Slow today, sadly. Past Black Fridays have been the busiest day of the entire year, with full capacities for nearly all showtimes.
For my afternoon show, typically the busiest of any day, holiday, weekend or otherwise, I didn’t even make one-third of theater capacity. It picked up a bit throughout the day, but I didn’t fill the theater for a single show.
I hope it’s not emblematic of a trend.
MJ (and daddy) love Mama’s turkey.
Speaking of turkey, an oldie but goodie from snopes.com:
Turkey does contain tryptophan, an amino acid which is a natural sedative. But tryptophan doesn’t act on the brain unless it is taken on an empty stomach with no protien present, and the amount gobbled even during a holiday feast is generally too small to have an appreciable effect.
…experts say the average serving of chicken or ground beef contains as much tryptophan as a serving of turkey does.
Regardless, we all took a nice long poultry-nap, and will go over to Meme’s soon for pumpkin pie.
Black Friday starts the holiday season at the Blank Blank Planetarium; I’ll be happy to shelve the shows we’ve been playing, since I’ve seen them both an estimated 400,000* times or so.
*Number severly exagerrated for effect.
Still getting over this sickness junk. I’m feeling much better, but have some sort of gunk in my throat making it difficult to breathe and eat, two of my favorite pastimes.
Normally I’m off on Mondays (it’s the museum curse–a Tuesday through Saturday schedule) but I went in today to meet Nick from Spectra Physics and Mark Z. from AVI to get the core and optics on my laser replaced.
My friends think it’s hilarious when something in the planetarium breaks, as I usually end up spouting off some Star-Trek-esque technobabble. For instance, earlier this year when our star projector went south, I said to my friend Tony, “The infrared reticule sensor on the latitude axis control card blew a potentiometer, and it won’t zero out.”
Fancy words for, “It busted, bad.”
Luckily, the laser wasn’t busted, just drooping a bit on power, so Mark and Nick, two severly cool dudes, replaced the core and optics, and rebalanced the head so now I have nice pretty colors at retina-searing brightness gracing my dome once more.
Mark, who is an ol-skool laserist cat who rocked out Floyd and Zeppelin shows manually back in the day (I have it easy, I just load a couple of files and press play), was talking up Konica Minolta’s newish full-dome systems, which I didn’t know much about, so I came home and looked it up.
Peep the Super-MEDIAGLOBE, in all its minature kick-buttitude:
Projects 360-degree full-dome images AND filters 99.9% of particulates from your tap water.
That thing is a full-dome projector. (It’s apparently bigger than it appears to be in this photograph.) Leave it to the Japanese to build a machine that looks like it should sprout arms and a cutesy happy face, and walk around serving drinks. It looks like you could pour dirty water in the top and get a pitcher of clean, clear H20 from a ergonomic tap neatly concealed behind a tiny trap door.
But seriously: 10,000 to 1 contrast. Ten thousand to one. That’s freaking amazing. It’s all in the lens, apparently, and if there’s one thing Konica Minolta knows how to do, it’s make lenses.
Check out K-M’s planetarium info pages for some great examples of not-so-clean and clear English translation. AVI does U.S. distribution for them, and there’s a good image of their user interface there. Snazzy. I’ll take one please.
Had a bad cold all week. Voice almost totally gone this morning.
Probably didn’t help that thanks to a scheduling error, I had three back-to-back programs yesterday morning, and basically spent 10am to 1:30pm talking nonstop to elementary school visitors.
Luckily, today there was an extra staffperson that could cover my schedule, and so I ran a quick revision of the holiday show then cut out for half a comp day. It’s nice to be able to do that, and even though our public shows are fully automated (except for the intro speil) I was happy to be able to come home and rest.
But it brings up an issue that I’ve gone back and forth on since getting into the planetarium field: how much of a planetarium program should be automated, and how much should be live, given by a presenter? Read the rest of this entry ?
Speaking of Endeavour…
Frankly, I’m surprised that this doesn’t happen more often:
Things didn’t go quite according to plan for astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper during her spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Tuesday.
First, a grease gun inside her tool bag leaked, coating everything inside with a film of lubricant. While she was trying to clean it up in the absence of gravity, the whole bag floated away.
Of course it slipped out of her hands–it was coated in a film of NASA-grade lubricant! Hope they don’t dock her pay.
Also funny:
Mission controllers were also tracking the lost bag, which they say is floating well clear of the station and drifting further away.
Sounds like a job they probably shrug off on the newbies.
“Cool, you work for NASA, what do you do?”
“I monitor and observe the orbital paths of tools dropped by astronauts.”
“…”
It’s been glibly remarked that the Space Shuttle is the world’s most expensive delivery van. This week, it’s partially true: Endeavour is taking a new workout machine to the ISS, as shown in this unusually detailed CNN report:
The advanced Resistive Exercise Device, aRED for short, functions like a weight machine in a gym on Earth, except it has no conventional weights. Instead, it has vacuum cylinders — canisters with air that have had a vacuum applied — that provide concentric workloads up to 600 pounds, NASA says.
Obviously, working out in space is very important, as the article says, but I have to wonder… how in the heck are they going to ge that thing aboard? Just look at that picture, it’s HUGE. I’m guessing it’s in pieces, and they’ll float ‘em through the dock and then assemble it (I wonder which astronaut drew the short straw for THAT task… You think these things are hard to put together on earth, just imagine what one is like in microgravity).
One thing that caught my eye was this little throwaway line:
Between the vacuum cans and the bar, there are small flywheels that spin in opposite directions, creating an artificial gravity when someone lifts the bar.
A-say what now?! Artificial gravity?! I’m guessing that this means that it pushes “down” against the user, essentially pulling toward the user’s feet with an Earth-like gravity. How cool is that?
Also going to the ISS, a new-style Water Recovery System that will now recycle the crew’s urine into drinking water.
P + WRS = H20(ok)
Look at it: also HUGE. Two full double-wide rack-units worth of pee-transforming mechanical goodness.
But really, I think if you’re going to have something that’s recycling your bodily wastewater, you want it to look like this: big cylinders and tubes and pipes and buttons… If it was just one tiny little self-contained solid-state machine that you could carry in your pocket, wouldn’t you be suspect of its results?
Doc Philly P’s got the skinny on a couple of supremely cool images re: extrasolar planets, including the very first actual optical image of one (shot by the almighty HST, natch). The always enthusiastic BA is downright ecstatic about these files, and rightly so–this is huge. That Eye of Sauron-esque Hubble shot shows an actual planet around another star. And we took a picture of it. That’s astoundingly fantastic.
Last year at the Blank Blank Planetarium, we ran a program called Light Years from Andromeda, a fantastic canned show about intergalactic distances and light speed benchmarking, made by producing powerhouse team Mark and Carolyn Petersen of Loch Ness Productions–see it if you can, it’s narrated by Lieutenant Michael Worf.
I mean, Michael Dorn.
Son of Mogh.
Anyhoo, I ran a short demo with the show about astronomical mysteries and the science that solved them (in a lame attempt to cash in on the CSI craze), and one of the points I referred to was solar wobble, which indicates the presence of a large, nearby planet.
This prompted a handful of questions about extrasolar planets, and I thought to myself, “Self, you better study up on XSPs so you can answer these questions better in the future.” So I did. And waaaay back then in early 2007, the number of confirmed extrasolar planets was in the 60s.
Today, it’s 326.
Imagine what it will be in a year, in five years, in 20 years… As our telescopes get better, our computers get faster, and scientists get cleverer, that number is going to grow, astronomically. (Yeah, I went there.)
Pretty soon the public will start demanding that we name these new planets.
I suggest Star Wars characters. Or Harry Potter. Either is good, really.
For everyone up in arms about Christmas becoming a secular holiday and whining about putting “Christ” back in “Christmas,” I have seven things to say:
Why, for the love of the Norns, has everyone taken Tyr out of Tuesday?!? At least can we change it to Marsday? In all the Romance languages (except for Portuguese–why do the Portuguese hate the god of war?) the name of Tuesday comes from the Latin Martis dies, which means, of course, Mars’ Day. Frankly, I don’t care who wins out, whether it be the Nordic pantheon with Tyr or the Greek with Ares or the Roman with Mars, but for Odin’s sake, won’t someone PLEASE put an ancient war god back in Tuesday? Please???
The secularization of Wednesday makes the All Father sad.
And speaking of Odin, don’t get me started on Wednesday… I’m sick of the secularization of the honored middle day of the week. “Hump day.” How disgustingly sacrilegious. Please, oh please, praise his holy ravens and put Odin back into Wednesday, before it’s too late!
And those that would dishonor Odin by forgetting his day would callously do the same to his red-bearded son, the almighty god of thunder himself, by taking Thor out of Thursday. Why tempt Thor to rain down lightning upon us by not honoring his special weekly day? Pray! Appeal to Thor for forgiveness, lest he burn your homestead with his fiery bolts of retribution.
The same goes for Friday: please stop taking Frigg, Freya, Frige (take your pick) out of Friday! People love Fridays, but only in a secular sense, since it’s the last work day before a weekend of godsless debauchery. It’s high time we begin showing our appreciation for these Germanic pagan deities for having our favorite day named after them. Thank god it’s Freya indeed.
I didn’t forget Monday. Why, oh why, won’t people put the Moon back in Monday!?! The moon is a real thing! You can see it in the sky! It makes the tides! Humans have visited it! It’s the root of the word month, and was so important to the Hebrew calendar that the new crescent moon signified the new month, no matter what the actual date was. For the sake of Luna, Artemis and Selene, please put the Moon back in Monday.
And io! Saturn! STOP TAKING SATURN OUT OF SATURDAY. I mean, come on. I demand that we stop slighting the Roman god of agriculture by ignoring his influence on the first day of the weekend. Without Saturn, who would bless the the hops that make our beer and the government subsidized corn that gets turned into our ethanol? Really, people. Io, Saturn!
And I say it's alright.
Finally, Sunday… Sadly, there is no more sun in Sunday, and if any object deserves its own weekly day of reverence, it’s the sun.
The sun is the source of darn near everything on Earth. It’s where we get all of our energy (that useful stuff called “heat” and “light”), it’s where we get all of the chemicals that form your body, the air you’re breathing, the monitor you’re reading this on–and most everything else that has ever been or ever will be on this planet.
The only reason humans exist, the only reason the Earth exists, the only reason our solar system exists is because of the sun.
If you ask me, that makes it pretty damn important.
The ancient Egyptians had it right (as did myriad other cultures). They worshiped it as the source of life on Earth, and though their execution was a little wacky, they were more right than they ever could have realized. If there is one thing that deserves our devotion, it’s that nearby average yellow star that’s gracing us with its heat, light, and gravity.
But of course, the sun doesn’t have the capacity to care if we’re devoted to it. Love it or hate it (why would you hate it–it’s the sun), it will continue to do what any similarly charted star does for many more millions of years, and that’s even if it doesn’t have a day named after it.
Which is does…
(And that’s 51 more than Jesus has. Just sayin’.)
I’m a sucker for cool watches and clocks, so I squeed when I saw that someone had linked to this on Fark:
Sweet, I'm 50 minutes early instead of 10 minutes late!
It’s backwards, see? Man, if Tom Hanks would have realized that the da Vinci code was simply backwards writing, he and Amelie could have saved a ton of time and have Leon put Gandalf in jail right away.
I love watches. When I win $3 million on this lucky lotto ticket, I’m going to take $2500 and blow it all on watches.
There’s some other cool ones at that store, including this one, but I wonder… Can you tell if it’s going forward or backward, but not tell which way it’s spinning, and vice versa? I’m just not certain.
The Soviet Union was the first space program (like one or two other very important milestones in aerospace history) to put a remote-controlled robotic vehicle on another world.
In Soviet Russia, moon walks on you!
It’s name was Lunokhod 1 (literally, moon walker) and if you didn’t know better, you might think it was some sort of fictional steampunk kitbash.
Just look at this monster. It was 2.3 meters long (seven and a half-ish feet!), and I haven’t been able to find its weight anywhere, but it must have been pretty hefty.
Overall, the rover itself was pretty straightforward. The tub-like body was a sealed chamber filled with nitrogen and temperature regulated by Polonium-210, and was covered by a hinged lid. The chassis had eight independently-powered wheels (plus another roller at its rear which acted as an odometer).
It had a slew of simple testing devices, including cameras, geology tools, a spectrometer, a small x-ray telescope, and a laser. Two antennas relayed its data back to Earth, one a vertical conical visible in the above photo, the other a super-directional helical antenna (the upper boom sticking out at an angle). The flipped-open device at the front is a laser retroreflector.
The whole shebang was powered by batteries which were recharged throughout the lunar day by a bank of solar cells underneath the main body’s lid, which would flip open to soak up some E.
To me, this guy looks pretty much exactly what I imagine a big, rugged, late ’60s Russian lunar robot should look like.
And they built it to last; they expected to get three lunar days of operation out of it (three-ish Earth months… do I really need to do that math for you?) but ended up getting almost eleven lunar days of life, constituting 20000ish video images, over 200 hi-rez pans, 25 spectrographic soil tests, around 500 soil punctures, and about 10 kilometers of travel.
Lunokhod had a sister, Lunokhod 2, which in it’s 4 lunar days of life traveled a nearly unbelievable 37 kilometers. A third rover was built, but not launched.
I guess you could say that these guys were the great-grandparents of Sojurner, Spirit and Opportunity. And despite their data being nearly 40 years old, you can bet that the info and pics they radioed back home will still be handy in the future explorations of our planet’s closest astronomical neighbor.
The spacecraft which carried Lunokhod 1 on its voyage was named Luna 17, and was launched on November 10, 1970. It touched down on the moon’s surface and dropped off its passenger a week later, November 17.
