Guess and Check

During ISS Expedition 31, astronaut Don Pettit took some really cool star trail photographs.

This is the same guy who back in Expedition 6 made his own barn door tracker out of spare parts he found around the space staion.

I think my favorite photo on the Voyager Golden Record is “Supermarket, NAIC”.

I’ve been reading the Dune series, and it’s been great so far.

There’s a quote here on the back cover of the copy of the 1977 paperback printing I have of the first book:

“Unique… in the depth of its characterization and the extraordinary detail of the world it creates. I know nothing comparable to it except The Lord of the Rings.” – Arthur C. Clarke

This week’s what-if.xkcd was pretty good.

HelixSnake’s Skate 3 videos are always a good time.

Yale Stewart (twitter/tumblr) writes/draws/colors/edits/publishes the amazing JL8: A Webcomic. As he puts it, it “follows the adventures of popular DC comic characters as children in elementary school.”

I like it very much. If you want to get into it, I’d suggest starting at the really nice fan-archive that Axel Samuelsson put together.

A year ago, Mark Pilgrim disappeared from the Internet. I was always a fan of his writing, in particular the brand of humor he blogged with. I used his fruit salad recipe once.

I hope he starts up again some day.

After you’ve gone and experienced the 1110th xkcd for yourself, you may be interested in seeing the whole thing at once, put together and presented by mah boy Phlip.

As usual, The Onion seems to handle, summarize, and satirize an issue extremely well.

YouTube user gilmour509 has a bunch of great complete album uploads.

Here’s a favorite:

It’s the cats that really make it.

A long time ago, dsandler posted about the diff where the sudo sources were updated to include the Uncle Ben quote in the lecture. The diff link has changed, but it’s still a great find.

It’s from last June, but President Clinton played Not My Job and got all three questions about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic correct.

Do you like Economics but just can’t get yourself to want to learn about it? Well if you enjoy Seinfeld, you may find The Economics of Seinfeld rather interesting and helpful.

I’m not sure if MythBusters would or could actually do a show on Fan Death, but I know I’d be interested in seeing it and seeing the reaction of lots of South Korean people to it. Especially 5th and 6th graders in Seoul.

I’ve posted about this elsewhere recently, but I think it warrants repeating here:

I find the story of Andy Mooney and the Disney Princess franchise interesting.

This New York Times article speaks to his inspiration:

It was about a month after Mooney’s arrival that the magic struck. That’s when he flew to Phoenix to check out his first “Disney on Ice” show. “Standing in line in the arena, I was surrounded by little girls dressed head to toe as princesses,” he told me last summer in his palatial office, then located in Burbank, and speaking in a rolling Scottish burr. “They weren’t even Disney products. They were generic princess products they’d appended to a Halloween costume. And the light bulb went off. Clearly there was latent demand here. So the next morning I said to my team, ‘O.K., let’s establish standards and a color palette and talk to licensees and get as much product out there as we possibly can that allows these girls to do what they’re doing anyway: projecting themselves into the characters from the classic movies.’ ”

And Wikipedia summarizes the financial aspect nicely:

Despite limited advertising and no focus groups, the various Disney Princess items released became a huge success. Sales at Disney Consumer Products rose from $300 million in 2001 to $3 billion in 2006.

That’s an order of magnitude in just five years. Astounding!

In his new book Behind Photographs Limited Edition: Archiving Photographic Legends, photographer Tim Mantoani took lots of photos of photographers posing with prints of their most iconic work.

This Wired article has a collection of a few of them, and they’re rather interesting.

Via Kottke.

I need to remember that $39.95 is (one of) the magic number(s) when purchasing New York City MTA Pay-Per-Ride MetroCards with the current fare pricing.

Remembering that with the 7% discount given with purchases of more than $10 and the limit of only being able to make purchases in $.05 increments, a $39.95 purchase gives a $2.80 bonus so you’ll be able to get exactly 19 rides at the regular fare rate of $2.25 per ride from the $42.75 you’ll end up with on the card, leaving no money left over at the end.

There’s also other numbers that work: $35.75 gives 17, $37.75 gives 18, $73.60 gives 35, $75.70 gives 36, and $77.80 gives 37 rides; but I think $39.95 will be the easiest to remember.

Gay Talese wrote a good article for the New Yorker about the recording session of Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga‘s version of The Lady Is a Tramp for Bennett’s Duets II album.

And because Random House has it listed on Gay Talese’s website’s essays page, the PDF of the article is available for download. Read that; then watch this:

Amazing.

It’s generally considered much more difficult to ascend the seven second-highest peaks on each continent than the seven highest.

See Seven Second Summits for details.

I went to the Orioles/Tigers game this past Saturday.

Justin Verlander did not get his 25th win for the season, but watching this suicide squeeze that turned out to be the winning run was really cool.

Here’s a photo I took; that’s Willie Randolph in the third base coach’s box. Oh, and that hot dog vendor in the lower right seems like he has a lot of fun with his job.

Edit: (10/3/2011) That hot dog vendor? His name is Charley Marcuse and he’s been selling hot dogs with the Tigers since 1999. And he does have a lot of fun with his job. I can hear him in the background of tonight’s radio broadcast and the announcers took note of it at one point just a moment ago.