Double post!
Anyone planning to stay up to see this? If it's not looking cloudy this evening I might. (The word on the net is that it's actually much less impressive when you see it live, kinda just a faint glow. If so I'll get to be cynical and dismissive of it later though, so win win!)
Random & Fun
Re: Random & Fun
"The way to succeed is to get born at the right time and in the right place. If you can do that then you are bound to succeed. You have to be receptive and have some talent as well."
- Sydney Brenner
- Sydney Brenner
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AssistantCrone
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Re: Random & Fun
I am now! (At this stage it'll probably involve setting an alarm, squinting out the window for a few seconds and falling asleep under the curtains, but damnit, shiny things in the sky are awesome).
"Now, I know art is all about expressing ourselves, but today we're going to express ourselves by getting it right." --DB
Re: Random & Fun
I'm pretty certain it'll be cloudy.
How good it looks depends on how bright the sky is and how close you are to inhabited areas. If you're out in the wilds you'll be very impressed. If you're in the middle of London you won't see it. Somewhere like Cambridge, you'll see it, but your impression of its quality may vary depending on things like brightness of the street lamps, angle of light, how far south you are, blood alcohol content...
How good it looks depends on how bright the sky is and how close you are to inhabited areas. If you're out in the wilds you'll be very impressed. If you're in the middle of London you won't see it. Somewhere like Cambridge, you'll see it, but your impression of its quality may vary depending on things like brightness of the street lamps, angle of light, how far south you are, blood alcohol content...
Our choicest plans have fallen through, our airiest castles tumbled over, because of lines we neatly drew and later neatly stumbled over.
— Piet Hein - Grooks
— Piet Hein - Grooks
Re: Random & Fun
Well, I looked and I looked, but I could not sees any proton. Maybe they are quite small 
"The way to succeed is to get born at the right time and in the right place. If you can do that then you are bound to succeed. You have to be receptive and have some talent as well."
- Sydney Brenner
- Sydney Brenner
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AssistantCrone
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Re: Random & Fun
Me neither. Nice clear night, though. Very twinkly. 
"Now, I know art is all about expressing ourselves, but today we're going to express ourselves by getting it right." --DB
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c_nordlander
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Re: Random & Fun
Zilch here. It was pretty cloudy, and there was probably too much street lights and stuff.
Pretty little baby
Pretty little monster
Went to the good school
Left with honours
Brand new tycoon
Sitting with a harpoon
-- Mother Mother, "Business Man"
Now offering writing commissions! Fanfiction or original, PM me for more information.
Pretty little monster
Went to the good school
Left with honours
Brand new tycoon
Sitting with a harpoon
-- Mother Mother, "Business Man"
Now offering writing commissions! Fanfiction or original, PM me for more information.
Re: Random & Fun
Probably wasn't worth looking at anyway. Feh. Stupid astronomy...
... speaking of which, a couple of articles that I found fun:
Chasing the Greek Foot and Making an English Foot.
The bit in the comments of the first article about the length of a cubit is something I'd never known, and the way the foot is actually derived (hint: it's nothing to do with feet) blew me away. And far from all the mystical bullcrap about Stone Henge and other similar stone circles, the fact that they're just a prototype for the International Standards Organisation is really quite amusing for me. Will there be naked dancers running around the burned-out husk of the ISO offices in Zurich two-thousand years hence?
The more I read about it, the more I'm coming to resent the whole metric system for being so divorced from nature. It's no more or less accurate than imperial (metric often appears more precise because of the decimal point and never-ending stream of numbers after it, but never confuse precision with accuracy as they are two very different things), but I've found that I can do mathematics a lot more easily when I'm thinking in fractions than in decimals and having more factors available makes dividing things so much easier. But of course metric uses 10s and that makes it simpler to count on your fingers...
To hell with that though. I use my fingers to count in binary. you can get up to 32 on one hand, it's awesome.
... speaking of which, a couple of articles that I found fun:
Chasing the Greek Foot and Making an English Foot.
The bit in the comments of the first article about the length of a cubit is something I'd never known, and the way the foot is actually derived (hint: it's nothing to do with feet) blew me away. And far from all the mystical bullcrap about Stone Henge and other similar stone circles, the fact that they're just a prototype for the International Standards Organisation is really quite amusing for me. Will there be naked dancers running around the burned-out husk of the ISO offices in Zurich two-thousand years hence?
The more I read about it, the more I'm coming to resent the whole metric system for being so divorced from nature. It's no more or less accurate than imperial (metric often appears more precise because of the decimal point and never-ending stream of numbers after it, but never confuse precision with accuracy as they are two very different things), but I've found that I can do mathematics a lot more easily when I'm thinking in fractions than in decimals and having more factors available makes dividing things so much easier. But of course metric uses 10s and that makes it simpler to count on your fingers...
To hell with that though. I use my fingers to count in binary. you can get up to 32 on one hand, it's awesome.
Our choicest plans have fallen through, our airiest castles tumbled over, because of lines we neatly drew and later neatly stumbled over.
— Piet Hein - Grooks
— Piet Hein - Grooks
Re: Random & Fun
Yeah, but that's metric binary. Imagine if you were doing that but for no reason at all, the 4th digit could take the values 0-13 instead of 0-1To hell with that though. I use my fingers to count in binary. you can get up to 32 on one hand, it's awesome.
"The way to succeed is to get born at the right time and in the right place. If you can do that then you are bound to succeed. You have to be receptive and have some talent as well."
- Sydney Brenner
- Sydney Brenner
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fellranger
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Re: Random & Fun
Norfolk.I use my fingers to count in binary. you can get up to 32 on one hand, it's awesome.
There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning....
And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave....
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave....
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
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AssistantCrone
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Re: Random & Fun
"Now, I know art is all about expressing ourselves, but today we're going to express ourselves by getting it right." --DB
Re: Random & Fun
Yay, these ones are at least not in the middle of the night
"The way to succeed is to get born at the right time and in the right place. If you can do that then you are bound to succeed. You have to be receptive and have some talent as well."
- Sydney Brenner
- Sydney Brenner
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c_nordlander
- Insane Underling
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- Joined: Fri Aug 10, 2001 2:00 pm
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- Location: not a place of honour
Re: Random & Fun
If you read the Lackadaisy webcomic, you've probably seen this already, but in case you haven't:
Lackadaisy Radioplay
It follows the first few pages of the comic, and the voices are excellent, especially Rocky's.
Lackadaisy Radioplay
It follows the first few pages of the comic, and the voices are excellent, especially Rocky's.
Pretty little baby
Pretty little monster
Went to the good school
Left with honours
Brand new tycoon
Sitting with a harpoon
-- Mother Mother, "Business Man"
Now offering writing commissions! Fanfiction or original, PM me for more information.
Pretty little monster
Went to the good school
Left with honours
Brand new tycoon
Sitting with a harpoon
-- Mother Mother, "Business Man"
Now offering writing commissions! Fanfiction or original, PM me for more information.
-
Stretch_Dude
- Junior Secretariat
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Re: Random & Fun
Amazing. I'd like to hear that guy do Rocky's spiel about the Mississippi.
I memorized "Holy Grail" really well
I can recite it right now and have you ROTFLOL
- "Weird Al" Yankovic, "White and Nerdy"
"Any pile of stunted growth unaware that entertainment is just that and nothing more, deserves to doom themselves to some dank cell, somewhere, for having been so stupid!! Movies, books, T.V., music - they're all just entertainment, not guidebooks for damning yourself!" - Nny
I draw too, dammit!
I can recite it right now and have you ROTFLOL
- "Weird Al" Yankovic, "White and Nerdy"
"Any pile of stunted growth unaware that entertainment is just that and nothing more, deserves to doom themselves to some dank cell, somewhere, for having been so stupid!! Movies, books, T.V., music - they're all just entertainment, not guidebooks for damning yourself!" - Nny
I draw too, dammit!
Re: Random & Fun
On the way to tesco in the pouring rain, I was walking down to the canal when I noticed a little round yellow ball on the floor. For a moment I didn't pay it much attention until I saw another. And then another, and realised I was standing next to a small plum tree. Just one, I thought. It had a few little yellow plums on it that were very tasty (naturally I ate them as they don't belong to anyone). On my merry way I went.
On the way back I looked at the spot from the other side and noticed something odd. It wasn't one little tree, it was a whole mess of plum trees, all of them just heaving with fruit and most easily accessible. A lot of it isn't ripe, but a significant chunk of it is and I've been plucking plums in the rain for the best part of 15 minutes. They are absolutely gorgeous.
On the way back I looked at the spot from the other side and noticed something odd. It wasn't one little tree, it was a whole mess of plum trees, all of them just heaving with fruit and most easily accessible. A lot of it isn't ripe, but a significant chunk of it is and I've been plucking plums in the rain for the best part of 15 minutes. They are absolutely gorgeous.
Our choicest plans have fallen through, our airiest castles tumbled over, because of lines we neatly drew and later neatly stumbled over.
— Piet Hein - Grooks
— Piet Hein - Grooks