GOES 13 looks at Hurricane Sandy

After being down for maintenance since Sept 17,  GOES 13 is back in service.  Which is good because my AppleScript more or less broke while it was down.  “The trouble stemmed from a motor vibration, which caused a lubricant buildup that obstructed the spinning motion of the filter wheel in the sounder. A team of … Read more

Maple Chromatography

An interesting natural  record.   Xanthophyll, a water-soluble pigment in the maple leaf dissolves in the rain.  The solution diffuses outward from the leaf.  Apparently there are repeated cycles of diffusion and evaporation, leaving concentric outlines of the leaf.  

Edward Teller on Project Plowshare

In 1965, the Ohio State University produced a film about the US Air Force’s use of instructional technology, called “Teacher-Centered Television”.  The film contained this brief excerpt of an interview with Edward Teller as an example of one of the capabilities of the medium.  Dr Teller responds to the question  “Are there peaceful uses of … Read more

Maybe time to trim the beard…

Some time ago I was asked (about my beard) “how long are you going to let that thing grow?”  I replied that I thought it had about maxed out, which it seems to do after 3 or 4 months. I immediately think of a constrained random walk model for beard growth and forget about it.  … Read more

FCPX Crashes on Export

This annoying feature (related to version 10.0.5) was fixed by trashing the Matrox component “com.matrox.vpg.MPEG2IFrame.component”  (ver 1.0.2) from the Macintosh HD:Library:QuickTime: Hopefully I won’t be missing the Matrox component.

The Great Re-Baling

With the dairy barn, we inherited a big mess,including 2 or 3 hundred bales of straw that had long since been eroded into piles rather than stacks.  Apparently mice like to munch the string, so most bales had broken.  And ground hogs had burrows all through them. We wanted to recover the space in the … Read more

Why I love Google, sometimes.

I could not for the life of me think of what QR codes are called.  After a few abortive searches, I gave in and ran the following: “what are those picture things you aim your phone at and get a link to a web page?” This totally lame search returned Wikipedia’s QR Code page at … Read more

GOES 13 on standby, GOES 14 activated

I use an AppleScript to scrape files from the GOES archives at http://goes.gsfc.nasa.gov/goeseast/fulldisk/ir4/ The collected files are then processed a bit in Photoshop, named with sequence numbers and fed to QuickTime Player 7 as an image sequence to make a QuickTime movie.  Today, the script broke, and upon investigation, I found that the GOES 13 … Read more