The new characters can look exactly like those we know and trust in the standard english letters – however they can lead to a completely different website that you shouldn’t trust with your money. Below is an example…
Living in London brings some challenge to pursuing amateur Astronomy, most notably due to the high light pollution that comes with being in the 19th largest city in the world. Because of this I was excited to go back to the more rural area of Ohio for Christmas as it provides a wonderful opportunity to do some star gazing and astrophotography.
Now that I’ve returned though, the question came to my mind, where is the least light polluted area I could find?
Fortunately after some research (and yes, I mean Googling…) I’ve found Jonathan Tomshine’s site with a very handy Google Maps implementation of a map that will help the aspiring Astronomer find the general area to get the best viewing results. The data comes from the Royal Astronomical Society and so I’ve a feeling it’s quite trustworthy.
Here’s an idea of the resolution you can expect to get
South West Ohio Light Pollution
Users have also added in notes about the site they have observed in, with some handy information such as if there is a parking lot or bathrooms.
I’ve found other sites that offer this data, however they’ve proven to be difficult – with maps that are not as user friendly or lacking in data, sometimes only providing info about specific areas.
Unfortunately the site only covers America, and I’m hoping in the future that Jonathan will be able to provide a European version for when I return to England. For now though, it was a great find and I’m excited to test it. Now I only have to worry about if the weather will cooperate and provide me a clear sky!
Forty years ago Apollo 11 set off on a mission and accomplished what man had dream of since he looked to the heavens, exploring the heavens and landing on the moon. I wasn’t alive when this amazing feat of engineering, determination and sheer courage took place, but despite this I have a healthy respect for the accomplishment, partly due to the matters of scale involved.
First let’s look at the physical size of the Apollo 11 crafts and rocket :
Apollo 11 Crafts and Rocket compared to a Semi Truck and Space Shuttle. You should click the image to enlarge.
We’ll start with the Command/Service Module and Lunar Lander. When combined these two vehicles are barely longer than your average Semi Truck and have an internal area smaller than that of the 1 bedroom apartment in which I currently sit. For 4 days the astronauts lived in this small space on their journey to the moon. Also try to imagine how the crew of the lander would have to maneuver inside of the module while wearing the bulky spacesuits and backpacks required to explore the Lunar surface. Armstrong, as the mission commander, got to make the decision to be the first out of the module and onto the moon, but it was also the logical choice to have him exit first due to his piloting position near the hatch. With both Neil and Buzz suited it would be extremely difficult for Buzz to get to the door first.
Wernher von Braun next to the bottom of a Saturn V Rocket
Now let’s look at the Saturn V rocket, which still holds the record as being the largest rocket ever built. I remember as a child seeing this behemoth at the Kennedy Space Center on a family trip and being in awe. This rocket dwarfs the Space Shuttle, today’s most well known space fairing vehicle, and is also just one foot shorter than St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, England. In addition to all this, Saturn V was also the first rocket that wasn’t a converted U.S. Air Force missile, and was built specifically with the aim of space exploration.
These facts illustrate to me some of the amazing things about Apollo 11 that I’ve learned over the years. If you’d like to find out more I’d suggest checking out We Choose the Moon, a wonderful site that shows recreations of all the stages of our trip to the moon.
First, I’d like to set the mood with this excellent trailer for the movie “The Comedian”.
What a lovely piss take on what has, in my mind, become an art form in and of itself. How many trailers have you seen that have just knocked your socks off, only to disappoint you when you see the actual finished film? This trailer side steps the content of the movie completely but still conveys the spirit of the movie.
We’ve also become accustomed to narration by a deep, sonorous voice illustrating the true epic quality of the film which you should, no, must go see! That voice actor is key in convincing audiences to part with their hard earned cash later down the line for a product that they themselves aren’t even a part of. What a selfless act!
One such voice actor is Don LaFontaine, whose talents you’ve certainly experienced between mouthfuls of popcorn. Here’s a great video bio of him, he certainly sounds like a great guy – pun intended of course.
I find it all quite refreshing, as you could view the music trailer business as a con. It all reminds me that we don’t have to settle for the same old trailer style. There’s more out there.
Recently I came upon another gem of a trailer, for “Time Bandits” in 1981, a movie which is arguably brilliant for being terrible in odd ways that stay with you. The trailer does the same and like “The Comedian” trailer, it keeps the spirit of the movie without really attempting to make it epic or humorous based on the film’s content.
“You’re sitting there telling millions of people to see a movie you haven’t even seen?!”
“Well I can’t see every film I do now can I?”
You get the picture, enjoy!
Before I close a small side note, at the beginning of the trailer for “The Comedian” is Greg Grunberg, also known as Matt Parkman from the TV show “Hereos”
This year, 400 years ago Galileo Galilei first demonstrated his telescope, discovering the moons of Jupiter, and 40 years ago in 1969 the American NASA Mission Apollo 11 landed on the moon. It is now 2009 and this year has been designated the International Year of Astronomy and it couldn’t come at a better time. There are many disciplines of Astronomy that are making observations which are changing the way we understand the entire universe. Astronomers are comparing these decades to those when Einstein and Plank created a revolution in Physics in the early 1900s.
For example, In the last 10 years we have discovered more planets outside our solar system than ever before, 300 planets. This year the Kepler satellite was launched and will monitor over 100,000 stars for signs of orbiting planets, so soon we will find even more. Also this year the European Space Agency launched the Planck satellite which will let us look back to a time when Galaxies began to form. To put that in perspective – human life on Earth Started .007 billion years ago (7 million years ago) – Hershel will look back to 13.2 billion years in the past. That’s more than 8 billion years before our sun and planets even existed!
I’d like to encourage you to participate during the International Year of Astronomy because it’s a wonderful science that is rapidly changing with new observations year by year. With recent technologies we’re learning more about our whole universe per year than ever before.
I invite you to listen to some excellent podcasts which will entertain you, and help you to learn more about… well, everything!
iTunes : 365 Days of Astronomy – ( Site : http://365daysofastronomy.org/) : This podcast provides a new Astronomy segment each day for all of 2009. Each are about 15-30 min in length and the subject changes each day. Great to listen to on your way to work!
iTunes : TheJodcast – ( Site : http://www.jodcast.net/ ) : The University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank (UK) provides a wonderful bi-monthly summary of the latest Astronomy news ands also information about Stargazing (looking at constellations and planets) for the month for both the northern and southern hemispheres
While not a pod cast, make sure to check out the Bad Astronomy blog by Phil Plait. He covers many aspects of astronomy, and also subjects that scientific people can relate to.
If you want to get connected and help Astronomers checkout the American Association of Variable Star Observers : You can help Astronomers by watching stars and reporting your results with no equipment required. Just look at the stars and compare them, then report your results. It’s just that simple.
Everyone I know has as sometime looked to the sky at night and been in wonder about how and why our universe has come to be the way it is. Is other life out there. Can we reach other planets, like Mars or light years away. When I was at Bowling Green University I had a job for the Astronomy Department working for Dr. Dale Smith. I taught astronomy students about the sun, the planets, and the universe. And when I was even younger I remember being literally star struck when my father would point out constellations.
How can we not be in wonder about the universe around us?
This is your time and mine to learn more about our place in the universe. Get listening and see how you can participate in the International Year of Astronomy.
Recently I’ve had a renewed interest in Processing. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the summary from their site is :
Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.
If I had to sum it up I’d say Processing is a simple programming language targeted to visual people, with an emphasis on allowing the programmer to quickly sketch up visual results. What really excited me when it was released is that designers and developers took it and started creating wonderful visual art and interfaces with it. Check out work by Robert Hodgin and Jared Tarbell to see what I’m talking about. Processing never went away, but I did until lately. I’m going to be checking it out again though due to 2 projects that I think are really exciting.
Open Processing
Open Processing is a site dedicated to sharing your sketches (Processing projects) with the world. Your sketch is shown running and interactive with it’s code displayed below. This is all done under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License which allows people to remix the original work and share it with others as long as you attribute the work to the original author and share your sketch under the same rules. What has resulted on the site is over a year of people sharing, learning and remixing in quite a nice little community. If you’re new to Processing, I think this is a great place to start and learn from countless other examples ranging from very simple to complex.
Processing.js
The other project I found that’s got me fired up is Processing.js, which is Processing that has been ported to Javascript and will run on browsers capable of rendering HTML5. Currently this means Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 and the beta of Google Chrome. If you checked out the Josh Nimoy Google Chrome Experiments version of Ball Droppings, then you’ve already seen Processing.js at work. What I like about Processing.js is that it’s going to make some of the new HTML5 Javascript functionality a lot easier for people to get into without worrying about a lot of the cross browser issues and the complexity of Javascript. From a business point of view I can imagine Processing.js could also be used to quickly sketch up DHTML prototypes to get clients excited about creative solutions. Another bonus is that it runs on the iPhone, albeit slowly on my 2nd gen. With the new iPhone and future versions having quicker processors, Processing.js could very well take off.
All in all, Processing to me has just received a new lease on life and I’m quite interested on where the future will take it.
Part of my job at unit9 involves estimating the time and cost for additional features on a site, or just judging how feasible something is. One of the things many clients ask for on their sites are Social Network Sharing Buttons such as “Digg this!” or “Add to Delicious”. This is usually a simple matter. Sometimes however a client comes along and asks for a sharing button for a site I’m unfamiliar with – which means it’s time to Google Hunt for the solution to make sure we can provide the feature.
Well I’ll have to Google Hunt no longer now that I’ve found Sharingbuttons.org, which lists (at the time of writing this) 30 different Social Network sites each with a description of the site and breakdown of the proper format and parameters to create a sharing button.
For example, here is the entry for Digg.com :
This becomes incredibly handy when you’re asked to support lesser known sites like for me Mister Wong, Dzone, Fark, etc.
I’m settling down again after hosting my annual 4th of July party in London. I was quite pleased this year with the poster design by Anders Anderson of Helpful Strangers who turned my original design into something quite more epic….
This year, despite my copy on the poster, everything went quite smoothly. Fireworks were pointed in the right direction, the party host remain on his feet at 4am – all in all a good result. Thanks to all of you who attended and made it the fun event it was!
On a side note, it’s been 9 years since I was in America for a 4th of July, so it was a pleasure to see Mike Kobal’s video of the NYC fireworks display. Stunning!
When I play a game on a console or computer, I expect it to help me to learn how to best play it. That’s why when I packed last night for my vacation I took the 3 new Nintendo DS games I’d bought but not played, tossed them in my luggage and left the instruction at home. My feeling being that if I couldn’t figure things out with the controls and mechanics in the first 30 minutes or so, it’s not really going to appeal to me in the long run anyhow. With users of websites and internet based games, the attention span is more like 30 seconds – likely because they’ve not shelled out $40 on it. This got me to thinking about how we keep people in our websites/games/private-little-worlds.
Creating this kind of learning environment for a user of a game or website is more challenging than most people would expect. And as with most things, if you’ve done it right, people won’t notice anything at all. But that’s all part of the job now isn’t it. A couple thoughts I’d share on how to get the ball rolling in a user’s brain :
Teach them in small steps, a bit at a time and not too quickly. Once you’ve shown them how things work, let them have a play with things to truly wrap their mind around it.
Visual design and functionality shouldn’t stray too far from the norm. Stick with the standard usability vocabulary the user would expect, atleast in the beginning. Things like rollovers, clicking, scaling objects, etc. As the user spends more and more time in your little world, you can start throwing new tricks at them – but don’t expect them to pick everything up right away with a lame excuse such as “it’s easy, everyone should understand this”. If you’re saying things like that without actually justifying your ideas, then it means there’s probably a lot more to your idea than you initially thought and will take more time for people to grasp.
Every step or so, introduce something new. When you do this, you’ll also find that for the first 1/3 or the journey, instructions will have to be pretty blatant and verbose. After that you can be a little more vague and let the user figure more and more out for themselves. If they’ve stayed in your experience this long, odds are they’re going to keep pushing forward.
Just today I had a play with the Science Museum Game “Launchball”, created by the clever folk over at Preloaded. To put it quite frankly, I was floored. The usual Preloaded care and attention to detail is all there, down to each and every pixel, as you’d come to expect from the boys in blue. What really got my attention though, was the usability of the game and the excellent way it taught me how it behaved as I went, while also throwing new things at me each step. When new blocks became available, it didn’t feel like an extra obstacle or annoying requirement to finish a level – it felt like a reward, driving me forward to play more and more. I almost laughed out loud as well when I had spent over 2 minutes on a puzzle, and a pop up appeared offering me help on completing the level!
Well done guys, I’d tip my hat to you, but I’m too busy playing your game! To those who haven’t seen it, get over there now and have a play.
It’s been a busy month for us at unit9. We’ve just completed work on this year’s Carphone Warehouse X Factor site. Like last year’s campaign, this year you can call in from a mobile and leave an audition singing one of eight songs. This year’s site has added a lot to that though, and the user can now sing via a PC microphone, draw a character’s face and have it sing for them. We’ve also added the ability to deeplink into an audition so that people can share performances over email, or on Facebook. There’s even the capability to download the performance to mobiles.
Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.
