Just another nerd.
The amazing thing about this image of Saturn is that it was produced using a ground telescope at the Paranal Observatory, which is part of the European Southern Observatory.
According to the BBC’s story about this photo, to achieve this image the laboratory used a special detector which corrected for the distortions created by the Earth’s atmosphere.
As much as I love Conversant, one of the things that was somewhat limiting for awhile was the inability to create an interface to the discussion group that resembled the flat bulletin board systems like the Ultimate Bulletin Board, etc., that I prefer (on the other hand, I don’t know of any other content management system that lets you build your discussion system from the ground up however you like it — and modify it instantly — that Conversant does).
Anyway, Macrobyte followed through on my and others’ feature requests, and it is now possible to emulate just about any bulletin board system you could imagine.
And, today, somebody threatened to sue me over it. After I stopped laughing over the e-mail I re-read it and started laughing again.
I converted all of my sites from a chronological ordering of posts to a reverse chronological ordering posts. So this yahoo, out of the blue, writes to tell me that I have inappropriately changed the “context” of something he posted to my site back in July 2001 and that I have two days to remove it or face his solicitor!
Ah, nothing like crank e-mail on a Sunday morning.
With my brother off doing the Homeland Defense gig somewhere in Nebrasaka, whenever Grandma gets sick its pretty much my wife and I who drive the 25 miles to take care of her. Yesterday she called us early in the morning because of pain her legs.
Grandma has had angioplasty and a bypass operation in the past couple years with a lot of problems with blood clots afterward, so when she starts feeling pain in her legs we have to take it very seriously.
So we rushed over there and I spent about 4 hours with her in the emergency room. The doctors couldn’t give her any solid answers, but the problem is likely a sprain or other sort of injury rather than blood clots.
Grandma’s starting to get down in the dumps, largely because for the most part she’s never had many serious health problems. Personally I’m amazed — I hope I am half as healthy as she is when I am 78 years old, especially mentally, where she is just as lucid (and cantenkerous) at 78 as I remember her being when she was in her early 50s.
Better (and longer) living through science.