Random Stuff LXXI
For the next couple of weeks we’ll have quite a menagerie of planets in the evening sky. Venus is slowly converging on the closely-spaced Mars and Saturn, which currently form a dim colon (the punctuation mark, and not the internal organ) above the western horizon after sunset. Mercury may also be spied, at least in the tropics, somewhat below. Here is what the planetary situation will be when Venus (V), Mars (Ma) and Saturn (S) make their closest mutual approach on August 8 (the black margin at bottom is the horizon):
Venus will be a cinch to spot anytime after sunset, but Mars and Saturn won’t become apparent until the sky gets very dark. The star Spica, to the left and slightly above, will be brighter than Mars and about as luminous as Saturn. Mercury (Me) won’t set until about 9:30 PM EDT (01:30 GMT August 9), but in temperate latitudes will be lost in the twilight before then.
On the evening of August 11, a late one-day sliver moon will be visible just below Mercury to those folks down south lucky enough to get a clear sky, and the following night we might get the chance to spy a late two-day sliver moon shepherding the four planets as they slowly drift apart.
Nobody claimed that the moon was a very good shepherd.
We have infrared and ultraviolet, but infrasonic and ultrasonic. Shouldn’t the latter be infrabass and ultratreble?
My last post got me thinking about board games I played as a wee tot, and I thought I’d mention two that stand out in my memory. (This time my recollection matches reality more or less exactly.) My very favorite board game from my early childhood was a kind of minimalist Chutes & Ladders called Cross over the Bridge. The idea was to move all your marbles from the outer row into the central reservoir. It had just enough strategy to challenge a precocious six-year-old and not to bore an adult to death. And the Pop-O-Matic die rollers were incredibly boss. I liked to push ’em down just to hear the cool sound: click-POP! And the die-marked with actual numbers, and not dots-would bounce around inside the hemispherical enclosure like it was electrified. Mom probably liked them too, just because they kept the dice from rolling away behind furniture or down the nearest heating vent.
The other game that stands out in my mind, even though I didn’t really like it, was TUF. I was fascinated by numbers and mathematics even as a first-grader, but TUF frustrated me because I didn’t know what half the symbols meant. I don’t think I ever played a real game; I just fiddled around with the dice. Our copy of TUF looked exactly like this one, scuff marks and all. (The j in the fourth equation represents what we would call i, or the square root of -1. I have no idea why it appears before its real multiplier.) “Even for those not math-minded!”, claims the box. Show this to a hundred average non-math-minded teenagers, and see how many takers you get.
During my nostalgia bath I stumbled across one of the most bizarre games imaginable. I challenge anyone to find a game less politically correct than Barbarossa (ばるばろっさ), a card game of the same phylum as Magic: the Gathering. The goal of Barbarossa (the code name for the German invasion of the Soviet Union in World War II) is to capture Moscow by deploying scantily-clad military girls, such as Rundstedt-tan and Adolf-tan (warning: panty shots), and gaining victory points.
Interestingly, though the game is chock full of German military iconography, the developers seem to have carefully avoided the swastika. I’m kind of surprised: the swastika doesn’t carry the same cultural baggage in Japan as it does in Europe or North America. In fact, the “backwards,” or left-facing, version, 卍, is a standard Japanese map symbol indicating a Buddhist temple. (Something else I learned recently: the word swastika is derived from a Sanskrit word referring to a lucky or auspicious object, and is not German like I thought. It must have been the k that fooled me. The Nazi anthem, “ Horst-Wessel-Lied”, uses the word Hakenkreuz (“hook-cross”) for the Nazi emblem.)
And now for something totally disgusting:
I have discovered a novel type of bioreactor that converts any mixture of ordinary organic compounds into an equal mass of Krazy Glue™. I call it “my large intestine.”
Venus will be a cinch to spot anytime after sunset, but Mars and Saturn won’t become apparent until the sky gets very dark. The star Spica, to the left and slightly above, will be brighter than Mars and about as luminous as Saturn. Mercury (Me) won’t set until about 9:30 PM EDT (01:30 GMT August 9), but in temperate latitudes will be lost in the twilight before then.
On the evening of August 11, a late one-day sliver moon will be visible just below Mercury to those folks down south lucky enough to get a clear sky, and the following night we might get the chance to spy a late two-day sliver moon shepherding the four planets as they slowly drift apart.
Nobody claimed that the moon was a very good shepherd.
We have infrared and ultraviolet, but infrasonic and ultrasonic. Shouldn’t the latter be infrabass and ultratreble?
My last post got me thinking about board games I played as a wee tot, and I thought I’d mention two that stand out in my memory. (This time my recollection matches reality more or less exactly.) My very favorite board game from my early childhood was a kind of minimalist Chutes & Ladders called Cross over the Bridge. The idea was to move all your marbles from the outer row into the central reservoir. It had just enough strategy to challenge a precocious six-year-old and not to bore an adult to death. And the Pop-O-Matic die rollers were incredibly boss. I liked to push ’em down just to hear the cool sound: click-POP! And the die-marked with actual numbers, and not dots-would bounce around inside the hemispherical enclosure like it was electrified. Mom probably liked them too, just because they kept the dice from rolling away behind furniture or down the nearest heating vent.
The other game that stands out in my mind, even though I didn’t really like it, was TUF. I was fascinated by numbers and mathematics even as a first-grader, but TUF frustrated me because I didn’t know what half the symbols meant. I don’t think I ever played a real game; I just fiddled around with the dice. Our copy of TUF looked exactly like this one, scuff marks and all. (The j in the fourth equation represents what we would call i, or the square root of -1. I have no idea why it appears before its real multiplier.) “Even for those not math-minded!”, claims the box. Show this to a hundred average non-math-minded teenagers, and see how many takers you get.
During my nostalgia bath I stumbled across one of the most bizarre games imaginable. I challenge anyone to find a game less politically correct than Barbarossa (ばるばろっさ), a card game of the same phylum as Magic: the Gathering. The goal of Barbarossa (the code name for the German invasion of the Soviet Union in World War II) is to capture Moscow by deploying scantily-clad military girls, such as Rundstedt-tan and Adolf-tan (warning: panty shots), and gaining victory points.
Interestingly, though the game is chock full of German military iconography, the developers seem to have carefully avoided the swastika. I’m kind of surprised: the swastika doesn’t carry the same cultural baggage in Japan as it does in Europe or North America. In fact, the “backwards,” or left-facing, version, 卍, is a standard Japanese map symbol indicating a Buddhist temple. (Something else I learned recently: the word swastika is derived from a Sanskrit word referring to a lucky or auspicious object, and is not German like I thought. It must have been the k that fooled me. The Nazi anthem, “ Horst-Wessel-Lied”, uses the word Hakenkreuz (“hook-cross”) for the Nazi emblem.)
And now for something totally disgusting:
I have discovered a novel type of bioreactor that converts any mixture of ordinary organic compounds into an equal mass of Krazy Glue™. I call it “my large intestine.”