Via Instapundit, a Wall Street Journal article about folks who are building fusion reactors in their basement. How's that for a Berserker project?

Answer: probably requires too much voltage. :)

Now here's a walk I would have liked to go on. By way of Instapundit, here are some really nice photos from a recent spacewalk mission.

You may have heard of the sport of hypermiling, where you try to maximize the number of miles that you can travel on a tank of gas. Now that's far too much work to contemplate for most of us, but how would you like to be able to see what mileage your car is getting from moment to moment?

Via Instapundit, here's the ScanGauge II, a cool little device that plugs into your car's computer access port and gives you an instantaneous readout of your MPG. Going up a hill? Mileage down. Pedal to the floor? Mileage down.

Not getting squashed by that semi? Priceless. :)

The old laptop is dead (more or less). Long live the new laptop.

I got the new power adapter and -- although I managed to get some charge into the laptop -- it was clear that the connector was a truly flaky part. Now, while this can be fixed by someone really good (or lucky) with a soldering iron, it wasn't something I had the time or inclination to try.

I'd been looking over the HP Pavilion dv9410us for a while. It has a 17 inch screen and a numeric keypad, both in the "real nice thing to have" category. Sam's Club has had it for about $950 lately, although my local club is supposed to be out of stock on it according to the website.

But in poking around, I found that there's a dv9420us, which is about 1/3 faster, has about 1/3 more storage capacity, and which lists out for $200 more on the HP website. Hmm.

So while I was sitting in Dr. Bob's office waiting for him to look at my leg (which has flared up again -- I now have new antibiotics), I noticed that the dv9420us was on sale at Fry's yesterday and today for $999 after discounts and rebates.

So after we visited daisy_knotwise at the hospital, I tore out on I-355 when visiting hours ended, arriving in the Fry's parking lot at 8:45 PM, left the store with laptop and case by 9:05 PM (5 minutes after closing), and arrived home at 9:35 PM with laptop in tow.

So far, so good, but I need to neuter some more Vista features...

(And the power connector on this one looks to be better mounted. We'll see how it goes.)

I needed gas, so daisy_knotwise, Katie, and I set out for the gas station this evening after a futile first attempt at installing Katie's new car seat. So once the old car seat was back in position...

After we got gas, we headed down to Culver's for some custard and skywatching. The flavor of the day for custard was Brownie Thunder (vanilla custard plus caramel plus brownie chunks). The flavor of the day for skywatching was the International Space Station, which made its appearance near Venus right on time at 9:53 PM local. As it arced across the sky, I suddenly realized that it was being followed.

"Did the Shuttle separate?"

"Earlier today," Gretchen replied.

"Cool."

It's not often you get to see man-made objects in space flying in formation.

We weren't the only ones who'd gone to Culver's for some skywatching -- another man pulled in moments before the ISS and Shuttle appeared and thanked me for pointing them out to him. And since Culver's closed at 10 PM, when the ISS and Shuttle vanished into the Earth's shadow, he vanished into Culver's.

We'd already had our custard, so we headed home.

This is a little old, so some of you may have seen this before, but here's a video of a man flying with his own personal four-engine jet pack and wing. Wow!

The company that makes the engines is JetCat.

Via Instapundit, this article about a cheap, off-patent drug that seems to wake up the mitochondria in cancer cells. The awakened mitochondria apparently then look at the cell and say, "Hey, you should die now." And the cell does, so the patient doesn't.

There do appear to be side-effects, but -- so far -- none that look nearly as bad as, say, dying.

Of course, also as usual, we haven't gotten around to human testing yet.

I took the new computer to the basement and booted it up. The first thing I discovered was that you need a working computer to get this system set up, because you need to make an install floppy for the disk drivers for this motherboard. Ok, I can handle that. Off to the office computer I go, where I make a floppy to use in the installation. And I eventually get a screen that tells me that it's now installing Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2.

The only problem is that what I'm trying to install is Windows XP Media Center, which is what I bought for the new computer. But these hard drives had been in the old computer and had gotten XP Pro SP2 installed on them earlier and it looks like it really wanted to install it again. Unfortunately, this meant that Microsoft would probably blow a raspberry in my direction once the whole process was completed.

So the hard disks are now being reformatted. Very slowly. We're up to 58% now.

This means that I had time to burn a flag.

You see, Bilbo had done a bad thing to our U.S. flag which we fly irregularly on holidays. And the U.S. Flag Code specifies that the right way to dispose of a flag that you are done with -- and trust me, we were done with this flag -- is to burn it in a respectful manner. We also had shed wax from the blessed candle that had been used for Katie's christening that also needed to be disposed of by burning.

So I got some very old gasoline from the garage that would probably have just killed the snowblower if I put it in there and took it out to the backyard, along with a lighter, some newspaper, and the blessed wax. I removed the ash catcher on the grill, the grill lid, and the grill surface, since I didn't want them getting involved in this mess, placed the flag in the grill with the wax, and doused both with the gasoline -- which promptly ran out through the bottom of the grill where I'd removed the ash catcher.

The last time I'd tried burning something with gasoline as a starter, it hadn't caught well. However, I had a hunch that this had been an outlier as events went. So I rolled up the sheet of newspaper to make a yard-long torch, lit one end with the lighter, and tossed it toward the grill as daisy_knotwise stood back and watched.

Fwoomph!

Ok, that caught nicely. The inside of the grill was a fire pit. So was the patio beneath it, where the spilled gasoline was blazing merrily away. This wouldn't have been a big problem (although I'm not sure what the long-term effect on the patio is going to be), except that one wheel of the grill melted, causing the grill to tilt alarmingly. But by that time the fire had pretty much burned out.

No trace of the flag remained, although the wax took a bit of time to finish burning out.

There's a brick holding up that very flat wheel and I've ordered a new grill of the same design. This one was over ten years old and was probably due for replacement, as it was getting fairly rusty. I'll salvage the replacement parts that I've added over time and use them with the new grill first.

In the meantime, I've put a bit of charcoal in the barbecue and we'll be grilling steaks for dinner soon. And no, I didn't use gasoline to light the charcoal...

Via Patterico, an article from the Guardian about how the sleeping pill, Ambien, seems to wake some severely brain damaged patients up from their permanent vegetative state.

My brother-in-law, jeff_duntemann wrote about problems with animating humans and the uncanny valley, where things that look almost human look creepy. This Wall Street Journal article explores a new technology that may -- or may not -- get animation of human beings to the non-creepy side of the valley.

Of course, you end up with creepy, green-glowing images during the process, but they go away before you're done.

According to this report the Marines are interested in developing a reusable spaceplane for delivering a strikeforce of troops anywhere in the world in a big hurry, getting them there in two hours or less, and then getting them out when the job is done.

Fortunately, this is not a link to the song. Instead, it presents a series of models that will give you an idea of how small the Earth is compared to other astronomical bodies.

By way of johnridley, this entertaining video that shows what happens when you add alkali metals to water. In the case of lithium, sodium, and potassium, not so much. Rubidium and cesium, on the other hand...

This is behind a cut tag, because I don't feel like posting even a neutered ad into the middle of everyone's friends list. However, if you click on the cut tag, you'll see an advertising GIF that I found while browsing around tonight where the logo in the bottom right corner clearly appears to be in 3D -- at least to me! -- as I look at it on my LCD monitors.
( That oddball GIF inside... )

Apparently, Fermilab has conducted an experiment that doesn't prove (because they only hit the 90% certainty level), but that strongly indicates that the B_s meson flips back and forth between matter and anti-matter 17 trillion times a second.

Now that really Hertz.

Much like daisy_knotwise (but slightly earlier in the day), I headed over to our local polling place to vote against the incumbent Cook County Board President (and to vote for Siobhan Murphy for judge as long as I was there :) ). They asked if I wanted to use the touch-screen voting system and I said, "Sure!"

It was reasonably easy to use, did not tell anyone else that I'd deliberately undervoted by skipping at least one race where I had no opinion whatsoever, and generated a paper copy of my ballot which it displayed to me and sealed away on a spool in its innards. I can see where some people might have had a problem reading the paper copy of the ballot -- the lighting was less than perfect -- but other than that, this system seems to meet the minimum requirements for an electronic voting system.

Not mine for a change, as it turns out. By way of scs_11, this video shows some rather impressive juggling set to the tune of a familiar Beatles song.

This website allows you to look up the number one song in America on any given day in history -- or at least any given day when Billboard was keeping track of the chart. And on the day that I was born, the number one song in America was:

Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley

Thank you. Thank you very much. (Apply accent as appropriate...)

In this Guardian article on dark matter, researchers at Cambridge University are quoted as discovering that dark matter comes in chunks at least 1000 light years across of at least 30 million times the mass of the Sun. (Or maybe 30,000 solar masses -- I may have misread the abbreviation.)

However, they also discovered that the Milky Way is the largest galaxy in the local group, not Andromeda. So, as it says above, we're number one!

Via Instapundit, the Stardust mission successfully landed the return capsule on Earth, carrying samples collected from the tail of Comet Wild 2. The previous Genesis mission had the return capsule crack open on landing, which limited the usefulness of the samples.

Ok, probably not, but Instapundit passes along this report about U.S. military research into a hyperdrive.

Hey, I always wanted a good look at Alpha Centauri...

I returned the USB to Serial adapter to CompUSA, since it didn't work with the software that I had. While I was there, I picked up a dual-head video card that would support my Samsung 213T monitor at 1600x1200 resolution via a digital connection. Wow, that's nice!

I also discovered that the reason that my Samsung 913T on the other head looked crappy was because the Gamma was set to a stupidly bright setting which might look ok in the store, but which washed out all of the blacks. That's also nice.

daisy_knotwise and I spent some time today walking around the Garden of the Gods. This is an absolutely gorgeous park with towers of red sandstone rock that have survived as the less durable stone weathered away around them. It's reminiscent of Arches National Park in many ways, except that the formations have taken a different form. I may post pictures later, but I need to get them downsized to something reasonable for Web.

But, wow, that's cool.

(Actually, it wasn't that cool. Someone scheduled relatively warm weather, so I spent most of the time walking around in a short-sleeve shirt and sneering at the folks in parkas. Only a few of those, though.)

So yesterday, Jeff, his friend Pete, and I headed out to Ultimate Electronics where Jeff bought the Samsung HLR6178W DLP HDTV. This is similar to the HLM507W that we bought three years ago, but bigger, newer, and smarter. Curiously enough, about the same price that we paid...
( And then the set arrived... )

daisy_knotwise and I have been creeping closer to assembling a Cubase-based 24-track mobile recorder. Today, I fell off the ledge.
( Buying binge... )
Meanwhile, I've been playing with the new DVR that Gretchen let me buy for myself as a Christmas present. Once I learn how to use it, it will be pretty cool. So far, I've actually gotten it to record shows, which is the main idea. :) The TV Guide On Screen feature seems to work ok, except there are a lot of missing listings. *sigh*

The problem was getting it to play a CD through our stereo. After messing with it a bit, I got it to work. Now, I just have to get it to work repeatably. And I think I'm going to have to buy a bunch of new cables to get everything rewired in the optimum fashion. We'll see.