Hubble's Next Discovery - YOU Decide!

How would you like to participate in astronomy?  Surely, you’ve heard of the Hubble telescope.  It’s the space telescope that has brought us amazing images of objects in our solar system and in deep space.  Amazing pictures like these:

 

And as hard as it is to pick just one, here is one of my all time favourite Hubble pictures:

If you'd like to pick your own favourite, you can peruse Hubble pictures to your heart’s content here.

This is the International Year of Astronomy - pretty awesome, huh?  Who knew there was an International Year of Astronomy?  Well, now you do.  Sometime soon I'll also be telling you about an upcoming International Year of Chemistry!  Yes, that's right - International Year of Chemistry!  Doesn't get any better than that - except that we have to wait until 2011 to celebrate.  Anyway, this year we've got Astronomy.

To celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, NASA is running an online poll called “Hubble’s Next Discovery – You Decide”.  They are giving the public a chance to vote on what you want Hubble to look at next.  You can help vote on what the next amazing image that Hubble releases to the public will be.  And if just participating wasn’t cool enough, voters will be entered into a random drawing and 100 people will receive a copy of the image that Hubble collects.  Now wouldn’t that be a lovely addition to any décor?

So get on the web site and vote.  (Sorry for the late notice but you have to vote by Sunday.)  

The Golden Dauber

A few times a year we go to a fundraising BINGO for the CT Gay Men's Chorus.  It's a fun night to hang out with friends.  What always gets me about the evening is that it's such an interesting mix of people in attendance.  It's not just gay men and their friends - there's a lot of the people who you would expect to see at any church basement BINGO game.  It's a riot to attend and interesting to see the crowd.

There's always a theme to the evening and some people dress up in costume (this past weekend was Pajama Party BINGO so some people wore pajamas).  A hilarious "Joan Crawford" calls the numbers with her "kids" and she entertains with some colourful jokes.  In addition to the actual BINGO game prizes, there are winners throughout the evening for the door prize raffle.  Some of the prizes are great - restaurant and spa gift certificates, theatre tickets, merchandise - all donated by local businesses.  They also do some fun, silly prizes through the evening, like the prize of a "nice, hard cock" and then they bring out a small statue of a rooster.

The most coveted prize is the Golden Dauber which I was fortunate enough to have won back in November.

I had not mentioned this before - didn't want to brag, or anything - but I bring it up now because the most recent winner from this past Saturday does deserve mention.  Here she is with her prize.  Her name is Betty.

When she stood up to accept her prize, the place erupted in laughter to see cute little Betty tottering up to accept her prize.  People started applauding and she actually got a standing ovation.  It was hilarious!

Happy Pancake Day!

You may know this as Mardi Gras, or Shrove Tuesday, or the start of Lent, but when I was growing up it was Pancake Day in our house.  It's a tradition we followed in Nova Scotia that apparently came from the UK and stems from trying to use up the eggs and fat in a household before the start of Lent.  We never really observed Lent, but we kept up with the tradition of Pancake Day by having pancakes for dinner.  Perhaps it was because I had three brothers and sisters and some flour, eggs, milk and a little fat goes a long way to feed a big family.  We didn't just have pancakes - actually, now that I think about it, sometimes I think it was just pancakes. Hey, it was a big family.

I do love pancakes so I try to continue the tradition.  Tonight I whipped some up and made a couple of special pancakes.  Here's a T for Todd:

I know - it's a little rough, but the thought is there.

One thing we loved as kids - and was a pretty easy thing for Mom to do to humour us - was the Mickey Mouse pancake:

See it?  It's a Mickey Mouse pancake!  Or a bear pancake, or a googly-eyed frog pancake or three pancakes that just ran together.  Again, the thought is there.

I actually don't recall if Mom did this or not but one other tradition people used to do was put coins in the pancakes for kids to find.  Looking back on that now it just makes me think, "Mothers put small choke-sized objects into food items?!"  If someone did that now, Child Protection Services would take the kids out of the home.  Seriously though, back then if we thought money was in those pancakes the tiniest speck of non-pancake would not escape our attention.  

But still...

This is why we're doomed...

I watched the movie Idiocracy last night. It was pretty forgettable, but the intro was pretty funny. Pretty funny because it's true.

glumbert - Intro to Idiocracy

Happy President's Day!

I have to say that it's awfully nice to have a President's Day on which we aren't embarrassed by the man in the office.  Yeah, yeah, I know it's too early to say that Obama is the best thing since sliced bread, but he'll have to screw up pretty bad to be worse than George W.  Anyway, I have a couple of Presidential tributes to share.

Presidential Tribute I

On my usual commute, I pass through Newtown on I84.  Between the overpasses of Currituck Rd. and Parmalee Hill Rd. you can see the following: 

(I hope you can tell that it's Obama in Christmas lights and in the O you can see a peace sign.  I would have loved a better picture but it was tough - I had to use a lot of zoom from across the highway.)

I should say that you have been able to see this display because while the lights had been up for a couple of months, I haven't seen them since the start of this month.  I hope the lights aren't down for good because I loved seeing them every evening.  They are probably about ten feet tall and in someone's back yard facing the highway so they were clearly for the benefit of drivers on the highway.  I certainly appreciated them.  Maybe they were up just for the election and Christmas.  I'm definitely all for taking your Christmas lights down within a reasonable time after the actual holiday but these could have stayed up all year and I wouldn't have minded.

Presidential Tribute II

From a ten-foot-tall tribute to a microscopic tribute.  Scientists (of course, it's science - I have to sneak it in wherever I can!) - anyway, scientists have created the tiniest presidential portraits ever.  Each Obama in the pictures below is smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.  They're Nanobamas - things this small are referred to as "nano" scale so "nano" plus "Obama" becomes "Nanobama".  Hey, maybe it's corny but the creators are scientists not marketing experts.  As you may have guessed by now, we're a pretty corny bunch.

I won't bore you with the details about the photolithography process and the carbon nanotubes, polymers, silicone wafers used in the creation of Nanobamas - you can get that info at the Nanobama web site.  But I will show you my favourite couple of pictures and if you're really interested you can find more pics here.

How cool is science?  I say, "Way cool."

Happy President's Day!!