In Time for Halloween: War of the Worlds

All my life I've heard about this 1938 Halloween broadcast (details at Wikipedia, if you don't know what I'm writing about), but had never actually heard it.  Sitting around this evening, it occurred to me that surely it was on the web somewhere.  And, no surprise, here it is at the Internet Archive.
One hour, 27 megabytes, it's worth the time.

Birthday Art

From the Darling Daughter:

Some more detail:

Thanks V.!

Upcoming: Halloween & Cemetery Tour

At the Cedar Rest Cemetery in downtown BSL.  Info here.
Note to self: event goes from sunset to 8.  Not "be there by 8."

And here we go: FTL Neutrino Mystery Solved

Probably.  The paper still needs some peer-review and general sniffing-around, but it seems about right.  The problem seems to have been timing differences between lab-on-the-ground and GPS-in-orbit reference frames.  Here's a synopsis.  The discrepancy and its correction agree to about 3%, plenty of accuracy to confirm that these neutrinos were in fact moving slower than light.

Last week, Jobs. Now Ritchie.

Dennis who?  Dennis Ritchie, who cooked up C and unix in his spare time, just so he could load a home-brew space travel program on a surplussed PDP-7, that's who.  Not as flashy as Jobs, but with a list of achievements even more crucial to today's computing infrastructure.

Obit here.

Wiki biography here.

Slashdot reactions here.

Yet another one who will be sadly missed.

Defies Description

The master of children's rhyme meets the master of horror:

The rest can be found here.

Hurricane Season Wrap-Up

Here's a nice picture:

And some humor from xkcd for the small handful of hurricane geeks out there.