The Windkey and the Lamplighter

This is the coolest thing I’ve seen all day. I want a metric ruler to wear on my wrist!
It’s the perfect complement to the stainless steel “Brass” rat.
Sadly, they are currently out of stock (and they’re also $40) or I’d be giving them as Christmas (or your winter-holiday-of-choice) presents to all my hardware-hacking and sewing friends.

Dixon's Aerial pencil, with text in a font described by H&FJ as "open Lombardic capitals with terminal lightning bolts"

Wordsplosion! had a link to Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ blog entry about grawlix, which was right next to an entry about the cool typefaces used on pencils. Here’s another one from http://www.brandnamepencils.com/ :

Pencil with reverse leading quotes!

Somehow, my current writing implements just aren’t as beautiful to look at. I wish I worked in a fashion that made pencil a reasonable alternative. I even do my crosswords in pen.

On the other hand, though, I do have a lovely new pen—a Pilot Extra Fine RazorPoint in purple to match my new iPod.

Before:

Gilchrist, Texas before Hurricane Ike, from Google Maps via WunderBlog

Gilchrist, Texas after Hurricane Ike, National Geodetic Survey via WunderBlog.

Google Map of Gilchrist, Texas

This is Gilchrist, Texas. (hat tip to Wunder Blog for the pictures) Or, at least, it was. Now, it’s completely gone. No structures, no wreckage, no anything. Swept into the sea.

Putting aside the completely wrecked bridge, look at the places that used to be beachfront walkways. Where those houses were is *underwater*. I guess this is the risk you take when you build on a sandbar, but I can’t imagine losing my home in that way. I hope most of those people evacuated, and that they were summer homes with relatively little property left in them, but I bet some of them didn’t and some of them weren’t. I like the Jeff Masters’ idea of buying that land (where there is land, anyway) from the homeowners and making it a park (a la the Fire Island National Seashore). I think that’s a much safer way to help these people who’ve lost their property—without setting up the bad incentives which will cause it to be repeated in the next hurricane.

I wonder how much it would cost to buy all of NOLA and turn it into a park…

The Boston Globe’s Big Picture feature is neat. (Thanks to my favorite Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait, for the link to the volcano pictures, which got the RSS feed into my newsreader!)

But even better than volcanoes is volcanoes on Io:

The rest of the Jupiter pictures are also fantastic.

There’s been too much complaining on this blog recently, at least from me. But I have good news! Finally, I can indulge my desire to watch Martian weather.

The Mars Express Visual Monitoring Camera isn’t a scientific instrument—no pointing control, no focus adjustment, only “basic exposure controls”—but it was included on Mars Express to monitor the ejection of the Beagle 2 lander in December 2003. The camera performed well—the lander didn’t. In 2007, ESA turned the camera back on to capture low-resolution images of Mars, including some neat crescent shots and global images that the scientific instruments and other satellites aren’t positioned to capture. They did tests and focusing all throughout 2007, and the “Mars Webcam”, as it’s been nicknamed, went live today.

This is way cool. Also, it’s a live satellite that can be used to train ops engineers:
“VMC activites are unique in that the camera is operated by the Flight Control Team, and not a team of scientists. This gives operations engineers, particularly junior members, a chance to learn and practice command generation, planning, and other skills normally done at the Science Operations Centre.”

This is going right up with the VolcanoCam(1) on my list of things to go in my virtual windowframe(2).

(1) OMG, the VolcanoCam is now in HD! I love the USDA Forest Service.
(2)And thanks to Ryan Hoagland for putting up a website that I could link to when I wanted to explain what I meant by virtual window. Wherever and whomever you are, Ryan, you rock.

I found this post at Sense of Events a very informative, intellectual, and moving account of the events that occurred (according to some calendars) ~2000 years ago this last weekend. Just thought I’d pass it along while I’m working on organizing my own thoughts for original reflections on a bunch of topics.

Die loudly. I can hear the voice from the original reading of this. It works amazingly well, even matching the meter for most of the text.