Nerdliness

Quietly, in the bottom of the sidebar to the left, is a widget that displays the times of today’s solar events. An ephemeris is a tool used by navigators and astronomers to predict celestial events, like eclipses, moon rise, occultations (planets or stars crossing paths) and the like.

My widget (home grown – written in PHP scripting language) accurately predicts solar events at the longitude and latitude for Torrance, CA, but will be approximately correct anywhere within a fifty mile radius.

I’m working on a version of this where you can put in your zip code or longitude and latitude to get your local solar ephemerides. Still in work, but possibly will materialize soon.

A couple of years ago, Mozilla had a contest to produce a video promoting the Firefox® web browser. Without taking sides in the debate about whose browser is better, I have to say that this one entry was not only quite imaginative, but very humorous.

I use both Firefox and Internet Explorer at work. At home, Verna uses Explorer and I use Firefox unless I’m testing browser compatibility with one of the websites. I have used Netscape and Opera in the past as well, and each has it’s strong and weak points. It’s more a matter of preference, I suppose, and there are no right or wrong answers.

You can see the original video here and learn about the contest they had.

People who are familiar with Windows® operating systems will recognize this “blue screen of death.” I have seen it from time to time when using both home and work computers that both use the Windows OS. What threw me was this one that popped up on – wait for it – the gas pump at a Lomita (CA) Mobil station. It pumped out $2.16 worth of regular gasoline when it did this. I had to move to another pump where I completed my fill-up.

When I checked the credit card charges later in the week, I saw that I got charged the $2.16 for the aborted sale. Weird.

Click for a bigger view.

If you ever took a class in practical physics that included a lab, then you remember those little diffraction gratings that could be used as a substitute for a prism to observe the spectrum of light. The gratings exhibited the properties of prisms, but without the bulk. If you did not happen to have a physics lab, then you may remember those flat Fresnel (pronounced ‘freh-nel’) fish-eye lenses that were popular in the back windows of vans and motor homes. Again, the properties of a larger, bulkier lens made in a compact format.

Image: (L. Koechlin et al/OMP) – a metallic prototype of a diffraction lens – click on the image for a larger view.

Now, it appears that a diffraction grating is being considered as a lightweight, and even more accurate, optical device for focusing light without the usual mirrors and lenses. That will be a boon for the future of space and even terrestrial telescopes.

This excerpt from New Scientist explains how that is possible.

Continue reading…