Wednesday, March 5, 2003

Build roads in an exotic Southern climate! 10:12:29 AM     Fenton Johnson read offered a wonderful piece on the meaning of the upcoming war as a part of the Anxiety in America series being broadcast on All Things Considered. You need to hear it. Scoll down to "Anxiety in America" on the March 4th archive. 7:00:53 AM     Four to six megapixel digital cameras are common these days and the pros are working with eleven to sixteen megapixel detectors. Astronomers have historically been at the cutting edge of digital imaging and the Megacam project is an interesting example. The motivation for the detector is creating very large multispectral sky surveys. The camera is still under testing and was build with technology that is a few years old, but its specs are impressive -- 360 megapixels (40 x 9 megapixel ccds) and images that are 770MB each (it takes 20 seconds to read data from the array!). With the exposure times being used about 100 images a night can be made under ideal conditions - 77GB a night. It should be pointed out that there are several similar projects. 6:48:00 AM     Have a death wish? I'm particularly impressed by the statement that it is ideal for errands. Of course you can substitute Alpo for electricity and still have fun. 6:09:12 AM     One of the handiest gadgets we own in a Raytek Minitemp IR thermometer. Basically an IR heat sensor with a laser diode to tell you roughly where it is measuring, it is cheap and reasonably accurate. One of the stranger uses has been measuring the temperature of liquids for very ill ferrets. The slurry we give them is a combination of warm water, some items at room temperature and some refrigerated liquids. All of this gets mixed and needs to be served between 95F and 105F - the Minitemp makes this easy (it is great for cooking by the way) and ours is called the "soup gun." Other uses include scanning piles of clothes to determine where the ferret is sleeping. If you get one, go for the laser pointer model. Not only is it cool to see where you are pointed, but the unit with the laser is improved over the earlier non-laser model. A bit of searching with show a wider variety of models, but I've indicated a reliable vendor who offers a good price. You probably need one of these. It was my favorite toy of the year a few years ago. 6:08:55 AM

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