I’ve recently been liquidating more of my video game collection on eBay, and the thought never occurred to me “Hey, let’s turn around get moar video game stuffs with the moneys!” But I’ve made an exception here, and with good reason. … Read more
Or… dust from the skies! I’m gonna go all Fred Baker on it and issue my very own…
…because… check this out.
It’s a giant dust devil on Mars.
A towering dust devil, casts a serpentine shadow over the Martian surface in this image acquired by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The scene is a late-spring afternoon in the Amazonis Planitia region of northern Mars. The view covers an area about four-tenths of a mile (644 meters) across. North is toward the top. The length of the dusty whirlwind’s shadow indicates that the dust plume reaches more than half a mile (800 meters) in height. The plume is about 30 yards or meters in diameter.
So… it’s giant Martian tornado*, in the late part of the Martian spring. People from Arkansas and Oklahoma should colonize this planet immediately (as I’m from Arkansas, I know of what I speak). We’d be right at home. Let’s land a few well-stocked trailers there and get going.
* maybe not a tornado formed from the same moisture-reliant convection structure that causes tornadoes in the American midwest, sure, but obviously there’s some kind of atmospheric shear making this happen – it’s the same root cause in the end.… Read more
Oh come on. It’s funny. 😆… Read more
Maria’s ability to drape herself over the back of my chair is becoming nothing short of legendary.
I’ve never seen photographic evidence of cats being any more relaxed than this. 😆 … Read more
For those of you just tuning in, it was about a year ago this weekend that our herd of 2011 rescue animals started showing up, beginning with Portia, an attitudinal little red-headed tabby kitten my wife spotted up in a tree… surrounded by hungry dogs. The dogs were chased off and Portia was promptly whisked away in the tail waggin’ mail wagon to join our family.
She’s celebrating today in fine style. … Read more
For many moons I have been searching for a decent arcade emulator for my Android tablet, and there just wasn’t one. There was a Neo-Geo-only emulator that I tried and couldn’t get to run on my little flat friend (not surprising, as it’s a budget model rather than a luxury model), and besides… Neo-Geo only? Really? Nah. But now the folks who made MAME available for the iPad right around Christmas last year – and managed to keep it in the Apple App Store for all of about 72 hours before it got yanked for being a dirty filthy emulator – have also given the world a magical thing: MAME4droid. Behold.
Over on the book o’ the face, a hint has been dropped that the date for OVGE 2012 will be announced soon. That’s the good news.
The bad news is… I have no idea what to do/bring this year. … Read more
Sometimes I’ve got to remind myself that we’re not really experiencing a post-Apollo-Soyuz gap. These are amazing. Watch them all.… Read more
(For real- from the NASA Orion Twitter account.)
I shouldn’t laugh – the space shuttle Enterprise (whose Earthbound adventures I just happened to be researching last night for a project I’m working on) went on these kind of goodwill tours all the time, including a much-ballyhooed 1979 stop at the airport in Tulsa (why wasn’t I there for that? I shoulda been all over that.) There’s just something sad and incongruous about “y’all c’mon down for low low prices and see the new Command Module!” 😆 I still have much NASA love going on even while we’re in another late-’70s-style doldrums*. And who’s to say this won’t recruit some future astronauts who might otherwise never set eyes on anything that’s headed for space?
* referring to the period between Apollo-Soyuz (1975) and the first shuttle flight (1981) during which there was no American manned presence in space. For a kid who’d just had a lifelong love of space switched on so forcefully (ha!) by Star Wars, this was a painful period.… Read more
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