It’s the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. I’m sure everybody who was alive then remembers where they were that day.
I didn’t get to see it live on TV because I was in the middle of the Atlantic ocean on a ship at the time.
doug
There is an interesting, balanced take on Chrome OS – why it is relevant and why it is irrelevant at:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=21004&tag=nl.e550
I lean towards the skeptical points mentioned.
You know, as experience showed with the iPhone when it was first released, users just wanted to do more with the device than Apple first envisioned and thus were forced to create a SDK and allow apps to be created for it – not just the original “web apps.” People found the web apps to be too limiting.
I think that people who buy even portable netbooks will not be satisfied by being constrained by a browser and web apps and are inevitably going to want to be able to run apps directly on their devices. I don’t believe that the future is entirely in the cloud. I think it will be a mix.
I think Evernote (http://www.evernote.com) is a good vision of the future – a mix of a very cool local client that works on Mac, Windows, iPhone and other mobile devices, combined with a cloud version that lets you synchronize and also access your data in a very nice web interface. Plus you can choose which data to synchronize, which to publish to the outside world and which to keep local on your own device in 100% privacy. And it just has really cool features.
That model is the best of both worlds I think.
doug
Best and Worst Case Scenarios
Best Case: The Large Hadron Colliders’ ALICE experiment successfully creates quark-gluon plasma, a substance theorized to have existed just milliseconds after the Big Bang. By generating temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the sun, scientists hope to watch as this particle goo cools and expands into the particles that we know. That could help scientists answer why protons and neutrons weigh 100 times more than the quarks they’re made of.
Worst Case: Scientists inadvertently make a micro black hole, and the earth is quickly erased from existence. Scientists at CERN and elsewhere have ruled out the possibility that the LHC will create any kind of doomsday scenario. The black holes that the LHC could theoretically create don’t even have enough energy to light up a light bulb. On the other hand, the U.K.’s Astronomer Royal put the odds of destroying the world at 1 in 50 million (which puts it in the realm of possibilities but still not as likely as hitting the lottery).
doug
I remember the “It’s the Swinger! Polaroid Swinger!” commercial!
What to do at 2:16 am when jet-lagged? Browser comparisons!
I’ve been feeling that Firefox has been sort of sluggish lately. The latest when looking through Google images this evening and seeing a bunch of them fail to load in that browser.
I usually use Safari 3 as my “second browser” when testing. But decided to do the same image tests in Safari, and was surprised at how quickly the Google pages were loading by comparison.
Safari, in fact, seems to be snappier overall than Firefox.
Hunting around, I found this feature-by-feature comparison review I found interesting:
http://www.mostofmymac.com/articles/safari-3-faces-off-against-firefox/
I had forgotten about that text-field-resizing feature, mentioned in the article. I’m using it even as I post this message. Very useful!
I think I’m going to make Safari 3 my default browser for a while and see how it goes.
doug
A friend recently gave me a fascinating pocket watch that keeps Edo era time (Edo no Koku). Take a look at the photo. It is really amazingly intricate and complicated and interesting. Click on the thumbnail to see the full-size image!
The way time in the Edo era (1603 – 1868) was kept is so convoluted and bizarre, to our modern way of thinking, it took me a couple of days just to figure it out.
Take a look at the attached photo and try to follow along and let’s keep Edo time together!
First, for convenience, the watch also keeps modern time, which was introduced in Japan in Meiji 5 (1872).
The inner ring of numbers is a 24 hour modern era clock number 1 through 12 in kanji, and then 1 through 12 again. The left hand side is AM and the right-hand side is PM. The long hand in the photo shows just after 6 am (just past the 5 and 6 border).
The smaller thick hand is the minute hand and it is just a standard reading of 60 minutes around the clock – each small black circle marks off 15 minutes, each dark black tick mark is 5 minutes and the light tick marks are 1 minute each. The thin hand is the second hand.
The next circle out is a ring showing the juunishi (the 12 characters of the oriental zodiac) and for each character there is a number, also in kanji.
This is where is gets interesting.
The way time was kept in the Edo era was that the day was divided into daylight and nighttime and the hours were counted from dawn (yoake) and then from sunset (higure).
The definition of dawn was “from when the stars faded” and the definition of sunset was “from when the stars appeared”.
Day and night were divided into 6 intervals, or hours, each.
It is an oversimplification, as some do, to say that because we have 24 hours and in Edo they had 12 hours that each Edo era hour was about 2 of our current hours. That is oversimplified because, of course, daylight and nighttime depend on the season. So the length of the hours change depending on the season and whether it is daytime or nighttime.
This is called futeijihou in Japanese. futei means “non-fixed” and jihou means “time method”.
The fu in futei is an “opposite” or “negation”, so modern time is called teijihou, or the “fixed time method”.
In the photo, daylight hours are in white and nighttime hours are in black.
Because the amount of daylight, and thus the length of the hours themeselves, changes with the seasons, the outer ring must actually be replaced on the 7th day of each month. The watch comes with a set of 12 replacement rings for this purpose.
And now for some more fun!
The way the hours themselves are counted is even stranger.
Let’s start around the clock, from the first daylight hour, on the left. The big character shown half in black and white on the left side of the outer-most ring is “u”, which is rabbit in old kanji.
So this hour is called u no koku – hour of the rabbit. koku is a word for time. The word “no” is just a particle, like the possessive apostrophe in English. Thus u no koku is rabbit’s hour, or hour of the rabbit.
The number below the u chacter is the kanji for the number 6. The 6 represents 6 bells that a shrine might chime to mark the hour.
So the first hour of daylight is called either u no koku (hour of the rabbit) or yoake mutsu (number 6 since dawn, or 6 bells from dawn, or just “dawn 6″). The word yoake, remember, means “dawn” (literally “day opening”) and the word mutsu is the ordinal number 6 (the counting number without a counter word).
So dawn, this time of year, occurs about half way in the middle of yoake mutsu, the hour of the rabbit. Looking at the inner modern clock, you can see this is about 4:45 am or so, which is correct.
(The sunrise and sunset times are in Hyogo prefecture standard.)
Is everybody still with me? If so…
The next hour after u no koku is tatsu no koku – the hour of the dragon.
Since u no koku was yoake mutsu – dawn 6, tatsu no koku is …. yoake itsutu – dawn 5!
Yes, that is right. Instead of going up, the next hour goes down!
The next hour is mi no koku – hour of the snake. Numerically it is yoake yotsu, or dawn 4, meaning 4 bells would be chimed to mark the hour.
And here it gets weird again! The next outermost character, at the top of the clock, is the character for horse – uma. So it is uma no koku, hour of the hourse. It is yoake kokonotsu which means….. Dawn 9. Yes, nine. Not 3. There is no 3.
In other words, the hours start at dawn and the daytime hours are 6, 5, 4 then 9, 8, 7.
Then at night – higure (sunset) – they start counting from 6 again! Don’t you just love it!
You can see on the watch that higure (sunset) is on the right side, down from the horizontal – where white turns to black again. That outermost character is tori, meaning bird. So sunset occurs during the hour of the bird, higure mutsu (sunset 6). Looking at the inner ring, day becomes night around 6:30 pm in modern time, which is correct for this time of year (it gets darker earlier here than in the U.S.).
The complete list of times, starting from dawn and working around are:
* yoake mutsu (dawn 6), u no koku (hour of the rabbit)
* yoake itsutsu (dawn 5), tatsu no koku (hour of the dragon)
* yoake yotsu (dawn 4), mi no koku (hour of the snake)
* yoake kokonotsu (dawn 9), uma no koku (hour of the horse)
By the by, the kanji in uma no koku (hour of the horse) is the 2nd kanji used in syougo – the kanji for noon. Noon occurs in the hour of the horse, which is half-way in the middle of the daylight hours.
Continuing…
* yoake yatsu (dawn 8), hitsuji no koku (hour of the sheep)
Another aside: For those of you who like Japanese snacks, you will know these are called “oyatsu”. Many Japanese people even do not realize that the word oyatsu comes from this Edo era time of the day – about 3 pm in the middle of yoake yatsu – when it is common to have tea-time and snacks.
Continuing…
* yoake nanatsu (dawn 7), saru no koku (hour of the monkey)
The next hour marks the end of daytime and the beginning of the hours after sunset (higure, literally “the coming to the of the day”), and the counting starts over with 6:
* higure mutsu (sunset 6), tori no koku (hour of the bird)
* higure itsutsu (sunset 5), inu no koku (hour of the dog)
* higure yotsu (sunset 4), i no koku (hour of the boar)
* higure kokonotsu (sunset 9), ne no koku (hour of the rat)
* higure yatsu (sunset 8), ushi no koku (hour of the ox)
* higure nanatsu (sunset 7), tora no koku (hour of the tiger)
Then it starts over again with yoake mutsu – dawn 6, which is, as you know by now, u no koku – hour of the rabbit.
Cool huh!
doug
