to provide procrastination tools. This one is called Planarity. No files to download, it just plays on the web. You have to arrange the vertices of some crazy set of lines so that none of the lines overlap. A friend of mine from gburg pointed me to it.
I dunno who else is interested (and apologies to those who read this again in your e-mail), but there’s the makings of a good concert to be held this Saturday (July 30) at 3 PM in the BEMA (the big outdoor ampitheatre-like space just over the hill behind the observatory).
Yerba Buena will be performing, and I aim to go. Anyone else interested?
Let me know soon, ’cause I’ll probably grab some tickets by Wednesday.
apparently the weather’s looking worse than just an inconvenience?
as mentioned at tea, the bending the rules bit would scare me. (selfishly, i’m kinda glad i don’t know any of this launch group.)
it’s lame to just link-post, esp from /. but oh well, it’s well said so that’s what i’ll do.
Very soon, NASA will be dismantling and scrapping its only computer left which is able to access and process the data on its ancient 7- and 9-track magnetic tapes. “Who cares”, you say? Well, the Planetary Society for one and they’re hoping you might care as well. The data held on these (few hundred) tapes is no ordinary forgettable data, it is the complete archive of the first 15 years of all the data returned to Earth by the Pioneer spacecraft which were sent into interstellar space. This additional and thus far unexamined data (the data after 1988 is available and has already been examined) may hold the key to solving what is considered one of the top problems in physics today, the so called Pioneer anomaly, where the observed trajectory of these spacecraft (and a couple others) deviates noticeably from our very precise expectation.
How’s this for news?
Vardan Kushnir, notorious for sending spam to each and every citizen of Russia who appeared to have an e-mail, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head.
Sadly, this likely isn’t the work of some citizens’ rights vigilante but instead a mafia hit – Russian mobs get into spamming as a revenue source. (as well as a lot of online blackmail/cyber-warfare stuff, so I’m told.)
i’ve gotten 46 spam mails since 6:30pm last night. 46! i’ve only gotten 10 mails that were legit in that time!
somehow day-old soup and pasta doesn’t sound great to me, so I’m happy to forego the leftovers and hit up bagels/wrap instead, plus we can regale eachother with stories of the weekend. 
