Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Lightning Bugs
June 30, 2004
We went out tonight to Chuck E Cheese because I promised Abby that she would be allowed to climb around in tunnels at home after I wouldn't let her do so at the Spy Museum. When we came back, we hunted fireflies in the front yard.

It occurred to me with some new camera skills that I’m aquiring that I could capture the lightning bugs on “film”, and so I set up the camera on an empty Amazon box (where the heck is my tripod?) and pointed it toward the neighbor’s yard. The exposure time was 8-10 seconds and the F setting was 8, whatever that means.

Anyway, the streaks of yellow you see in the pictures are the bugs. I’m not sure to where the junebug is indiginous, but I suppose that they’re a pretty odd sight if you don’t have them locally. Basically, the bugs blink yellow light every few seconds. The bugs are very friendly, and you can get them to land on you quite easily, which is what Berta and Abby were doing behind me as the camera ticked through these photos.

No Blogathon This Year
June 29, 2004

I wasn’t paying attention and they cancelled the Blogathon this year. That really stinks. Just because the people that rent the domain name aren’t going to manage it, we all get the short shrift.

Anyway, I guess the folks over at Project-Blog are going to take over the operation. They won’t call it Blogathon, of course, but it’s basically the same thing. I can’t imagine it’ll be the same. Actually, the frequency of their ’thon is a little less– only every half hour instead of every quarter hour.

Cassini-Huygens
June 28, 2004

On Wednesday Casini-Huygens is going to pass through the rings of Saturn. I suppose that it will take some really cool pictures as it completes its one and only pass through the rings.

This project is pretty neat besides its passage through the rings. The probe is giong to orbit Saturn for a while, but it’s going to eject a lander that is going to check out Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. Titan looks to be a pretty interesting place. 1/4 the diameter of Earth, it has an atmosphere that goes out 600 miles (that’s 10 times the depth of Earth’s atmosphere) that has a lot of methane gas in it. Scientists say that there might even be liquid lakes of methane on Titan. Hopefully, it survives and sends back good pictures, even though the landing isn’t until November, I think.