In the ’90s, the nerds on the internets were all concerned about the automated sniffing of email text being carried out by Echelon, the NSA’s signals intelligence collection and analysis network. Many people started adding terms to email footers that were believed to trigger Echelon. There were Echelon Days identified for this effort. People wrote scripts that appended trigger words to every email they sent.
Weatherspark is an impressive collection of weather data, graphs, and tools.
WeatherSpark is a new type of weather website, with interactive weather graphs that allow you to pan and zoom through the entire history of any weather station on earth.
Get multiple forecasts for the current location, overlaid on records and averages to put it all in context.
Here's the weather for NYC. (via @bantic)
Tags: infoviz weatherAnd in celebration, this is my new favorite fact about pi: we have calculated pi out to over 6.4 billion digits but only 39 of them are needed to calculate the circumference of a circle as big as the universe "with a precision comparable to the radius of a hydrogen atom". (via @santheo)
Tags: mathematics pi
In a rare escape from workville, the fam lunches at Arthur Bryant's in Kansas City. If I could consistently make ribs like these, I'd be a very happier man.
@BadAstronomer is sharing the exciting news that someone has taken the first picture from Earth of an astronaut on a spacewalk from a Shuttle. Is this the first such picture, internationally? Or is it just the first such picture in America?
Check out the pics at the photographer's web page. They are well annotated and exciting.
Taking ground-based photographs of satellites and space vehicles is a great project for young people interested in image processing and space. In this case, the result is spectacular, but to get a photo of anything human-made (e.g., the ISS) would be exciting for young and old, alike.
And there really IS a wikipedia page for Common Misperceptions.
I'm going to read them to my daughters tonight, in fact.
