bat “White Nose Syndrome”

The decimation of the bison herds and the extinction of the passenger pigeon were epic environmental events. The ongoing decimation of bat populations by White Nose Syndrome (WNS) may be much more serious. Wired magazine has a good article on the subject.

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Jay Lake Provides One Moment of Shining Clarity

A moment of shining clarity, thanks to Jay Lake.

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RWA Scale Test Fixed

My thanks to R.C.H. who has pointed-out to me two bugs in my implementation of Bob Altemeyer’s RWA Scale. As always, I find bugs in my code embarrassing, and I’m grateful to R.C.H. for not only finding the bugs, but reporting them. Consequently, the code has now been fixed. So, for those who’ve answered “strongly disagree” (-3) to questions 7 or 8 in the past, if you retake the test, your answers

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New Nukes

From Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary by Stewart Brand, pp. 81-82:

As to footprint, Gwymeth Cravens points out that “A nuclear plant producing 1,000 megawatts takes up a third of a square mile. A wind farm would have to cover over 200 square miles to obtain the same result, and a solar array over 50

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Climate Change

From Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary by Stewart Brand, pg. 9:
Climate is so full of surprises, it might even surprise us with a hidden stability. Counting on that, though, would be like playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded but one.

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Bamberger Ranch 2007 vs. 2010 – Compare and Contrast

David Bamberger recently posted an item on the Bamberger Ranch Journal showing photos of the water flows created by the rains brought by tropical storm Hermine on September 7th and 8th. I have at least two images in my files of areas pictured in David’s blog entry during the ranch’s last “wet year,” 2007. Bamberger Ranch Journal followers might find the contrast adds some perspective to David’s

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U.T. Austin Main Building and Tower, Predawn

Most photos of the U.T. Austin Tower neglect the Main Building, which is its base. While shooting some test panoramas the other night, I thought I’d take a different approach and emphasize the Main Building. To get all of the Main Building and Tower into the photo, I shot this as two rows of three photos. Every photo was shot at three different exposures, 3 stops apart, so that a high dynamic

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The First Mercury Launch

From Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willy Ley, 1968 edition, pg. 376:


The very first shot in the Mercury program was named Little Joe-1, ready for firing August 21, 1959, on Wallops Island. Half an hour before the planned take-off time there was suddenly the noise of a rocket roaring and smoke enveloped the launch pad. When the smoke cleared, literally speaking, Little Joe was still

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What Was Not to Be: The Apollo 18, 19 and 20 Landing Sites

From Footprints in the Dust, chapter 11, by Colin Burgess, pg. 336:

Apollo 18’s Lunar module was scheduled to land in Schroter’s Valley, the site of intriguing transient lunar phenomena and possibly even volcanic activity. The two-man landing crew of Apollo 19 would then have explored the collapsed lava tubes of Hyginus Rille. The most hazardous but ultimately benficial mission of all would have

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How (Not) to Launch the First Satellite

“If Project Orbiter had gone ahead as planned, the United States would have placed a satellite in orbit during the summer of 1956.”
From Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willy Ley, 1968 edition, pp. 304-323:


In the spring of 1954 the Space-Flight Committee of the American Rocket Society had worked out a satellite proposal which had been submitted through various channels. The time was

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Man in Space? “Utter Bilge!”

From Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willy Ley, 1968 edition, pg. 361:


In 1959 the newly appointed Astronomer Royal of England, Australian-born Richard van de Riet Wooley, told the British press that space travel was “utter bilge.” Ever since, the British Interplanetary Society has had a fine time giving him reports such as “An American named Carpenter has penetrated utter bilge for the

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Knocking the Atlas Missile – With Hammers

The Atlas missile was a highly capable launch vehicle due to its very low structural mass. The place where the greatest mass saving was realized was in the fuel tanks which were, in effect, giant, load-bearing, stainless steel balloons whose strength came not from their dime-thin walls, but from their internal pressure. Without that pressure, the Atlas would have collapsed under its own weight,

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Astronaut Benefits

From Walter Cunningham’s forward to In the Shadow of the Moon, page xii:


[....] When I went to work as an astronaut, in 1963, I earned a little over $13,000 a year. I once calculated that, during my Apollo 7 mission, I had earned the great sum of $660. But we weren’t doing it for the money—nobody does a job like that for the money. Any one of us would have paid NASA to have the job!
[....]

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Video: Bats’ Morning Return to the Bamberger Chiroptorium

I had the opportunity last week to watch the bats return to the Bamberger Ranch Preserve’s chiroptorium. The morning return isn’t as dramatic as the evening emergence, but it’s still something to see. Realizing that, for the first time, I had a device that could capture high definition (720p) video, I propped up my iPhone 4 on the fence at the mouth of the chiroptorium and let it record for about

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Java Text – A Closer Look at the Ugly

Because the failings of the native Java text renderer have had such an adverse impact on my recent work, I think additional examination of the issue is merited. So, to further illustrate the difference between text rendered by Java 6 on Mac OS X and Linux, I’ve taken two paragraphs of text and written a program that fits them on-the-fly into an image of a specified size. Text fitting is vital to

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Java Text - When Platform Independence Fails

I‘ve recently been working on a Java web application that does server-side rendering of complex graphics that include text. Having sweated all the details to maximize the quality of the application’s output; having finally made the application sufficiently stable and feature-complete to enter beta testing; and having jumped through some unrelated hoops to make the production host usable, I

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Stephen Wolfram discusses “Computation and the Future of the Human Condition”

As found on the Wolfram Blog, Stephen Wolfram provides a transcript of his talk “Computation and the Future of the Human Condition” delivered at the H+ Summit @ Harvard on June 12, 2010. I found it interesting. Unfortunately for me, just as when I read his book A New Kind of Science (NKS), I think I can grasp the general ideas, but I can’t make the intellectual leap necessary to understand how to

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“Rotating Spiral” becomes a Google “Chrome Experiment”

My combination of Javascript and SVG that produces a rotating spiral graphic (“you are getting sleepy... very sleepy”) has been accepted by Google as an official “Chrome Experiment.” You can find the Chrome Experiments main page at http://www.chromeexperiments.com/, and my spiral experiment at http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/rotating-spiral/.

I’ve also submitted several other of my

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Gus Grissom Gets His Way

From Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willy Ley, 1968 edition, pg. 390:

Except for GT-III the Gemini spacecraft were not given names as the Mercury capsules had been. GT-III did have a name; it was called the Molly Brown. The name was chosen by the command pilot of the flight, Virgil Ivan Grissom. Grissom (generally known as “Gus”) had had to swim to safety when his Mercury capsule Liberty

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Government Secrecy, Andrew Jackson Style

Here’s a dose of perspective on government secrecy for this July 4th. I don’t mean to suggest that today our government can be as open as it was in Andrew Jackson’s (or Lincoln’s) time, but the following provides some perspective on how much the openness of our American government has decreased over the course of the past 150 years. To be sure, we’ve added some improvements, like the Freedom of

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Happy Longest Day of the Year

I’m about eleven hours late (allergies, or something like them, knocked me for six), but “happy longest day of the year” to everyone. According to my calculations, the June solstice occurred today at 6:28:16 AM CDT.

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Dear Apple: Typography Still Matters

As others have pointed-out (thanks to Jay Lake for that link), Apple’s ebooks have abandoned good typographic practices, and instead embraced problematic practices like full justification for all text. Apple has now carried these failings over to the generally wonderful “Reader” mode of version 5 of their Safari browser. I’ll confine myself to the issue of full-justification here, and leave the

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Guncotton and the Utility of Failure

From Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willey Ley, 1968 edition, pp. 80-81:

Guncotton [...] had been discovered [in 1845] by German chemist Christian Friedrich Schönbein, who had tried to dissolve cotton in a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids. Of course, the cotton had refused to dissolve and Schönbein, writing off the experiment as a failure, had gone home for supper, after putting the

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The Reagan Administration Meets the AIDS Pandemic…

…and allies itself with the virus, rather than politically unpalatable science. From Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC, by J.B. McCormick, M.D., S.F. Fisher-Hoch, M.D., with Leslie Ann Horvitz, pp. 174-177; McCormick is writing:



Two very important discoveries began to emerge from our investigation. For one thing, we were recording far more cases of AIDS in women than we were used to seeing in

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Bees Move into the Nest Box

Like last year, bees have moved into the screech owl nest box. One more problem to deal with. Or maybe not – for some reason they abandoned the box at some point last year. (During the worst of the drought? Probably, but I can’t remember.) Then, one or more fox squirrels cleaned out the nest box, initially, I presume, as a means to harvest the honey. A rare treat for a squirrel, I’d guess. They

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Screech Owl Nesting Complete

Owlet no. 3 (the last of the two owlets that successfully hatched from the four eggs that were laid), left the nest box around 9 PM last night, and successfully climbed its way to safety in the high, outer branches of the nest box tree. The picture above shows owlet no. 3 beginning that climb.

So, that’s pretty much that for the 2010 nesting season. There may be a few more updates if I catch

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The 2010 Models – Eastern Screech Owls

I brought the owls’ nest box down early this morning and attached the owlet rail outside the entry/exit hole (see the final photo). This was done in anticipation of the eldest owlet leaving the nest soon, and in the expectation that having a perch outside the hole must make that critical leap from nest to tree easier.
This also gave me an opportunity to open the nest box and take some family

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Photos of the Adult Owls

Here’re the promised photos of the adults. Don’t ask me which is the male and which is the female – unless I was lucky enough to observe sexually distinctive behavior (like tearing up prey and feeding it to the owlets, which only the female will do), there’s no way for me to know.


Alternately, if both owls suddenly took leave of their senses and let me get hold of them, I might be able to

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Fooled by the Owlets

The owlets fooled me. Earlier tonight it looked like there was only one owlet left in the nest. That sent me out on a search (and, if necessary, rescue) mission. I looked everywhere I could think of for that owlet (three or four times), wanting to make sure it had found its way to a safe perch, or, if it hadn’t, to find it and put it on a safe perch. I had no luck finding the owlet, but I found

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Imagery to Conjure With

Good friend Jay Lake has been dreaming again. This one has been haunting me for a week. Imagery to conjure with, but also imagery that strikes deep and hurts.
Jay and I have very different minds and personalities, yet somewhere in all that there’re more common chords than I’d ever realized.
Ouch.

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Adventures with Jay Lake

My old friend Jay Lake discusses a dream in a recent blog post and refers to a series of real-life incidents, specifically:
“...a baby puke yellow Ford LTD wagon was in my life for a while back in the 1990s — that’s the car I flooded with raw sewage while driving it, if you’ve ever heard me tell that story; also the car I took over the river in Mexico on a canoe ferry. Also the car I was driving

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Owlet no. 1 Hatched

Owlet no. 1 hatched sometime between midnight and 3:30 AM. So, the activity in the nest box is going to steadily increase from this point on. This is when the viewing really starts to become interesting.

The first look at the owlet came a bit before 6 AM. Those curious, and those who have QuickTime installed, can view two, short time-lapse movies of the owlet moving around; one seen from the

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What is the CDC?

From Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC, pg. 38, by J.B. McCormick, M.D., S. Fisher-Hoch, M.D., and L.A. Horvitz. Here McCormick relates a story from a trip to Sierra Leone in March, 1976, as part of an effort to deal with the Lassa Fever virus.


[....] When we were introduced to the secretary of health for Sierra Leone, his first question was: “What is the CDC? Does that stand for the Colonial

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The Authoritarians

Ever since I finished reading it a few weeks ago, I've been meaning to recommend the book The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba. So, consider it recommended. It’s available online for free at the page linked-to above. The book’s been out since 2006, so it’ll already be familiar to a lot of people, but it was news to me when I learned of it a few months back, and I know

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Beware Your Socialist Roads

In a time when intellectual standards have dropped so low that any involvement of government in the lives of its citizens can be labelled “socialism,” it seem only appropriate to warn the U.S. populace against using its socialist roadways.
Here’s how the Carfree Times (always worth a read) March, 2010, issue lays out the facts, as supplied by that well known band of socialist agitators that is

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Exploiting?

From an old favorite:
"Exploiting?" asked Dirk. "Well, I suppose it would be if anybody ever paid me, but I do assure you, my dear Richard, that there never seems to be the remotest danger of that. I live in what are known as hopes. I hope for fascinating remunerative cases, my secretary hopes that I will pay her, her landlord hopes that she will produce some rent, the Electricity Board hopes

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In Which I Appear on the Bamberger Ranch Blog

I've just learned that I'm putting in an appearance on the Bamberger Ranch Journal this week. Thanks, David, for the kind words, and for plugging the owl cam’. (BTW, that blog post was delayed not by David, but by me, because I haven't been checking my email often enough while I've been out of the office letting my knee heal.)
Anyone viewing that blog entry should be warned that there’s no such

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Three Eggs Confirmed

My guess yesterday was that the third egg had been laid, and that that was what had shifted Mme. Owl into serious brooding mode. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to capture an overhead view yesterday to confirm that guess. This evening, however, I was able to capture such a view, and, as you’ve undoubtedly already noticed, there is a third egg. Whether it was laid yesterday or today will likely

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Two Eggs and Counting

Here’s this evening’s shot from the nest box attic cam’. (You can see this morning’s image, too.) As expected, egg no. 2 was laid today.



Gehlbach’s research says an eastern screech owl, Megascops asio, clutch will average 3.75 eggs, if memory serves, so I’m expecting two more eggs, although clutches of up to six eggs are possible.

Note that the eggs are almost spherical, unlike the eggs of (

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The RF Scale

I’ve automated another one of the surveys from Bob Altemeyer’s book The Authoritarians. (My first effort, the “RWA Scale” is discussed in a previous entry on this blog.) This time, it's the “RF Scale.” What it’s measuring will be pretty obvious, pretty quickly. Just in case there’s any doubt, I’ve included Altemeyer’s description of the purpose of the survey at the end of the page.

Because this

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One Egg and Counting

Pat asked if I’d ever share the overhead views from the attic camera that I use for egg counting. Here’s just such a view that was captured early this morning. It shows the egg that was laid on the 22nd. (I expect to see that another egg was laid today, but won’t be able to confirm that expectation until Mme. Owl exits the nest box this evening.)



In previous years, I’d’ve included images like

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Screech Owl Cam' Operational

Some video capture hardware turned-out to have stopped working in the two years since the last nesting, but after some pulling of hair, swapping of hardware, and editing of web pages, Chris’ Eastern Screech Owl Nest Box Cam’ is live again.

What with surgery and an unknown recovery period starting tomorrow, I can’t say there’ll be regular status reports, or daily image round-ups, but the video

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Mme. Owl is Spending the Day in the Nest Box

Mme. Owl is currently sitting on the floor of the nest box in a brooding posture. If nesting hasn't strictly begun yet, it looks as though it will do so in next the day or two at the most.

I'm not sure when I'll have the Owl Cam' up and running again. If I can get it running tonight, I will. But, if that doesn't work out, things immediately become very unpredictable, as I'll be undergoing

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Mme. Owl Prepares the Nest Box

A female eastern screech owl visited my nest box this morning. I noticed the visit entirely by chance around 3:15 AM, and she stayed another 20 minutes, while I watched her performing actions characteristic of a female preparing to nest – namely pushing around the bedding material on the floor of the box to create a depression in which eggs could be laid.

My screech owls may be running later

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Eleven Hours in Owl Box Hell

I brought the owl box down around 6 PM on Sunday to remove a fox squirrel. This squirrel seemed familiar with the routine; with box open on the ground, I just stepped to one side, explained the situation, and the squirrel obligingly bolted out the other side. Simple enough.

It was a short time later that I made the terrible mistake. As followers of my screech owl cam' may remember, the

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The RWA Scale – Investigating “public opinion concerning a variety of social issues”

A friend (thanks D.C.) brought an interesting book to my attention the other day, the cornerstone of which is a survey known as the “RWA Scale” developed by Bob Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba. The survey describes itself as “an investigation of general public opinion concerning a variety of social issues,” and saying anything more would probably be a mistake. Anyway, because the book and

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A 2nd Year Cooper’s Hawk

A recent visitor to my bird feeder, identified by Sallie, my raptor rehabber friend: “This is a 2nd year Cooper's Hawk. Just the species I’d expect to go for your sparrows. (Hatched in 2009.)” … Just one of several ways that my bird feeder feeds birds. This hawk is welcome back anytime. Unfortunately for it, but fortunately for the sparrows, she/he may not want to come back. The pile of

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Owl Sighting

There was a screech owl in a brooding posture on the floor of my box a few hours ago. A male would be unlikely to adopt that posture, in my experience, so I assume the owl was a female whose mate must have recently claimed the nest box, and talked her into trying it on for size. (I heard a male in my back yard calling quite persistently one night last week.) She's gone now, but this is an

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Airports

It can hardly be a coincindence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "as beautiful as an airport."Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk

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Network Neutrality

The following is the slightly corrected text of a comment I submitted to whichever part of the government was studying network neutrality, and requesting comments from the public, back in mid-January. I submitted this comment as a private citizen, but, of historical necessity, it references my employer. Let me be perfectly clear about this: I in no way speak for, or represent, my employer.

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When do Hedgehogs Start Hibernating?

He phoned the BBC and asked to be put through to his department head.“Oh, hello, Arthur Dent here. Look, sorry I haven’t been in [the office] for six months but I’ve gone mad.”“Oh, not to worry. Thought it was probably something like that. Happens here all the time. How soon can we expect you?”“When do hedgehogs start hibernating?”“Sometime in Spring, I think.”“I’ll be in shortly after that.”— So

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The Moon – Been There, Done That

Our Moon, Third Quarter, February 5, 2010.©2010 Chris W. Johnson
While I’ve had my back turned in recent weeks, the Obama administration announced the scrapping of NASA’s Constellation program to return astronauts to the moon, explore asteroids, service distant space telescopes, and lay the groundwork for human exploration of Mars. I’ve since read several articles about this, and still have no

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"X-15: Extending the Frontiers of Flight" a Free E-Book from NASA

NASA is offering the book X-15: Extending the Frontiers of Flight by Dennis R. Jenkins as one of their small library of free e-books for most popular viewers. (Thanks to NASA Watch for pointing it out.) Personally, while e-books may indeed be the future (at least until civilization next stumbles, and they – trapped in their unusable viewers – all become inaccessible for a few centuries, if not

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“Texas Rancher an Unlikely Environmentalist”

NPR’s All Things Considered ran their story on my friend David Bamberger yesterday. They've provided a nice page to go along with it containing what I presume is the text of the story, photos, and a link to the audio. I haven't had a chance to listen, yet (I’m operating on a weird schedule), but I encourage anyone so much as curious to have a look/listen.
It's a shame that it can be considered “

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Bamberger Story on NPR, Probably this Friday

I'm happy to see my friends at the Preserve getting some more well deserved publicity, and to pass along advance word of it. This time, the publicity is from National Public Radio. Thank you, NPR.

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Refracted Moonlight

Moonlight refracted in a passing cloud at about half-past midnight. The moon is too overexposed to be distinguished, and the cloud is blurred by its own motion during the moderately long exposure required to capture its subtle colors, but the rainbow of colors in the cloud is clearly visible. (A little saturation enhancement helped, too.)
I can’t recall having seen this phenomenon before. Maybe

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Maze Wars SVG version 1.0b3 Released

Maze Wars SVG, version 1.0b3, has been released. This version began as a minor revision to eliminate an asymmetry between the rules applied to the bots and to the human players. Specifically, for lack of a check to prevent it, bots were able to move and turn at the same time, which human players could not do. Making the bots separate their move and turn operations seemed like it would be a

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Nest Boxes are “Go” – Squirrel is MIA

The conversion of my old bird roosting box to a squirrel box is finally completely complete. It’s one thing to finish the box itself; it’s quite another to iron-out all of the miscellaneous, but critical details, like how to mount the thing at a particular place in a specific tree, especially when the tree doesn’t have even one purely vertical limb. Also important, and thoroughly interrelated:

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Owl Box Work, Sorta

As usual, I'm doing this later than I should have, but fans of Chris' Eastern Screech Owl Nest Box Cam' will be interested to know that—better late than never—I am in the process of preparing the box for owl occupation. At the moment, the major work is on fox squirrel eviction. As always, I hate kicking out the little mammals, especially when the weather has been so bad, and pups may be on the

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Gatekeeper Released 21 Years Ago Today

Twenty one years ago today, on January 2nd, 1989, I released version 1.0 of the freeware Gatekeeper anti-virus system for Macintosh. It would have been better to note its twentieth anniversary a year ago, what with twenty being a big round number and all, but, frankly, I forgot.

Anyway, it was 21 years ago today. For reasons now obscure, it wouldn't appear in "comp.binaries.mac" until the 13th

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