Yesterday morning Amy got up pretty late.  Which means I got up really late.  And neither of us really had time to make coffee.  So I got out the instant coffee, because it's not actually possible for me to remember where I work without at least one cup of coffee.

Sadly, we were out of teaspoons, so I grabbed a tablespoon.  This mistake came into clear focus about an hour later, when I was having one of those so-awake-I-can-feel/hear-my-heart-beating experiences, and I realized that I had put a tablespoon of instant coffee in my cup, not the teaspoon called for in the directions.  And it was a heaping tablespoon at that.  That's like what, 4-6 cups of coffee in one?  (And strangely I did not notice anything funny about the coffee at the time.)

So, the tragedy: I had so much caffeine in my system that when I got to work I didn't want any real coffee, even though we have an infinite supply of free Peet's coffee at work.

(And I had a terrible headache yesterday afternoon too, which at the time seemed very mysterious to me.)

Inspired by the Google Earth Game group on Flickr, and just because I wondered if I could find where I was when I took this picture from an airplane:



There's something strange happening at the bottom of the Google Earth image, in part because of some strange fisheye like image mapping, and in part because all their image data is from above.

I didn't really think American chocolate could get any worse, but I was wrong:

FDA Considers Redefining Chocolate

"The US Food and Drug Administration is considering redefining 'chocolate' to allow substitution of vegetable oil ($0.70/lb.) for cocoa butter ($2.30/lb.), and whey protein for dry whole milk."

I've been scanning a lot of old old film recently. This is one of my favorites:



I have a great print of this, but the negative has deteriorated a lot in the 16 years since I took it, and the scanner's IR scratch and defect removal doesn't work on films with silver in them (like most B&W films).

For more, see my flickr page, which is the reason I've neglected Multiply so badly in recent times.

I was feeling bad about neglecting Multiply, and I've been slowly scanning a lot of old slides and photos, mostly of southwestern US rock art. So I thought I'd add some here. I spent about an hour picking the best of those, uploading them, adding descriptions, etc. Only when I added it, all the titles and descriptions vanished. And no matter what I did it would never post, it was stuck as a draft. Eventually I tried deleting it and reposting it, but that didn't work either. Argh.

So for now at least I give up. I've posted all those same photos on my Flickr page, so you can go check them out there instead. Stop by and leave a note if you do. Thanks.

From Wikipedia:More Best of BJAODN , a list of some of the best nonsense deleted from Wikipedia:

List of unpopulated professions

Astrolinguist
Biolinguist
Cryptoapologist
Ecomortician
Ethnochemical engineer
Forensic paleontologist
Geosurgeon
Hydroepistemologist
Lunar proctologist
Marine astronomer
Microethnologist
Neurothespian
Pediatric gerontologist
Photobiologist
Psychospectroscoper
Entomusicologist

I'm just curious if this has happened to anyone else here: at some point in my early days on Multiply I became my own contact. I don't know how this happened. I've listed myself as "Roommate, Colleague and Other Relative" since there is no "me" setting to describe a relationship. And of course I had to answer the message from myself approving those changes in relationship to myself. This takes talking to yourself to a whole new level.

After a lunch of complaining about, well, most of what we actually do for a living, a coworker (Richard) suggested a new kind of programming class that should be taught, and we've been developing the idea.

Every week, the problem set would be badly written and buggy code in some new language, different from last week, and probably one you don't know.  (There would be a poll at the beginning to determine and avoid languages people in the class already know.  Tcl and Ruby should be safe.  Probably Fortran too.)  And your homework is to make the code work.

We all want to teach this class now.  Rollin suggests the syllabus would start "Let's face it . . ."

It annoys me when I see something exciting in astronomy or physics, only then to see the press catch wind of it and try to report it without any idea of what they are reporting.  GRB050509b was such a case.  If you read the first round of press reports you will see all kinds of confused reports about astronomers having discovered a black hole or something.

So I was happy to see NASA actually put out a press release that explains it fairly well without the usual does of hyperbole that they often inject.  (NASA press releases are often part of the cause of the bad reporting!)  You can read it here:

NASA Scientists Catch Unique Gamma-Ray Burst

In short, what's exciting about this burst?  A satellite (Swift) saw a short (less than 2 second) burst of gamma rays and x-rays (the x-rays lasted longer), and managed to figure out where it came from (a particular galaxy) in time for people to point telescopes at it.  Previous satellites have detected these short bursts but could not narrow down where they came from in time for anyone to look.  Longer bursts are widely thought to be a special kind of supernova (that collapses into a black hole), but the shorter bursts have different energies and are, well, a lot shorter, and could be something different.  With the Swift satellite actually telling us where to look, we might be able to figure this out.