Over at Making Light, there's a picture of the Mars Pheonix lander as it's descending, taken from ANOTHER SPACESHIP.

NASA has the pic brightened to show Mars and the freaking PARACHUTE LINES.

Dude. DUDE.

Astronauts to Work on Giant Robot

I bet the editor who got to pen that was filled with glee.

(stolen from vanmojo)

I give you, Trans Siberian Orchestra and choreographed lights.



The same guy also did Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24) the year before.

I've been watching a bunch of the Discovery Channel and Science channel lately at my aunt's, and I just want to say this.

Science is fucking awesome!

I give you: The Futurama Movie Trailer.

Aaron of Dresden Codak has had a brilliant idea.  Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day, December 8th.

The rules, from his post:

1) Utopian/cliché Future - "If the Future did a documentary of the last fifty years, this is how badly the reenactors would dress." Think Star Trek: TNG or the Time Travelers from Hob. Ever see how the society in Futurama sees the 20th century? Run with it. Your job is to dress with moderately anachronistic clothing and speak in slang from varying decades. Here are some good starters:

- Greet people by referring to things that don't yet exist or haven't existed for a long time. Example: "Have you penetrated the atmosphere lately?" "What spectrum will today's broadcast be in?" and "Your king must be a kindly soul!"

- Show extreme ignorance in operating regular technology. Pay phones should be a complete mystery (try placing the receiver in odd places). Chuckle knowingly at cell phones.

2) Dystopian Future - This one offers a little more flexibility. It can be any kind of future from Terminator to Freejack. The important thing to remember is dress like a crazy person with armor. Black spray painted football pads, high tech visors, torn up trenchcoats and maybe even some dirt here or there. Remember, dystopian future travelers are very startled that they've gone back in time. Some starters:

- If you go the "prisoner who's escaped the future" try shaving your head and putting a barcode on the back of your neck. Then stagger around and stare at the sky, as if you've never seen it before.

- Walk up to random people and say "WHAT YEAR IS THIS?" and when they tell you, get quiet and then say "Then there's still time!" and run off.

- Stand in front of a statue (any statue, really), fall to your knees, and yell "NOOOOOOOOO"

- Stare at newspaper headlines and look astonished.

- Take some trinket with you (it can be anything really), hand it to some stranger, along with a phone number and say "In thirty years dial this number. You'll know what to do after that." Then slip away.

3) The Past - This one is more for beginners. Basically dress in period clothing (preferably Victorian era) and stagger around amazed at everything. Since the culture's set in place already, you have more of a template to work off of. Some pointers:

- Airplanes are terrifying. Also, carry on conversations with televisions for a while.

- Discover and become obsessed with one trivial aspect of technology, like automatic grocery doors. Stay there for hours playing with it.

- Be generally terrified of people who are dressed immodestly compared to your era. Tattoos and shorts on women are especially scary.

Me, my girlfriend, and Jonathan Coulton, after the concert. I even actually managed to smile in the photo, something I rarely do, even when I'm trying to.

Other awesome things about it.

- My girlfriend enjoyed the hell out of it, even though she hadn't heard any of Jonathan Coulton's songs before I played some on my Nerd Rock CD in the car.
- Going to an awesome concert with my girlfriend, because she's awesome. And that's how it's supposed to go.
- Seeing the updated blog post on his site about the concert, because now it's on the Internet, so it must be true!
- Going to a concert with 400+ other nerds. It's like a mini-con. A gathering of my tribe.

I promise I'll post

I just got back from seeing Jonathan Coulton (his site was down during the show, but seems to be up now) with Paul and Storm at the Birchmere in Arlington.

It was fucking AWESOME. Paul & Storm, it turns out, are two of the dudes who used to be in Da Vinci's Notebook, which I didn't know. They were funny and awesome, and Jonathan Coulton was fucking awesome, and also funny. They packed the place, which was over 400 people, and there were two standing ovations and an encore of two songs.

Some highlights.
- The Birchmere is a really cool venue, and decorated all sorts of interestingly.
- Meeting up with kjatar, and his friend and friend's girlfriend, whose names I have shamefully forgotten. kjatar looks a little like Doc Ock from Spider-Man 2. Not how I expected for someone I've known online for an absurd amount of time. Also, they helped by saving us good seats.
- Paul and Storm singing their song "Opening Band" and getting to the line of not having panties thrown at them. Three sets were subsequently thrown on stage.
- One of which was a pair of men's briefs.
- One of the others of which was a minuscule thong, which Paul called an eyepatch, and said he'd have worn as an eyepatch, but his wife wouldn't have approved.
- Paul and Storm's audience participation pirate song, and the varieties of "ARRR!"s involved from the audience.
- A wiseass in the audience (not me) called out "Freebird!" and Paul and Storm played it, with a few modifications, and the audience waved their cell phones since only like two guys had lighters.
- Apparently many people in the front had coordinated to bring plush octopi and monkeys (and a jellyfish and a toucan?) to which they'd pinned $1 bills, or notes.
- One of the notes was a guy asking him to play a bachelor party in Vegas, in exchange for a room and travel fare and such.
- This led to a comment about Neil Diamond already turning the bachelor party down, which led to a really awesome singalong of "Sweet Caroline" with no preparation.
- The audience response part of "Re: Your Brains".
- Getting my CDs signed by Jonathan Coulton, who seems to be a really nice dude, and was willing to talk to a big line of fans and sign all sorts of things even though it meant he didn't get out till midnight, and overall seems a really cool dude.
- The Awesome.

More details later. Sleep now. Also later, picture.

Today's Map of Online Social Sites.

It's already my background.

This Wired article is about very cool stuff. Methods of augmenting human senses through things like feedback belts and tongue sensors and so on. I think that sort of stuff's awesome. They talk about how the brain re-maps once it has a chance to get used to the new sense, and how it can make things noticeable humans usually can't notice. It's cybernetics without all the brain implantation and stuff. Direction senses, orientation, even "sight" through the tongue sensor. That's so awesome. And I've noticed the same thing with well-designed games and stuff, once you get used to the controls and the interface, you're not pushing buttons or moving the controller, you're making things happen in the game world. That could lead to a whole discussion about identity, since you don't say "Aww, my character almost died!" you say "Man! That dragon almost got me!" But I'm not going into that one right now.

Maybe I'm just a tremendous nerd, but the idea of using technology to add on to our senses and expand the way we can see the world is tremendously awesome to me. I'd love to have smartgoggles or something that would let me identify things and then find more information about them instantly. Imagine something that let you look at products on the shelves and see how healthy they are, or color them by worker treatment, environmental costs, whatever that went into them. Or be able to "smell" various chemicals, or...pretty much anything. Not all of it's possible, or easy, but the potential there, that's so awesome. Or on a more mundane side, look at cell phones, and the growing ability to talk to a pretty good chunk of anybody, a pretty good chunk of anywhere.

I love living in the future. Wish it'd hurry up and get here.

(crossposted to snarkoleptics)

Today's xkcd is brilliant. And it definitely could only work as a webcomic. Stick figure free software ninja jokes have a relatively limited audience, but I am completely that audience. Everybody here probably already knows all this, of course. There's just so many things about xkcd I like. Unfortunately, I'm a lot worse at detailing the reasons I like something than I am at detailing the reasons I don't. Maybe part of it's a feeling that the world should be more like what happens in the strip. Maybe it's the free mix of math and science and pop culture and romance and idealism and absurdity that just hooks in to almost everything I'm predisposed to like, growing up when and how I did. Or maybe it's the sense where I can look at the comics, and there's the absurd and the funny, and then there's the ones that feel True. I think that's probably the biggest thing. A lot of the comics feel like they're True, not just the ones that have happened to me. (Okay, not the part about walking around the world, but the doing something and thinking that)

(Jupiter's moon Io, from about 600,000 KM)
Woah.


(via Warren Ellis via Nasa Image of the Day (which has an LJ feed, nasa_images.)

Instructions for home made screenprinting. Nice and simple, and yet reusable.

*looks speculatively at a closet half-full of random plain T-Shirts*

So I'm researching various religions version of the end of the world, right? At this point, Hinduism. Which of course leads to Kali and Shiva, and there's a mention on Wikipedia about how when Kali's unleashed, often only Shiva can calm her down. And one of the examples of ways he contained her is "challenging her to the wild tandava dance and outdoing her."

An actual precedent for a dance-off. AWESOME. Now, I could confirm this with other sources, but the idea's too awesome, so I'm not sure if I CARE.

However, when scientists found a massive Tyrannosaurus rex thigh bone in a remote region of Montana a few months ago, they were forced to break the bone in two in order to fit it into the transport helicopter. This act of necessity revealed a startling surprise: soft tissue that had seemingly resisted fossilization still existed inside the bone. This tissue, including blood vessels, bone cells, and perhaps even blood cells, was so well preserved that it was still stretchy and flexible.

Dude.

I'm sure most of you have seen this already, but I never let redundancy stop me. I love the Internet. A lot because it lets so many awesome things happen that wouldn't have happened before, and most of them done just by random folks.

Like these videos. There's a band, called Ok Go! They posted a pair of videos on YouTube, one for "A Million Ways", the other for "Here it Goes Again". The first video made the rounds a couple months back, the second's going around now. And they're both pretty awesome, even though it's just filming the four of them in the one guy's backyard, or the four of them in a coordinated dance on treadmills.Well, the coordination and choreography is pretty awesome. But y'know, the fact that it's just the four guys and the one guy's sister doing the choreography and filming them, literally, in their backyard or basement is part of the appeal. And the music's pretty good.

What makes it even more awesome though, is it worked. The one guy was interviewed on the Colbert Report, and they got a record deal in part (EDIT: Already had a record deal) because of the attention their videos got. That's pretty cool.

I wonder if they'll keep doing those kind of music videos. It's hard to keep low-budget cred when you have an actual budget to work with.

When you mix digital cameras with long exposures with lightpens and then add in stop motion photography?

Complete Awesome, that's what.

I think this idea might be useful in the philosophy of awesome. And it's a nice turn of phrase. So here's the link from which I swiped it: http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2006/08/elaborate_mediocrity.php

So I was thinking about the Awesome thing. One thing that came to mind is stuff that you remember more, and feel more glad to have done, are things where you actually DO something. Going to watch a movie can be Awesome, depending on the movie and the company and a lot of other things, but the part with the company is about what you do with them, the movie is usually just starting point for whatever. Now how much more Awesome would it be to have helped MAKE the movie? Reading a book or comic or seeing art can be Awesome, but how much more Awesome would it have been to make it? Watching people dance can be Awesome, but how much more Awesome is it to dance yourself? (If you can get over looking like an idiot, anyway) I think, in general, doing something is more Awesome than just looking at something. Or it's at least a longer-term kind of Awesome.

This probably doesn't deserve to be called a philosophy yet. That, or somebody else has already come up with it. But I'm getting used to that happening, so here we go.

Most people only live a few days out of the week. If that. The other days are just sort of there, a blur of sameness. I know it's one of the things that makes me least satisfied with my job and my life. My job is really pretty pointless in the larger scheme of things, and it's neither interesting or enjoyable. So it makes the weeks go by fast and slow. Slow, because it takes forever to get through all the regular boring crap. And fast because when I stop and look back over the week, it seems like it passed in an instant since I spent all of it looking forward to the few times I got to do something cool, and basically fast-forwarded through the rest. That's pretty depressing.

Part of the rest of the problem is of my own creation, and this is where the Awesome comes in. Too much of the rest of time is spent doing stuff that's just okay. Or just interesting enough at the time, but not really that interesting in retrospect. Part of it is because no matter how cool something on the Internet is, 99% of things on the net just involve sitting at the computer and typing or looking at things. Video games are all joysticks and buttons and looking at pictures on the screen. Etc.

The point is, life shouldn't be like that. It shouldn't be fast-forwarded through. Life should be Awesome. Every day should have things that make you glad you did them. At least one. Really glad you did them, something you'll remember. Or something at least worthwhile. Whatever it is, as long as you're glad you did it. I can't tell you what's awesome for you to do. You have to do that.

I don't think I'm explaining this well. Dave, over at Dave's Long Box refers to "FUCK YEAH!" moments in comics (and movies), when you just want to yell "Fuck yeah!" because it was so awesome. Life should be more like that. Not all the time, because the human brain is a marvelously weird thing, and gets used to things really quickly. So then the amazingly awesome would become commonplace and boring as you became desensitized to it. Kinda like a drug, where you build up resistance to it, only this would be resistance to Awesome, which would be stupid.

And I think, perhaps, that might be part of the problem. At least in the US and the "West" in general. We're surrounded by marvels and so used to them we don't notice the kinds of Awesome permeating our every day lives. Hmm. That's a topic for another time, with the appeal of "natural" stuff because it's different than the normal Awesome we have, and the genesis of X-TREME! with Awesome junkies trying too hard to get ever-increasing doses of Awesome as everything becomes normal and boring to them. But that's for another topic, this is an attempt at a practical philosophy to make people's lives more fulfilling. Well, mine at least.

There's elements of Zen in this I guess, but it's more from Discordianism, because one of the whole points in that is to appreciate the moment. You're here, live it. Not to ignore the future, or the past, but not to focus on either or both so much you forget the rest. There's Awesome all around, and if there's not enough Awesome for you, then you should add more. If you're bored? Find something interesting to do. Don't just keep flipping through the same TV channels that bored you in the first place. There's a lot of Awesome things out there as it stands. Some people think they need to add magic or demons or High Weirdness to life to make it Awesome, but I don't think those are really any more than dressed up versions of the Just Barely Interesting, balloons of little substance with just a thin layer of Awesome on the outside. At least for me.

And the idea of Awesome is part of how I've become pickier. 90% of everything is crap, goes Sturgeon's Law. Probably even more. But there's a LOT of stuff and people out there, there's more than enough to keep to the good or great almost exclusively. If you're only reading something out of habit, or because it's Kinda Neat, is it Neat Enough to spend your time on? That's up to you. If it's not Awesome or Neat enough, ditch it.

I still don't think I've explained this very well at all, because it went a totally different way than I'd planned. My central point I was trying to make is this. Life should be Awesome. There's not enough time to waste on the Just Barely Interesting. Be picky. Go for the good stuff. Go for the Awesome. Don't let the Almost Interesting keep distracting you.

I'm going to keep trying to flesh this out and organize it into... something. I dunno. Maybe an Awesome Manifesto at some point. Or something. So I'm seriously requesting feedback, so I can try and figure out where I'm going with this, because just talking to myself only gets me echoes.