HoodedHawk

The Cassini probe has returned some really great, high-resolution pictures of Saturn’s rings. The above color-enhanced photo was taken when Saturn was between Cassini and the Sun, allowing features of the rings to standout that normally would be masked by sunlight. It’s a composite of some 165 images taken while Cassini was in Saturn’s shadow. This orientation allowed Cassini to get shots of light reflecting off ring particles as small as a micrometer. At this time Cassini was about 1.3 million miles from Saturn.

Beautiful!

For sale on Ebay (ends Wed. Nov 1, 2006 at 10:30pm):

Border Trilogy. All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain.

• First editions, first printings
• Near Fine in Near Fine Dust Jackets
• Very nice set of the Border Trilogy

Professor Richard Dawkins was at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. tonight, giving a reading/discussion of his new book, “The God Delusion“. Notice the imposing bodyguard in the background. Another was stationed on his left. When asked, he said he had not received threats; they were just hired by his publisher.

I’d estimate that there were about 200 people (or more - standing room only going way back into the store) at the reading/signing. I managed to get there early enough to get a seat in front, and a place at the front of the line for the signing.

When Prof. Dawson came on, he noticed the size of the crowd and decided to “skip the reading of Chapter One, which has a conciliatory tone - and start with Chapter Two, which is decidedly not conciliatory”. There’s a reason Prof. Dawson has been labelled “Darwin’s Rottweiler“. His basic premise is that God does not exist (yes, he is an atheist), and religion in general has not done us much good - on balance. One of the questions posed to him after the reading had to do with the “faith-based” recovery methods of groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous. He admitted that he was not aware that Alcoholics Anonymous had a religious undertone - “that’s just terrible” (or some such comment - my memory isn’t as good as it could be due to Preston being up most nights lately).

I recorded the reading and the discussion after.

Kirsten gave birth to our son, Preston, today. Preston is 10 lbs, 4 oz., 22 in. Baby and mom are doing just fine. Click on Preston below for a slideshow, or see him under Photography, Family.

I have to get back to them, so more later.

[update 10/18/2006: more pictures are up...]

If you are having issues with your Powerbook waking up at the wrong time (in your backpack for instance) because the lid latch is weak, then run the following command from a concole window:

sudo pmset lidwake 0

(more…)

IBM just got a contract to build the first petaflops supercomputer (that’s 1000 trillion computations per second). The machine will be used at Los Alamos to simulate nuclear explosions. What is really interesting is that some of the specialized processors that will be used were originally designed for the PlayStation 3.

An ancient hair dye formula, used by both the Romans and Greeks 2000 years ago (and still marketed as Grecian Formula) is based on nanoparticles, researchers say. The dye contains lead, which when applied to hair reacts with the sulfur in keratin protein to precipitate dark lead sulfide crystals. Using X-ray diffraction and other techniques they imaged the crystals. They appear to be like today’s lead sulfide quantum dots created via techniques from materials science, and are just 5 nanometers wide. Ancient Nanotech!