Lunar Eclipse

At some point in the past week or two I seem to have burned out on blogs. Maybe it had something to do with the brilliant NetNewsWire, which, while helping me read more efficiently, also helps see how many sites I regularly visit (about 75 different sites averaging 350+ new postings a day) and how often those sites overlap or otherwise have nothing much to say. I wish NNW was more of an aggregator and less of a collector. I’d love to be able to quickly see when different sites linked to the same places.

Maybe it’s just because I’m busy, but I can’t bear to visit some of my old regulars. Seeing the same set of memes go around in circles like so much pseudo-intellectual spam, suffering through an increasing barrage of “Blogosphere trumps old media”, slogging through battles of political punditry and anti-punditry, pounding my head while a few otherwise interesting people worry desperately about the pointless act of choosing an ideological label, or any number of other new weblog cliches [like this one (a twofer)] has started to get depressing.

So I barely read anything last week, and from what I could glean by hopping around today, I don’t seem to have missed much. I need new souces.

Model airplane crosses Atlantic. It gets even better, The Spirit of Butts Farm was designed by Maynard Hill, a 77 year old retired engineer who is legally blind and partially deaf (photo is not Mr Hill.). The plane sent its location data via satellite to an AOL email address, weighed less than 11 pounds, and flew more than 1800 miles from Canada to Ireland in 38 hours using less than 1 gallon of fuel.

This story is from August, but is one that I find totally inspiring.

For Dave: Why Is New York City Called “The Big Apple”?

“Do something that makes you cry, that makes you weep with awe. There is a state of humility where you can feel something coming from a dimension outside oneself. That recognition, that sense of awe can make me cry. And then make that into something. That will be your thing.” — Peter Himmelman

I put together an animated map showing how the Southern California wildfires spread and how much burned this past week. Click for a larger map (294k Gif file).

The source maps are here: Rapid Response Fire Maps

This BBC guide to video aspect ratios is interesting, however despite extensive personal research on this subject, I’ve never encountered many their numbers anywhere else. Because of how much is now edited with desktop systems like Final Cut Pro, I think a great deal of this information should be noted and dismissed as archaic since these numbers will likely cause minor distortions with modern video tools.