Cool!
A tad chilly
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Sep 10, 2015
0
#2663
Sheesh-- some of the pictures of the current flooding in Japan are indistinguishable from peak of the 2011 tsunami. 19 inches of rain and tens of thousands evacuated.
Dang!
Sep 10, 2015
0
#2665
New Horizons is now more than 43 million miles beyond Pluto and functioning perfectly. Over the Labor Day weekend the scheduled year-long data dump began, providing some new close-up imagery at ~400m per pixel. There's a bonus because Pluto has more layering in its atmosphere than was thought, which means there is more refraction of light beyond the night/day line and more of the nightside surface was illuminated enough for New Horizons' cameras than had been expected.
This image view is 220 miles wide, taken from 50,000 miles. It shows ancient cratered areas in close proximity to young flowing smooth areas.
Tomorrow (Friday) more hi-res images of the moons will be released.
Cool.
What fantastic imagery!
Sep 17, 2015
0
#2668
Ugh. 84 F today, 3rd day in a row above 80 degrees. It's getting a bit late in the year to have to continue putting up with that here. Relief has arrived, though-- it's raining now, bringing in a front to cool things down.
Sep 17, 2015
0
#2669
More spectacular Pluto images. Today we get some that were taken 15 minutes after closest approach, as New Horizons looked back toward the sun and thus got good images of shadows showing the mountainous terrain nicely.
Sep 17, 2015
0
#2671
Whip_Kitten wrote:
I spoke with Chris Baty about NaNoWriMo. The idea, as I understood him, was to throw shit on the paper--i.e., don't think. It's afterwards when you go back and sift through the crap, you see patterns and plots and themes emerge that you take from to build your novel.
The masochistic word count is intended to force you to write unfiltered from your subconscious. It's when you revisit what you've written that you start to consciously discern what your novel is about.
To me it strikes me as a lot of effort for such a low yield. If you already have your ideas, spending a month engaging in literary Irritable Bowel Syndrome seems like a shitty waste of time.
I expect stream of consciousness output is what Baty intended for everyone, but with several hundred thousand entrants each year I imagine there are just about that many different reasons for why and how they participate. It's very clear from the Nano forums that there is plenty of editing and re-writing of work done on manuscripts by a sizable chunk of the crowd, and many participants enter November with a lot of thought already put into their upcoming work and quite detailed outlines right from the start. Different strokes and all that.
Calling the word count masochistic is nonsense-- lots of writers regularly compose a couple thousand words a day. As I wrote, for me that's 2 to 3 hours of writing a day, which is not at all uncomfortable, it's just not something I usually do for that many days in a row. Participating in Nano just means I devote a higher percentage of entertainment time to one particular activity than I normally would. Less reading, more writing. Less watching sports, more writing.
Obviously Nano isn't for everyone. The good news is, it's not required of everyone.
Sep 21, 2015
0
#2673
The NWS September forecast has been right thus far. Through September 20 this has been the warmest September ever recorded for the entire region of the Gaylord NWS, which covers the about the northern 1/3 of the lower peninsula and the eastern 1/3 of the UP. In the case of the Soo the average temperature this month has been 6.4°F above the "normal" average temp for the 1st 20 days of September.
Reviving
didibrian wrote:
No revivals permitted.
Reviving
aww
Sep 27, 2015
0
#2677
I hope most of you get good views of the lunar eclipse in a few hours. I'm not so sure I will-- cloud cover is forecast at ~40%, so maybe I'll see it off and on. That's one advantage of a lunar eclipse over a solar eclipse, it lasts so long there's a better chance of at least a window of visibility during some portion of the event.
Sep 27, 2015
0
#2678
Cystem_Phailure wrote:
yeah just got done watching it! so cool! but at the end the evil clouds were being evil and got in the way... :(
I hope most of you get good views of the lunar eclipse in a few hours. I'm not so sure I will-- cloud cover is forecast at ~40%, so maybe I'll see it off and on. That's one advantage of a lunar eclipse over a solar eclipse, it lasts so long there's a better chance of at least a window of visibility during some portion of the event.
Oct 1, 2015
0
#2679
Here's a nice pic of Charon taken shortly before New Horizons' closest approach. It's worth it to look at the original 2000 x 2000 pixel in full resolution.
Last night I missed out on an amazing light show. Here's a pic taken from down by the Mackinac Bridge, ~60 miles south of my location, shortly after midnight.