bruceb

This Flicker set is so cool! The photographer's printed out historical photos, gone to the spots they were taken, and held them up with the proper alignment so that they lie nestled within the current reality. Very high level of craftsmanship in service of a delightful concept.
 

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed Phoenix as it was parachuting down. I am flabbergasted, in the best way.

I've been happily refreshing NASA's home page for the Phoenix mission. Sure, we've had almost real-time image access for several missions now...but I've decided I'm not ready to be jaded about it just yet. These are images from another planet, taken this morning. I've been re-reading a bunch of '60s, '70s, and '80s genre fiction lately, and I feel a certain obligation to be thrilled on behalf of those who helped make me the kind of person who'd be thrilled about this, particularly those who didn't make it this far to see these themselves. This is nifty in the biggest, best, coolest sort of way - from human minds to another planet, by golly.

Wow.

I also note that north polar Mars looks interesting. Lots of stuff has been happening in Phoenix's vicinity, from the looks of things.

And while I'm burbling, I'll point y'all at NASA's current missions page, which makes it a hop, skip, and jump to see impact craters on Titan and a bunch else. Mr. Simon tells me these are the days of miracle and wonders, and darned if he isn't right.

Now this is nifty in the software department. Moody lets you tag music by color out of a 4x4 grid and then get a playlist of tracks tagged with that color, or any of those colors if you select several.

The underlying idea is that the 16 slots in the grid have whatever meaning you want to give them - they suggest sad to happy on the horizontal axis, and calm to intense on the vertical, but the designations are all in your hands. So it's a device for assembling a set of thematic playlists and calling them up again, simply.

Nifty!

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto again:

Aaron Burr was a caudillo.

I'm opening up a new tag, "nift", for little snippets that catch my fancy.

Today's comes from The Americas: A Hemispheric History, by Spanish historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto.

The United States' founding fathers can be thought of as members of a creole culture, poised between and self-distinguishing from (in Fernandez-Armesto's words) the metropolitan and the indigenous. He goes on to compare it to other creoles and their roles in changing national and popular definitions.

Nifty. :)