> cosmicpenguin.net

Defending Cheerios, Cereal of Liberty. As the article tells it, our marxist government is going after Cheerios for promoting themselves as the next great miracle cure. Now, thats just downright Unamerican, dammit. My favorite line: "Washington raised ciggie taxes to pay for SCHIP expansion and are [sic] gearing up to raise soda taxes to pay for Obamacare ... No vice is safe from the health police. Dijon mustard and arugula exempted, of course." Correct me if I'm wrong, but any plan that encourages more arugula and less cigarettes is a solid plan in my book. I can't help but feel like we are all the victim of some great parody. Lets pretend it is and laugh anyway.

This just in from the outer darkness - The final image from the Hubble Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. The camera is being replaced by Wide Field Planetary Camera 3 (duh!).

From the "gee, we had to spend money to find that out" department, Terrorist Attacks Provoke Surge In Alcohol And Drug Use. Wow, really - humans drown their sorrows and fears with mind altering substances? Thanks for the scoop, Louis Pasteur.

Did the swine flu escape from a lab? This sounds less like science, and more like an attempt to blame somebody (anybody!) for our fear (that is, as soon as we recover from the hangover from the previous story).

And finally, from the biological front - Smelly refrigerator strikes down AT(and)T office - way to go, Ma Bell.

Three space posts in a row - but seriously, can you ever have enough science? This chart is neat - it shows the relative position of meteors over a two year period in Japan. Not only does it show the major meteor showers, but it also helped to discover some new ones.

PS: God speed Atlantis.

PPS: Did you know that Edwin Hubble (of Hubble Telescope fame) was a star forward on the University of Chicago Big Ten championship teams of 1908 and 1909? That totally won't happen today - you won't see anything in space named after Kobe (probably).

Chalk one up for my third favorite axiom, the law of unintended consequences. Apparently, since we are no longer hugging our children with nuclear arms, NASA is running out of fuel for deep space probes. We used to have pounds of the stuff, but we gave it all up at the end of the cold war, and world wide supplies are running short. Oops.

(And in case you wanted to know, I am also partial to the law of gravity and like the Simpsons, in my house we obey the laws of thermodynamics).

I read a story to my daughter called "I Love You This Much" wherein two rabbits, tongue-twistingly called Little Nutbrown Hare and Big Nutbrown Hare compete to say how much they love each other. At one point, Little Nutbrown Hare says that "Nothing can be further then the sky", and now we know just how far that is.

The combination of the orbiting Swift Observatory and a ground network of telescopes have captured a gamma ray blast and after glow from an exploding star 13.035 billion (thats billion with a b) light years away - from when the universe was only 680 million years old. Thats pretty cool, but whats even cooler is how the network of telescopes coordinates with the satellite. The satellite detects the gamma ray, and pinpoints where it came from. Immediately following, an alert goes out world wide for x-ray telescopes to zoom in on the site to catch the afterglow before it quickly fades. It is a testament to science that we can detect and track these things so reliably.

Getting Things Done (also known as GTD), is a pretty popular "action management" system - its like a to-do list on steroids. GTD is pretty popular among the geek set, and it is pretty heavily pimped by websites such as http://www.lifehacker.com. I downloaded ActionComplete for my G1 (on the basis of the Lifehacker recommendation), and I love it. It helps organize tasks by project, lets me enter notes and locations for tasks (and it integrates with Google maps for extra fun) and the reminders are well integrated into the phone and very persistant. My only complaint at this point would be that it isn't integrated into Google Calendar, so I am looking forward to the soon to come web interface.

Honorable mention: The Weather Channel app (I love doppler plus google maps.. :))

Sorry for not posting in a while - I have been pleasantly busy. Big news last week, I finally got my G1, which completes the transfer of my online soul to Google. In celebration of my promotion to pseudo-hipster, I signed up for Twitter (search for CosmicPenguin), Google Latitude and started receiving my @crouse-house.com code on Gmail. So far, I've been very happy with my G1 - it works reasonably well, and of course, it has all sorts of Qualcomm goodness inside. Its nice to be able to maintain IMs and read emails while in transit or hanging about at the dentists's office or whatever. Yeah, yeah - I've become _that_ guy, but hey, at least I'm not using an iPhone. Look for more of my web 2.0y gadgets to appear here soon.

In related news, Lifehacker has 12 awesome Android apps, following on to their previous posts. I already use Toddler Lock and Any Cut, and they are great. I installed Useful Switchers today, and I think I'm going to like it. I also installed Hungry!, but the jury is still out on that one. I want to try a GTD (Getting Things Done) app, and Lifehacker has recommended both TooDo and ActionComplete, and I haven't decided which one I am going to try.

The elite 8 is wrapping up as we speak though my Perl generated brackets have been busted for some time now. it only accurately predicted one final four participant, Michigan State, which did end up being a bit of an upset over the number 1 overall seed. As previous reported there were 10 upsets in the first round, 1 in the second round, 2 in the third, and its looking like 4 in the fourth. I think the low number of upsets for the second round were as much of a function of the high number of upsets in the first round. If a 12 beats a 5, its more likely that the 4 will beat the 12 in the second round.

Could I have done better if I had gone for more than 4 upsets in the first round? I think so, but its hard to tell. Next year I need to get statistics on the historical upsets per round, and I also need to try to focus more on recent history then the history of the entire tournament. The game has clearly changed since the addition of the NBA "one and done" rule, and the script should more clearly reflect that.

This is neat - for the first time ever, we have recovered a meteorite that was tracked from space. The upshot is that not only do we have the physical evidence, but we can also track its orbit and determine where it came from. The feat was accomplished with some good telescope work and some computer crunching to tell us where it would hit, and some good boots on the ground to track down the little buggers (numerous eyewitness accounts of the impact didn't hurt either).

The first round of the NCAA tournament is over, and man was it a bloodbath. My script ended up with only 24 of 32 games in the first round. An astute observer will note that my math was wrong - 25% of the round one games is 8, not 4, so my script was already woefully upset free, and this was not a normal year. There were 10 upsets in the first round, including 3 of the 12 seeds (and my beloved Utes - boo!), and one 13 seed. I lost three teams that I had advancing to the sweet 16, so I'm pretty much in the soup now. Next year I will have to remember to run the script to at least 8 upsets (I might need to tweak the algorithm).