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I got some money for Christmas, and naturally my geek-girl thoughts turned to software. I can’t quite recall how I came across it, but I found DesktopEarth Pro, and I was immediately blown away by it. I tried it out for a couple of days, then blew some of my Christmas money on it—money well spent, I think. At its most basic level, it’s a very fancy screen saver, which allows you to display an image of the earth, overlaid with updated images of the real cloud pattern, and the pattern of night and day across the globe. You can see my desktop above, with the elevation map, and showing the real cloud cover and circadian period as of about 1700h GMT today. Of course, you really need a more or less full-time broadband connection to make the best use of this application.

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After days of rain, it’s really nice to see the sun and some blue sky. It makes the stone look really warm and golden. After what must be years of walking past this Chapel, I noticed St. George slaying the dragon on top of it. It’s amazing what a bit of sun can do.

This album was a Christmas present from my brother, and came with the added bonus of a DVD pairing every song on the album with footage of Elbow playing live or fooling about in the studio, which was surprisingly interesting as these kinds of extras go. I’ve got—and love to bits—another of their albums, “Asleep in the Back”, so I was really looking forward to hearing this one.

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I had another go at a comments feed which would be a complete one—i.e. it would show the full post and also each of the comments, with one channel for the whole blog, and each entry and its associated comments forming an item within that feed. I struggled to produce something myself, but couldn’t produce something that actually worked.

After a Google session, I found this lovely template on etc, tried it out, and it works just as I had hoped it would.

So, I’ve provided the new feed here, or you can click on the ‘RSS Post+Com’ button in the sidebar. You don’t need to subscribe to both the standard RSS 0.91 feed and this new one—just choose one depending on whether you want comments or not. I’ve left the individual entry feeds too (at least for now)—never let it be said that I don’t offer choice!

I’ve been thinking about adding a feed for comments for some time, but some gentle prompting by djn1, and the example of his own feed encouraged me to try and find a solution. If you comment on an entry, it’s nice to know when someone replies, without having to remember to check back with the page.

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I know that many other people have linked to this polite but heartfelt rant about the new US visitor registration programme—it articulates everything that I’ve been fuming about over the last few days. If you want a slightly less polite but no less heartfelt (and very funny) rant, then head over to d4d.

What with ‘sky marshals’, no loitering near the toilets on long haul flights, and now needing to be fingerprinted or photographed when you enter the country—well, hands up who feels like visiting to the US now? I wouldn’t mind if it was actually going to achieve anything, but I think that it’s all pointlessness masquerading as actually doing something. The US Government seems to be a bit out of control.

Someone ought to point out to Bush that plenty of other countries have coped with high levels of terrorism for years (including the UK, of course, while US citizens blithely funded NORAID) without turning the country into an impregnable fortress.

We had much amusement in the office today over a brilliant ‘Bridget Jones’ pastiche by Kat Arney. I was supposed to be job-hunting on Nextwave, and looking for tips to make myself utterly irresistible to potential employers. Instead, I spent the next 20 minutes laughing my head off, and then forced my Postgrads to stop work too while I impressed on them how hilarious it was.

This passage in particular struck a chord:

Search the Internet for exciting conferences in exotic locations. Very enthusiastic about the prospect of a meeting in Honolulu when I remember that I have (a) no travel money left and (b) no results. My boss points out that I went to a very interesting conference last year in Dorset. Argue back that the windswept vistas of the South Coast are no match for the sun-kissed beaches of Hawaii. She retorts that I should be interested only in the quality of the science and anyway, the funding body thinks that £46 for a return train fare is more than enough to spend on me.

And this…

Number of tasks on to-do list as of Monday morning: 36 Number of tasks on to-do list as of Friday evening: 27 Distance by which frontiers of science have been pushed back this week: 0.73 mm

It might only be funny if you’re a scientist, but there’s probably something that most people can identify with.

I was hoping to be watching Steve Jobs’ keynote from Macworld San Francisco around now, but I’m getting an ‘insufficient bandwidth’ error message on the stream. Grrr. So I’ll talk about OmniWeb 5 instead.

I’m a big fan of OmniWeb applications. Thanks to their rather generous academic pricing, I’m the proud owner of OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle Pro. OmniGraffle—in particular—is beautifully designed, with a lot of very innovative touches. I even use it as a simple page layout program, and to produce the posters and catalogues for Mr. Bsag’s art exhibitions. However, I didn’t fall for OmniWeb in the same way.

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I really love this kind of thing, but I can’t quite explain why. This mechanical calculator was invented by Curt Herzstark—an Austrian Jew—while he was being held in Buchenwald concentration camp during the Second World War. I played with the simulator for ages, but I still can’t quite figure out how you would actually use it to calculate things. It’s like a slide rule; my Dad used one for years before the advent of affordable electronic calculators, but to me, it’s tantamount to magic.

I’d love to have a go on a real Curta calculator though—it looks as if it has just the right amount of clicking, rattling, twirling things to play with.

[via BoingBoing]

On our visit to Birmingham this weekend, we popped into the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery to see the Turner exhibition. This was excellent, and all the better for the fact that we got in free as it was only 40 minutes from closing time. Mmm—free art…

The Turner paintings were wonderful, but what really caught my attention on the way in was what is rather charmingly called a ‘sticking-out’ picture by Patrick Hughes. Imagine three tetrahedrons stuck inside a picture frame so that they are sticking out. Now cut off the ends of the tetrahedrons, and paint all the surfaces with a depiction of corridors in an art gallery, with paintings on the wall. When you come up to the painting, you have a very strong visual illusion that the tetrahedrons are sticking into the painting, and that the whole thing is three dimensional. As you move around, you see further into the corridors, and see more or less of the paintings. It’s like walking around a tiny gallery, and it’s somewhat spooky.

When I first saw it, it couldn’t for the life of me figure out how it was done. I stood there—like a kid delighted by a magic trick—trying to see how it worked, and bobbing around to make the image move. It wasn’t until I moved close to the painting and looked at it from the side that I saw the ‘sticking-out’ bits. Then the illusion popped in and out as my brain argued with itself about whether the image was ‘sticking-out’ or ‘sticking-in’. I wouldn’t suggest viewing it with a hangover, though.

I’ve always thought that New Year is an odd time. On the one hand, it can be a exciting time of new beginnings, but on the other it can—as Lyle points out—be a very disappointing time, and something of an anti-climax. I normally quite like New Year (though I’m not one for a big celebration), but this year I look on the coming year with a certain amount of trepidation. For the first time in a long while, I don’t have a full-time job (and nor does Mr. Bsag), and there doesn’t seem to be any great prospect of one. Of course, something could turn up at any moment (or so my inner optimist tells me), but it’s slightly scary nonetheless.

The weather doesn’t help much; yesterday it was cold, damp and very grey, with a flat pall hanging over everything. I decided that a short walk might cheer me up a bit, and I took my camera along to give some sort of purpose to my ramble. At first it wasn’t promising—the light was so flat and deadening. But as the photographer Brooks Jensen says, “There is no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ photographic light. There is just light.” Gradually, I noticed that the light was making my eyes hungry for colour. They sought out every scrap of green or yellow or red, and intensified the saturation before devouring it as if I was starving. Greens seemed emerald, yellow leaves were gold, and red and blue seared my retinas. The more I looked, the more colour I saw. The wet beech leaves were the colour and texture of polished leather, and even the mud seemed rich.

I also started to notice other things, seemingly disregarded or forgotten by other people. There was half a dumbbell, rusting gently by the side of the road; a silver hubcap with a covering of leaves, as if it was being solemnly buried; bright firework casings and a pencil with cartoon rabbits on it. I decided that my photographic theme for the day would be disregarded things¹â€”you can see the results of the best images here.

You may not find anything beautiful or interesting in the images—if so, I haven’t managed to get the moment across adequately, but perhaps you had to be there. Every time I saw something small and new I felt as if I was keeping a secret.

¹ I realise that this makes me sound a bit like a Womble, but that’s not such a bad thing. “Making good use of the things that we find/Things that the everyday folks leave behind”