Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Exploding Sun
May 26, 2004

This astronomy class- You know, it’s not really on my mind as much as it might sound, but I’m just not doing anything else. There’s work, and there’s class. I could write about where I go for lunch, I guess, but that would be pretty short, too. Hmm. -is all very doom and gloom.

The teacher is always talking about things that cause cancer, the sun exploding, and various bad ways that you wouldn’t want to end your life. It’s all very startling. I remember a trip to the Franklin Institute with my grandfather. We went to the planetarium there for a show, and they gave us a similar song and dance. I was pretty young and I remember being somewhat upset by the whole idea. It was pretty freaky sitting in such a dark place with someone telling you that the world was going to end with the sun exploding.

Flat Sky, Deep Rut
May 26, 2004

I wish I could find my MP3 player because I would like to record a little of my astronomy teacher’s ramblings for you to amuse yourself with. Maybe I’ll just call Audioblog and leave my phone on speaker. It’s supposed to record for an hour.

Night Sky MapYesterday, we constructed maps of the sky. There was a lot of taping and cutting involved. It’s a kind of neat thing. I think that there are probably better star charts out there than what we’ll make in class, but since we’re basically adding things to it by hand, we’ll get to know a lot better where things are in the sky. This place has night sky maps you can download with event data for certain dates.

Server Issues
May 26, 2004

The server was hacked sometime early this morning. I’m not sure exactly when, but I think it was between 8 and 9 am EDT. The only thing changed was teh blog breakdown page. I’m not sure if it was deliberate or an unfortunately unprevented accident.

I have since disabled WebDAV for the whole server, and enabled the integrated Windows 2003 firewall. I don’t know if this will prevent the problem because I’m still not quite sure what caused it.

Astronomy God
May 25, 2004

I attended my first Astronomy class at WCU last night. It was pretty strange. The teacher is some kind of religious zealot, except not in the traditional sense. No, he’s very anti-religion.

How do I even describe this? I don’t even know that it’s necessarily that he doesn’t believe in God (although I think that’s probably the case), but that he must always be at odds with the really religious folks. He says that people are always telling him that the Earth can only be a few thousand years old because the bible says so, even though scientific proof exists that the Earth is much older. Well, nobody in our class said anything about religion. I wonder how he got so jaded.

Backsliding into the flames of hell
May 25, 2004

I was listening to Good Morning America on the radio this morning (their web site really stinks, by the way) and heard some actress talking about this movie, which doesn’t seem at first glance like something that I might like, but I have to admit that I found the clip that they played pretty amusing.

Here is a page of trailers for Saved!. If you are going to watch the trailer, I urge you to watch the whole thing. The beginning start slow, but there are clips of a couple of scenes that make it all seem interesting.