Scuffulans hirsutus

The inhabitants of the moon never see an earthrise or earthset. However, spacecraft orbiting the moon, e.g., the Kaguya, do. Here is the earth rising and setting, as recorded in HD. (Via Aziz.)

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Speed Racer is probably worth skipping (though I might listen to Racer X). If you’re looking for an exciting race story, I recommend instead the Kuricorder Quartet’s take on “Highway Star”:

Here’s the quartet again with some tunes you might recognize.

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Understatement of the week:

Something tells me the commenter hasn’t met all that many nuns.

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Give peas a chance:

(Via Blackadder.)

Fun with juxtaposed pictures:

Bishop-elect James Conley. (Photo by Chris Riggs.)

If you want to identify the priests in a diocese most likely to be named bishops, see which ones attend bluegrass festivals. In years past, when I went to Winfield, I would find Fathers Paul Coakley and James Conley there, too. Coakley is now the bishop of the Salina, Kansas, diocese, and Conley has just been named auxiliary bishop of Denver.

Post title of the year.

And comment of the week:

When I was in law school I got involved in several long discussions about whether Zombies would count as persons under the 14th Amendment. And to think people called me weird.

(ibid. Via Eve Tushnet.)

Can’t remember your dative endings? Brush up with The Latin Declension Song.

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This week’s quotes:

Want a more polite internet? Bring back dueling!

Kansas is a heroic land well deserving of a mountain or two. 

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The McDonalds hamburger: death on a bun or balanced meal? (Via Steven.)

Via Jelly-Pinched Theatre:

1 - Go to wikipedia. Hit “random”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Random quotations:
http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use photoshop or similar to mix it all up.

The concept of the “lethal radius” (the radius of the circle within which the number of survivors of an event equals the number of fatalities without), useful in discussions of bombs and music technology, is also relevant to perfume science.

… as a Menger Sponge.

Also: mathematical origami.

Bonus link: More mathematical fun — Context-Free Art.

Here are a couple of New Yorker articles of interest concerning amnesia and music, and life as an Aspie. (The former link via Fred.)

This came up in an email exchange with a friend. I thought that other victims of photography might appreciate it:

The default mode in all digital cameras is “caricature.” The software automatically looks for slight defects in a person’s appearance and exaggerates them. If there are no defects, it will interpolate some. (Film cameras have a similar feature.) Unfortunately, camera manuals are minimal these days and seldom include directions for changing this default. In other words, nobody looks as bad as his picture.

I just a note from my brother:

I’m getting a laptop tomorrow. Any recommendations?

I don’t use laptops, and if I did, they would be Macs, which I don’t think he is interested in. Does anybody have suggestions for him?

This would explain a few things about me, I suppose. It has, in fact, occurred to me that I could possibly have been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome in my childhood, except that the term wasn’t coined until many years later in 1981. It might just have been Einstein syndrome, though.

(Via Ellyn.)

Celestia or Stellarium. (The Macintosh version of latter requres OS 10.4, so I haven’t been able to test it.)

(Via Mark Shea.)

• Hawthorn flowers stink.

* Maxell DVD-Rs are junk. Even if I burn them at half the rated speed, over a quarter of them end up as coasters.