Nasa comes through with some more great pictures. Here's a giant sandstorm off the north African coast:



And here's a beauty (taken from the ground) of the Sombrero Galaxy:



As usual, these pictures are shamelessly stolen from one of my favorite sites: BBC News Sci/Tech. I guess being able to do this sort of thing is one of the advantages of having a low traffic site.

Put yourself in the hands of the professionals.

now the NSA is getting grief from Europe in re the use of the Echelon network to benefit US companies abroad...

speaking of interdimensional orgiastic effects, check out this cruel site of the day -- baiting.org -- and rate your favorite sexchat pranksters.

"The Archangel Fairy Queen is directing Gnomes - Nursery rhyme creatures are darting everywhere... giggling. Then as the BIG BEN UNIVERSAL CLOCK strikes MID NIGHT, the curtain rises in the CRYSTAL AMPHITHEATRE OF NUIT. Poleshift! The Pumpkin flips to the Golden Coach and the "Golden Coach" into the Pumpkin. Andre calls these fairy creatures 0's and 1's. A jigsaw bunch of male digits with female holes to put them in. Pierre calls it the Yin Yang Era: Either way the interdimensional ORGIASTIC EFFECT is synchronous at 777." I didn't quite read enough to tell you when, exactly, 777 will be upon us, but according to the Quarkmaster of the Galactic Federation of Light Forces, we are en route. Don't say you weren't warned. (Plus, if you hurry, you can order the Cosmic Cube Directory and Applied Metaphysics Solution Sheet from Star Base One for US$25.)

Here's a good one for your lunar and astronomical needs.

Here's a great resource from the helpful folks at the Central Intelligence Agency. Everything you could want to know about every country in the world. (Nice maps too.) Where else could you find out that the highest point on Europa Island is an unnamed peak 24m above sealevel? Good stuff.

Yes, we were down for about an hour today (just past noon.) All services were down (http, mail, telnet) but they got things restored fairly promptly. I won't care if the outages happen at the rate we've experienced (1 hour every few months.) Also, unrelated (honest!), my page is coming back. Not quite done yet with all the internals, but I've started blogging anyway. Check in on the pre-release if you want at www.digitalmediatree.com/jim/newjim.php3. And, oh yeah: GO STEVE!

THE BATTLE IS DNA TRYING TO FIGURE IT'S ELF OUT

Actual photographs of sprites and elves. Not bad quality either considering what tricky subjects they are.

For you history and social science buffs, here is Prof. Dan Graff's home page Nothing but links to all catagories. Lots of good stuff there.

We made it back from disinfo.con. Incredibly long day. Lots of amazing moments surrounded by just plain lots of moments. Highlights for me were the time machine diagrams/alchemical drawings of Paul Lafolley. I had never heard of this guy before, and he blew me away. I'll try to dig up some links. Also notable was Genesis P. Orridge who I had never heard speak before. He was trying to convince us we are all in a battle with DNA. I hadn't ever thought of it that way, but he might be right. Very impressive speaker. Bob Wilson capped the evening with his usual illuminated remarks. Unfortunately we missed RU Sirius, so I can't report on my favorite Presidential candidiate. Oh well. Maybe two hundred people during the day, maybe four (five?) hundred at the end (?) Very glad to have gone, and very glad it's over. Anyone else?

thanks DRW and you might have seen that they have "proff" that the Romans were in mexico--which we knew all along due to the ships found of Brazil (that the goverment {happy to be Portugese} destroyed)--ref the mad hatter

How about this picture. Pretty incredible assuming it's not photoshoped. Here is the whole BBC article. Apparently this picture won first prize in the Science and Technology Singles category of the World Press Photo 2000 contest. It shows an F/18 hornet at the moment of breaking the sound barrier.

Holy shit, did any one else catch the database going down? I almost had a heart attack. It was only down for about 2 minutes (that I saw at least, but I think that's right) but it sure puts a crimp in your dynamic site to not be able to get the data out of the base. Lucky for us, this hosting company seems to be ON THE BALL. Everything is back, and everything appears fine. Guess I better learn some more about that back-up function!

Nice day for dratfink (and it's not even 11:30.) I checked out that trailervision link (couldn't resist the upgraded rating it got) but alas my poor machine is a little too slow. I waited for about 20% of ModeMan to download, so I got to see that much at least. Very funny. I've thought before that movie trailers are really the heart of movie making. Aren't most movies way too long? It's a sort of Borgesian take on making art ("Why would I take 400 pages to say what I can say in 3?") I usually hate trailers because they give away the whole story, but if you turn that around and only give me the trailer - well, we might have something there. (Plus, if I was going to watch a movie on the net, say, at work, I certainly wouldn't want it to be 3 hours long. A minute and a half seems about right.) Thanks Dave.

anybody thinking about going to disinfo.con? its coming up fast and tickets are mooving. could be fun to do some coverage for blogdom. but it could be tres shwag for the 99 clams entrance fee. damn, i thought we had some pull in this burg. wheres the damn plus one waiting at the door.

harrumph is a cute little blog. check there to find out what kind of tree you are. as for me, im a fig(ures).

(Where's that confounded bridge?)

yummy

tried two new soy cheese's one was not so good, cheddar. linda said it was more like american(t). the mozzerella is nice (making pizz-soy now). the smoked gouda is still the best. sort of planing our hopeful May vacation somewhere (looks like mexico as we can use FFM's).

I opted out of doubleclick's global internet ad tracking experience. Maybe you want to too.

Hey alex, what's up with this:World's smelliest flower blooms. I can't believe NYC doesn't have a smellier flower.

I put the possibility of scroll bars back on the left hand side of these pages. Ideally I'd like to have them not appear, but now there are some screens that have too much info, so in some cases they are needed. If I open my screen to the maximum I can (on this 15 inch monitor at 832x624 in Navigator) then I don't get them. How about in IE? On a laptop?

90% done with the proof of concept for building free standing html pages. Very messy, but it's mostly working. I'll put it up tomorrow (I'm sure you're all dying to see it.)