Yearly Archives: 2007

National High Five Day

Fun, Holiday! Celebrate!, Oddly Enough

In the spirit of peace, love, and general awesomeness, I high-five you!

National High Five Day falls on the third Thursday of April each year, which falls this year on April 19, 2007. The holiday originated at the University of Virginia in 2002, and has since spread across the nation, and around the globe.

Imagine that while on your way to class, you pass a dignified looking middle-aged man in a suit. Instead of noticing this respectable pillar of society fifteen seconds or so before your interaction is fated to occur, and lowering your head to avoid his disapproving scowl, you and the businessman simultaneously raise your hands and wordlessly high-five. You both walk on, and likely relate the story to whomever you eat dinner with that night.

Special thanks to Nate and Ted for bringing this to my attention.

finally a lottery ticket i’d buy

Fun, News, Space

Buzz Aldrin announced something awesome today: a lottery to send some lucky winner into space.

Details of the competition are still sketchy, Aldrin said at a space investment conference on Wall Street Tuesday, with the legal status of selling lottery tickets still to be resolved.

He said the idea was to offer the top prize of a flight into Earth’s orbit, but it was not yet decided on what spacecraft.

So it’s not exactly “WIN A TRIP TO THE MOON!“, but it’s a nice first step in that direction.

[Hat tip to Patrick for the story link]

a cat walks onto a bus…

Animals, Oddly Enough

No, it’s not the first line of a bad joke.  According to the Daily Mail:

Bus drivers have nicknamed a white cat Macavity after it has started using the No 331 several mornings a week.

The feline, which has a purple collar, gets onto the busy Walsall to Wolverhampton bus at the same stop most mornings – he then jumps off at the next stop 400m down the road, near a fish and chip shop.

I don’t quite get the nickname, but the rest of it is oddly fascinating.  I can totally imagine Kahlua getting on the Number 11 and heading over to a diner.

in which I get to say ‘spelunking’ and ‘microbots’ and ‘Mars’

Space

Cool (from Space.com):

A Mars-orbiting satellite recently spotted seven dark spots near the planet’s equator that scientists think could be entrances to underground caves.

Cooler:

The researchers hope the discovery will lead to more focused spelunking on Mars.

A project here on Earth aims to refine the visual and infrared techniques  THEMIS used to find the Martian caves and to also develop robots that can one day enter the caverns and explore them.

Awesome:

The researchers are also considering other robotic design possibilities, including the deployment of several miniature robots together into a cave.

“You could throw out an array of microbots in a birdshot approach over an area where you think there is a cave,” Wynne told SPACE.com . The microbots could then use sonar or some other method to confirm the presence of a cave and pinpoint its location.

Wow.  I mean, caves on Mars, detected by microbots scanning for their heat signature.  Just wow.