And then there were ten

Mike Brown has discovered another planet out past Pluto. Unlike Quaoar and Sedna, there is little debate over whether 2003 UB313 is a planet or not, since it’s bigger than pluto, maybe up to twice as big. And 97 times as far from the sun as us, take plenty of thick clothing if you visit.

laser-assisted sight Another parallel discovery, more interesting to me, is 2003 EL61. This is about a third the mass of Pluto, or roughly the size of Charon – Pluto’s moon – but it has a moon of its own. It’s a tiny thing, roughly 1% of the parent’s mass, and orbits in about 45 days, and is entirely inconsistent with everything that we “know” (ie, knew) about Kuiper Belt Objects.

This is good, because it’s causing some head-scratching amongst the planetologists once more (“dang! we’re going to have to work for our living again”), which hopefully means that they’re learning something. The good (theory) is the enemy of the best.

What would it have been like if our Moon had had a moon? Think of the impact on astronomy and all of the sciences entailed thereby!

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new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

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