This is a surprisingly hard question to find an answer for, but the best information I’ve been able to find seems to point to Cuba moving steadily westward as the Atlantic Ocean widens and South America pushes upwards towards North America, until eventually (some 250 million years from now) the continents reassemble themselves as Pangea Ultima and Cuba is sucked under what’s left of the Atlantic Ocean.
Then again, that may not have been the question the NYT had in mind…
The street finds its own uses for things.
Oh, look! Julie Taymor and the “Spider-Man” producers have settled their lawsuit out of court.
Quel frommage!
The worst Division I football program in history?
Savannah State is playing Oklahoma State and Florida State in the first two games, and will collect $860,000 (“which represents about 17 percent of the Tigers’ modest athletic budget”) for those games.
By the way, last year was a “1-10 season that included losses by scores of 63-6, 41-6, 47-7, 45-3 and 59-3, in addition to a defeat at the hands of a team that had lost 29 conference games in a row.”
There’s an interesting piece in the LAT about George Perez, former city manager and city councilman in Cudahy. (Previously.) Perez has not been charged with any crimes, yet, but is a major figure in the criminal cases against other Cudahy officials:
Perez started out as a janitor in Cudahy and worked his way up to the city manager position
And this is kind of interesting:
So there were concerns twelve years ago, but nothing happened? Quel frommage, again!
I can’t find a good way to embed the NASA videos in a post, and I don’t want to link to the ones on YouTube, which are dubiously sourced. So here’s NASA’s Apollo 11 video page. And another page containing some restored Apollo 11 video.
Ad astra per aspera. Godspeed, Dr. Armstrong.
More specifically, a random assortment of things that turned up in my Post Office box today, or that I found while I was out and about. Not that I’m bragging, but I think some folks might be entertained, amused, or interested in some of these items.
The first issue of “Infowars: The Magazine” (as Gregg Easterbrook might say, “Published on Earth: The Planet”).
I’ve got big balls. (Also acceptable: “Ah, but the strawberries. That’s where I had them.“) (Previously.)
The only political party that can actually change things this year. (Get yours here.)
Finally:
My USB TV receiver from Germany is here! (Previously.) More when and as I get a chance to dink with it.
40 years ago today, John Wojtowicz and Salvatore Natuarale tried to hold up a Chase Manhattan bank branch in Brooklyn. I believe this is what that location looks like today:
View Larger Map
Wojtowicz and Natuarale botched the robbery, and ended up in a 14 hour long standoff with police. The NYT has a retrospective.
And why does this matter, other than it being kind of a big deal at the time? Well, the robbery inspired a Sidney Lumet film:
Obit watch: Victor Poor, an influential early chip designer for Intel.
Noted:
Edited to add: Thanks to Borepatch for reminding us it is also the 20th anniversary of the shooting of Vicki Weaver at Ruby Ridge.
Here are a bunch of random links that I promised various people, collected in one place, so I can email one link rather than half-a-dozen.
“Stupid Idea Of The Day: Let’s Nationalize Facebook!”. This was also in TMQ Watch, but buried, so I’m breaking it out here. Note that this goes to Forbes and not Slate, because I refuse to give Idiot Boy any linkage.
Obit from EE Times for Hans Camenzind, inventor of the 555 timer IC.
Rap music is becoming less homophobic.
“Many hip-hop artists, too, noticed when Jamaican dance hall artists such as Buju Banton, whose lyrics are violently anti-gay, saw lucrative tour dates canceled as a result.”
The latest in Buju Banton’s legal case, or “You got 10 years. Would you like to go for 15?”
“What will 2011 (the Year of the Rabbit) hold for Buju Banton?” Somehow, I don’t think the answer was “Federal prison”.
So instead, I’ll link to this:
and this:
and let my readers fill in the blank.
Did you know that the promo code SUCKITGROUPON will get you 45% off your Buckyballs order from getbuckyballs.com?
I didn’t, either, until I saw it on Overlawyered. I already got my first set of Buckyballs, but I just ordered some more: this time, I got some BuckyBigs, so I can pretend to be Captain Queeg while I’m sitting at my desk.
(Note that I have no financial relationship with the BuckyBalls people; I just want the CPSC to die in a fire.)
In other news, the Germans have shipped my USB TV receiver.
Longer Marvin Hamlisch: NYT, LAT.
Speaking of obits, noted astronomer and pioneer of radio telescopy, Sir Bernard Lovell, passed away on Monday.
There was an update to the Sheri Sangji story while I was on vacation that I wasn’t able to blog. Luckily, Derek Lowe was on the case. For those of you who don’t remember the story, Ms. Sangji was working with t-butyl lithium in a UCLA lab; the substance, which catches fire when exposed to air, spilled, Ms. Sangji was severely burned, and died 18 days later. The university and the primary researcher, Dr. Patrick Harran, faced felony charges.
While I was gone, the charges against the university were dropped. Apparently, UCLA made a deal with the prosecution. The charges against Dr. Harran still stand.
But then it gets weird. Dr. Harran’s defense team is trying to discredit the OSHA report on the accident, based on the accusation that the author of the report participated in a murder when he was 16 years old and failed to disclose this to his employers. I’m not sure at this point if it was actually established that the author of the report and the murderer were the same person, but the author resigned his position anyway.
This is intended to be a short update. The Derek Lowe blog entry linked above has a longer summary, including links to various other sources; I commend it to your attention.
So…somebody I know was having problems with their netbook running Ubuntu.
The somebody in question decided (for good and sufficient reasons) that part of the problem might be due to them having done several upgrade installs of recent Ubuntu versions which left cruft on the system. This somebody thought the best thing to do was to make a backup of /home, reformat the box, and reinstall Ubuntu 12.04 from scratch, blowing away all the existing data and partitions.
Which they did.
The somebody in question had a MySQL database on the box that had somewhere around ~2,500 records in it. It was a fairly simple database, probably overkill for MySQL: one table, a few columns.
It turns out that MySQL doesn’t store databases in /home. MySQL stores databases in /var/lib/mysql by default, and the somebody in question never changed the default. (This vaguely makes sense if you think about it; after all, MySQL is intended to be a multi-user database, so why would you store databases under an individual user’s home directory by default?)
The somebody in question found this out after blowing everything away. And, of course, the somebody in question only backed up /home.
Fortunately, the database isn’t that important, and much of the data on it can be recovered from older .CSV files that were used to import the data into MySQL.
But next time, the somebody in question is going to backup every damn thing, not just /home.
The somebody in question is also going to try to get out of the habit of making assumptions about where things are stored.
In the DEFCON 20 day 2 notes discussing the ADS-B presentation by Renderman, I alluded to some work on using USB TV tuners to pick up ADS-B broadcasts.
I did a little more research on this earlier today, just to satisfy my own curiosity.
Holy cow! I’ve been wanting to mess with software defined radio, but the $1,500 cost for hardware is a bit discouraging. This looks like an excellent way to get started for about $20 instead. The necessary software is linked from the rtl-sdr page, and you can even get a script that will build gnuradio with the proper components.
Yow!
Edited to add 8/4: We are not amused. In the past two days, we have been to Fry’s. The shelves at Fry’s were almost completely stripped bare of USB TV adapters. We have also been to three different branches of Discount Electronics; none of them had any of the listed adapters. We have checked Google, and all of the adapters listed with the E4000 tuner do not appear to be available from vendors in the United States. The only adapter on rtl-sdr’s list that we were able to find was the Ezcap EZTV645 DVB-T Digital TV USB 2.0 Dongle with FM/DAB/Remote Controller which DealExtreme sells. However:
I’ve ordered the Newsky TV28T that’s listed on the sysmocom site (linked from the rtl-sdr page). With shipping, it came out to 23.30 euros, or about $28.86 in dollars. That’s still well within my price range for tinkering with SDR. I’ll update when the device gets here.
In the meantime, if anyone has any GNURadio or general SDR tips, advice, or suggestions, please feel free to leave them in comments or shoot me an email. Contact addresses are in the usual place.
(And thanks, Borepatch.)
It is 3:00 PM local time on Ice Cream Sandwich Day, and nobody has brought me my Android 4.0 tablet yet.