Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

In honor of today's end of mission, here are some Saturn flyby movies using Cassini photos. (via)

ETA: Animation of some of Cassini's last photos, showing Enceladus setting behind Saturn.

The world's oldest known trigonometric table is a 3,700-year-old cuneiform tablet. It is, to boot, highly accurate. (via)

Rocket Man, Elton John (Official Music Video), directed by an Iranian refugee. (via Janni)

---L.

Subject quote, also in honor of Cassini, is from the "The Earthly Paradise," Introduction to March, William Morris.

Tyop of the day: "withetered" (for withered).

Which sounds to me like a good excuse for linkblogging. Especially since I seem to have collected even more links than usual. My bad.


Dark Roasted Blend explains where's my jetpack.

Another example of how policitians use fear to manipulate voters to their benefit: In all four Arizona counties that border Mexico, violent crime rates have been essentially flat for a decade. There is no rising tide of violence, and if you believe there is, you've been had. (via)

And to relax after reading that, Hayaku ("quickly"), a beautiful time-lapse video of Japanese land- and cityscapes. Sit back with a cup of tea for seven minutes. Oh those clouds ...

The big question: do families create adults or do adults create families (via I forget)

Awesome optical illusion: Slopes like magnets.

Gen X Has a Midlife Crisis:

How can a generation whose cultural trademark is a refusal to grow up have a midlife crisis? ... In any case, the driving impulse [of the midlife crisis] is to shake off the straitjacket of adulthood and find some way to feel young again. But what if you never gave up adolescence in the first place? What if you donned the binding garment of maturity only tentatively, and accessorized it with mockery, as if it were a hand-me-down from Grandpa or an ugly shirt plucked from a used-clothing rack? And what if, from the start, your youthful rebelliousness had been a secondhand entitlement, without a clear adversary?

The Big Picture gives us balloons and other things lighter than air and recent Cassini shots of Saturn including several obligatory Enceladus photos yay.

Adding nuance to the Kruger-Dunning effect: it's not so much that the unskilled are worse at judging their skill as that we all have trouble judging, but the skilled are better at filtering the noise.

About the cognative effects of brand loyalty, and other sonsumer rationalizations. (via)

A story told in filenames. (via)

The Onion wins again: Massive Flow Of Bullshit Continues To Gush From BP Headquarters.

Says the creator of Calvin Minus Hobbes: "I won’t be posting any more of these. They’re too sad." Um, yeah. Also, creeeeeeepy in a good way. (via)

---L.