Thane Plambeck

New Horizons spacecraft at Jupiter

Launched in January 2006, the New Horizons spacecraft today took advantage of a gravity assist from Jupiter. New Horizons is passing through the Jupiter system at 50,000 mph, ending up on a path that gets it to Pluto on July 14, 2015.

link

Middlefield and Oregon Expressway, Palo Alto, 2007

Crummy cellphone photo becomes moody watercolor

barn slideshow, m niebuhr

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mniebuhr/tags/barn/show/

Forgetfulness

Not scared yet? Try The Dead.

Flag wavers at the Oakland convention center

Team Finland
Originally uploaded by thane.

Cole had a gymnastics meet this morning in Oakland. One team had come all the way from Finland.

Burgess Gymnasium

I interview the Big Man for Inside Basketball:

[ Eric's blog ]

Transparency test three

Did it work?

Yes—but it looks bad.

Transparency test two

Did it work?

No.

Flickr image transparency test

Did it work?

No—but I wasn't expecting it to.

The last three Megamillions lotto drawings...

...have all had "Mega" number 41:

I just looked a QuickPick ticket I bought for tonight's 150 Million drawing and yes—the computer picked 41 for the Mega number.

EASY STREET!

Just so you know, the winning numbers will be

6 8 22 40 52 and 41 (mega)

We can split the pot, but you'll have to hurry. I think the drawing is in a few minutes.

The go to girl for media

Q: Who's the President of gotomedia?

A: Kelly Goto.

I'd love to have a name like that, with plenty of pun possibilities. Some people have all the breaks.

Since "Kelly" could be a male or female name, maybe I could just steal it, and be the "go to guy" ?

#s

#s
Originally uploaded by taylorkoa22.

BEAN CRUD IN BRINE

BEAN CRUD IN BRINE
Originally uploaded by thane.

Spotted by Cole in San Francisco as we waited for our Thai food take-out from Marnee Thai.

US3's Cantaloop Fantasia

On the pop radio I heard Herbie Hancock mixed up with some rap and thought—nice job, Cantaloupe Island was just too ripe for that. It was US3's "Cantaloop" Fantasia (I'd never heard of US3, but that's not saying much; I'm living mostly in the 1940s and 1950s now, Quantum Electrodynamics, Art Blakey, Clifford Brown, Freeman Dyson's amazing explication of Feynman diagrams; you know the drill).

It's probably the derivative of a derivative (I think someone else sampled Cantaloupe Island in a recent pop song, right?) but that's the second derivative, the acceleration, you know, and that's OK, physicsly-speaking. Turn it up.

I just bought it at the iTunes store. There's even a couple of samples of Pee Wee Marquette introducing Art Blakey and the All Stars (A Night at Birdland, Vol I, recorded 21 Feb 1954 at Birdland in NYC). There's no Herbie on that record, I'm pretty sure, but he was about to enter the scene maybe (or already there).

Anyway—nice work. I'm happy to see the old stuff reworked. Who's going to take a new whack at Lee Morgan's Sidewinder—the VW bug is reborn, but the Sidewinder, which sold it in the first incarnation, idles on the sidelines.

Nestling Segways parked outside Green's restaurant at Fort Mason

Nestling Segways parked outside Green's restaurant at Fort Mason
Originally uploaded by thane.

At Fort Mason in SF, I noticed a swarm of Segways and helmets parked in a line.

They belonged to tourists who were having lunch in the restaurant. Later, I ran into them again, near the waterfront (photoset).

glyptothek

glyptothek
Originally uploaded by thane.

I was curious to see what a particular sculpture in the Glyptothek would look like if tried adding eyes to it in photoshop.

I thought the results made him look cross-eyed. Or sad. Or sad, and cross-eyed. (?)

Then I looked again at the original photo, without the photoshopped eyes, and it looked cross-eyed too.

I don't know who is represented in this bust. I'm pretty sure it's some Roman guy we've all heard of.
* * * Added later: From "Uses of Great Men" (Emerson, but gone to Whitman):

[...] The people cannot see him enough. They delight in a man. Here is a head and a trunk! What a front! what eyes! Atlantean shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic, with equal force to guide the great machine! This pleasure of full expression to that which, in their private experience, is usually cramped and obstructed, runs, also, much higher, and is the secret of the reader's joy in literary genius.

How to pronounce "Fuldu"

Scott Purdy:

I chose my nom through an excruciating process of going through things that I felt sounded neat. I had tried a name & wordplay nom at the con, and found it was too difficult to explain and not much fun to respond to. Since I've always been a bit of a fool, I wanted to use that in my nom. However, since we already had a Joker, I wanted to distinguish myself in some way. Fuldu is just a phoneticization of the way that I say "Fooled You," an appropriate response to those who pronounce it "Full Dew."

Having an argument about a bookcase

Having an argument about a bookcase
Originally uploaded by Seb Przd.

Flickr photoset

Seb Przd:

A conformal transformation is a kind of function defined over all complex numbers that has the basic property of being differentiable, i.e. continuous and smoothly varying. Such a function defines a transformation on the plane that has the property of conserving the angles. This implies that on a very small scale shape is preserved in such a transformation.

coolest flickr photoset I've seen in quite awhile...

Fear the Goggle T-shirt

Rants from the Big Man (blog)

T-shirt (sales)