Hrmmmm…

Due to length I’ll list them in comments section. Feel free to add any you know or can think of…

Hey I am looking for a video on either youtube or google and for the life of me I cannot find it. Maybe some of you have seen it or can figure out which search query will return it. The video is of a couple dudes, a father and son I think, on the top of a large hill in the desert. They take a large rock, it is flat, possibly slate or shale, and they roll it down the hill. It keep rolling down the hill on its edge, bouncing high when it hits various things. At the last moment, it bounces quite high and flies into the windshield of their brand new van. It is super funny and I wanted to show my boss but I couldn’t find it when I looked for it.

Albrecht and I have stepped up to chairing the newly formed “committee for Vegas”. Basically Schmeer wants people to come party in Vegas. He’s been trying forever and people are slackers. He wants to celebrate his numtuals with the PSK crew this fall.

So right now we’re looking at end of Sept, begining of October. We are trying to compile a list of people who’d be down. If we have enough I’m going to make some calls and see about getting a better rate at one of the hotels, otherwise I think it will be we set the weekend and everyone fends for themselves in terms of rooms, since some people want to call in their air miles, and some of us have room offers from specific hotels.

So yeah, who’s down? The tentative plan is to fly out Thursday night (6pm flights from Boston arrive around 9pm) and fly back Monday afternoon (checkout Monday morning), during some weekend this fall.

Check it out.  I don’t have a clue how the chick figured this thing out.  I’d like to think I could have figured something like this out, but I’d be dead wrong.  The last pictures on the Official Solution page are pretty awesome…

I’ve got an extra free ticket to tomorrow’s (Tuesday) show at the Paradise. Anyone interested in it? Doors are at 7.

(click for bigger pictures)

This is a view out of a window of the building I work in. Across the street is the department of history. I hope you can see that this mansion is jacked up about eight feet off the ground. Now it is resting on the red I beams. This 300-ton building is being moved, intact, 450 feet up a hill to a new foundation. Workers have been prepping this move for a couple months, and it’s gonna happen next week! I can’t wait!

more info here: http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2007-08/07-012.html

I know a few of you have seen this (since we saw the movie) but this is by far the best movie intro ever created.  And that’s no lie.

So yeah, in case you’ve been living in a cave, The Simpson’s Movie opens this weekend. It will be showing at the Somerville theater on Thursday at midnight. The Somerville Theater serves beer. I really can’t think of a better way to enjoy the Simpsons on the big screen. So who wants to go Thursdays? I realize its a work night, but I’m leaving Friday afternoon, so want to get my viewing in before I leave for the weekend. Besides Thursday is the new Friday and all that stuff…

Electric Music.

This music is shocking, even electrifying at times. Tesla your friends!

There’s a new comedy on HBO called the Flight of the Conchords, and the 6^th episode just aired last night. Well, I watched episode 2 a few weeks ago and it stunk. Then I tried the others last night, and it’s absolutely hilarious! It’s two guys from New Zealand who write funny songs and skits, and here’s a taste from the first episode if you are curious. All I picture is Hanson singing this to old ladies at next year’s canoe trip – “You’re so beautiful… you could be a paaaaart tiiiiiime model…”

This drunk driver has got skills.

Squares A and B are the same color.

Greg and Josh getting a ticket from the river police.

more pictures from this year’s epic canoe trip can be found on my Picasa page.

…with nothing to do on this Friday night. Harvard Sq is turning into Hogwart’s square for the night. Harry and the Potters will be playing live and there’s a bunch of other stuff planned as the lead-up to the release at midnight (I’m assuming the COOP will be open selling it).

Here’s the link to the event info:
http://www.harvardsquare.com/summer/harry-potter.php

When I was out in CA in April I was having dinner with my brother and some of his friends/coworkers and the topic turned to landing men on Mars. (thats what happens when you eat dinner with JPL engineers) They were explaining to me some recent discussions that this one guy at JPL had started in regard to actually reaching the surface of Mars from orbit. Lots of people just assumed we had the technology to do it if applied properly, but few if anyone had actually run the numbers. He did and it turns out its much more difficult than most people imagine.

My brother just sent me a news article about the topic that is very in depth while avoiding too much in the way of the nitty gritty of the technical issues. It does a very good job of presenting the problems at a high level.

My brother has worked with this guy and he was telling me some of the crazy calculations in play here. Like the forces that would be imparted by a supersonic parachute if they did build one. Since he works on rovers we talked specifically for a while about airbag landing systems. I knew they likely would kill a person, but I didn’t realize that the first bounce is something like 5km in the air, and that they can take excessively long to stop bouncing (think he mentioned like 30 minutes).

Anyway, its some interesting technical problems, and I’m sure there will be some interestingly radical solutions. Should be exciting to see what sort of developments they make in regards to materials, fluid dynamics (thursters in particular) and aerospace.