An interesting natural record. Xanthophyll, a water-soluble pigment in the maple leaf dissolves in the rain. The solution diffuses outward from the leaf. Apparently there are repeated cycles of diffusion and evaporation, leaving concentric outlines of the leaf.
Today’s note arises from installing Lion updates to my video editor workstations, which should have taken 20 minutes, but ended up taking 4 hours. Today I did not have typical problems just launching the App Store. These are often fixed by a re-boot, trashing various preferences, etc. However I did have two really annoying experiences … Read more
In 1965, the Ohio State University produced a film about the US Air Force’s use of instructional technology, called “Teacher-Centered Television”. The film contained this brief excerpt of an interview with Edward Teller as an example of one of the capabilities of the medium. Dr Teller responds to the question “Are there peaceful uses of … Read more
Some time ago I was asked (about my beard) “how long are you going to let that thing grow?” I replied that I thought it had about maxed out, which it seems to do after 3 or 4 months. I immediately think of a constrained random walk model for beard growth and forget about it. … Read more
This annoying feature (related to version 10.0.5) was fixed by trashing the Matrox component “com.matrox.vpg.MPEG2IFrame.component” (ver 1.0.2) from the Macintosh HD:Library:QuickTime: Hopefully I won’t be missing the Matrox component.
With the dairy barn, we inherited a big mess,including 2 or 3 hundred bales of straw that had long since been eroded into piles rather than stacks. Apparently mice like to munch the string, so most bales had broken. And ground hogs had burrows all through them. We wanted to recover the space in the … Read more
I could not for the life of me think of what QR codes are called. After a few abortive searches, I gave in and ran the following: “what are those picture things you aim your phone at and get a link to a web page?” This totally lame search returned Wikipedia’s QR Code page at … Read more
I use an AppleScript to scrape files from the GOES archives at http://goes.gsfc.nasa.gov/goeseast/fulldisk/ir4/ The collected files are then processed a bit in Photoshop, named with sequence numbers and fed to QuickTime Player 7 as an image sequence to make a QuickTime movie. Today, the script broke, and upon investigation, I found that the GOES 13 … Read more
Planted some garlic last night, in time for vampire season. 3 inches deep about 6 inches apart, in nice rotted manure. Startled a big old toad who thought he had the place to himself.
This ash tree volunteered from an old burn pile. I was hoping it would develop into a nice shade tree, but I’m afraid it is not to be. This is the first real sign of infestation I’ve seen in our neighborhood. We have a few other ash trees in the yard, and I would hate … Read more