Sean’s Mental Walkabout

The Font Sizes of the Planets | Orbiting Frog
Very nifty, might have to buy one of these shirts

Schneier on Security: The DNS Vulnerability
If you only read one article on the DNS issue, this is probably the one to read.

Patent Office finds voice, calls for software patent sanity
thank god this pendulum is finally swinging back in this direction.

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The picture above is from a CNET article on Extreme Tree Houses.  At $1875 per square meter, it isn’t actually as ridiculously priced as one might think.  Just imagine drinking your morning coffee up in the tree tops.

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It’s Monarch season.  No, not the dreaded form of government, but those butterflies that manage to migrate from the north east to Mexico every year.  Because Susan has both milkweed and butterfly bushes in or garden, we’ve managed to attract a few this year, including one that is currently pupating.

And that left me with a question.  I saw the caterpillar hanging from under the leaf when I went to work on Friday, and I saw the pupa when I got home, and the pupa is smaller.  After a bit of searching on the internet I found a video which actually shows that transformation in time lapse, and it is definitely weird.  I might have to rig up something to get my own time lapse of them next year.

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Just listening to NPR (I’ll link in the story later once it is in the archive), where they were discussing people not drinking enough and getting dehydrated. Towards the end of the piece it said that while drinking caffinated drinks isn’t as good as water, it isn’t as bad as you might have thought, based on some new research. If you drink a litter of water, you may retain about 800 mils. If you drink a litter of tea, you may retain more like 700 mils. I’m curious where this research actually comes from, but it is interesting. Water is still better, but even coffee seems ok to keep you from getting dehydrated.

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A new planet has been discovered, and it turns out that “these icy super-Earths are pretty common. Roughly 35 percent of all stars have them.”

Wow! 1/3 of all stars have super earths. I still remember the utter amazement when in high school the first extra solar planet was found, even though it was around a pulsar, so any life would have been blasted off of it long ago. Now we’re over 170 extra solar planets found.

Just awesome.

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I’ve been continually annoyed by the fact that current culture has seemed to replace science with technology in many aspects of life. If you stroll into an airport magazine, for instance, you’ll find lots and lots of computer magazines, and will be hard pressed to get a copy of Scientific American.

Online news falls afoul of the same issues. The NY Times Science section is good, at times, but it’s RSS feed is aweful. (And yes, I’ve become one of those people that measures a website’s usefulness on the quality of their RSS.) It is ironic that just before I deleted my Science Times feed, I read an article about Science Blogs in it. I’m not sure how much I’m into Science Blogs of yet, but it seems pretty interesting, especially the combined feed.

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