Primordial Ooze

A friend bookmarked this site on del.icio.us, which is the homepage for an astronomy library for Python called PyEphem. I’ve been toying with a new project idea since January when I took my kids to the New York Hall of Science in Queens. One of the displays was an interactive computer program that teaches you about where to find life in the galaxy. It was kind of a treasure hunt. While  the program was a bit shallow for me, it provided a lot of entertainment for my oldest son.

I played with the idea of writing something myself. Long ago, I bought a book called Astronomical Algorithms by Jean Meeus. I believe this is jean Meeus’ second work on the subject, the first being a book on astronomical algorithms on a pocket calculator. Man that sounds painful.

Anyway, the program I’d like to start and not finish (he, he) would be similar in concept to the NYHoS version, but with a bit more depth and perhaps some real astrometric data. I would either need a library like PyEphem or I’d need to read Jean Meeus’ book very carefully.

I doubt I’d write anything like this in Python, but who knows…

By Nick at 10:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

So, my brother calls me up at work and says he has a critter crawling around his place. I forgot if he said it was going through his dogs’ food or his real food or what. In any case, it’s always disturbing to have a little bugger like this crawing around in the dark.

I think he started leaving food for it in hopes he’d trap it somehow. I know he likes to be humane about these things so I’m not sure how this is possible. The food was always gone in under an hour.

As a first step, though, he decided to take a look at the critter first. Being a technogeek, he thought he’d put the nightshot mode of his camcorder to good use. He strapped it to a bottle and let it go. Here’s what it saw…

(click on the image to watch the video)

By Nick at 7:58 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

My friend Rob has a new blog called Sturmgard Rant, he cools off in his first post.

Subscribed.

By Nick at 7:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Look at this download speed. I’ve never seen over 1MB/sec like this. Amazing.

Now playing: Slacker Astronomy - Sharin' Charon (Show #19)

By Nick at 11:58 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Since I’m growing a large number of peppers in my garden this year, I decided to do something with the jalapeno chiles I picked last week. They were still good, having spent the week in the fridge.

I decided that I would not use a recipe and, well, wing it. How hard could this be?

I cut off the tops and took out the innards with a tiny knife I had. I disposed of the seeds. I then took some pepper jack cheese and cut it into little wedges. I also got a hold of some colby/cheddar shredded cheese.

I stuffed the shredded cheese inside the pepper, but I didn’t fill the peppers completely. I used the monterey jack for that. Once they were sufficiently stuffed, I scrambled some eggs, got out a bowl of breadcrumbs and breaded the little bastards. This was kind of tough since the egge didn’t quite stick to the smooth surface of the jalapeno. What the hell? How do they get the breadcrumbs to stick in the restaurant?

Anyway, I summoned forth some hot oil and dropped the cheese filled chiles in. Here’s a picture of what that looked like:

I then took them out with chopsticks and layed them out on a paper towel like so:

As you can tell, the breadcrumbs didn’t quite stay on. Most of the breadcrumbs were flaoting in the oil… yum. The jalapenos themselves were pretty darn good, but everything tastes good when you deep fry it. Unfortuinately, a lot of the cheese came out while they were being fried. I’ll have to figure out a way to get the cheese to stay in so I don’t look desperate fetching the cheese from the oil afterwards.

I’ll have to try this again.

By Nick at 9:04 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is phenominal!

!

There’s lots more

By Nick at 12:27 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)