imapweather my fave new weather site.

I am something of a weather junkie. Going to have fun in physical geography this fall since it is largely about meteorology.

The only complaint I have about the site is that there is no easy to find pressure map you can access like they have here.

Alice in Wonderland

quote:

The music video for my song 'Alice', an electronic piece composed using sounds recorded from the Disney film 'Alice In Wonderland'.

Not sure this quote should be in Random or here...
From TalkingPointsMemo's cafe site:

Posted by markg8 in reply to a comment from dickday
July 1, 2009 3:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sure there's nice people in Oklahoma but you're right, politically the state seems to lean troglodyte. That's why I advocate a do over of the War of 1812. Let's take over Canada. We'd get 30 million single payer advocates and generally even most conservative Canadians are to the left of Kucinich. It'd be a win/win for everybody except Canadians of course.

All I know is that dickday is a wonderful nic!

you guys must have seen this before.

Free Online File Conversion http://www.zamzar.com/

for all those jackass morons that send attachments in .docx or even better in .wps

Oh, sweet merciful heavens, it does Audio! Thanks, strivvie.

(I get sick of every nerd out there trying to popularise his own arcane and irrelevant new audio codec because an audio file in said new format sounds better than an MP3 file at the same bitrate, but only if it's Aphex Twin or some other suitably techno crap which is all nerds who create new audio codecs listen to. Which does, I realise, beg the question as to why someone with as much contempt for said genre would be willing to go the trouble of mutating that file into one I can listen to...the answer is that so I may either shut up the person who's begging for me to listen to it, or to laugh at their choice of music.)

Well, *my* favourite weather site, for a long time now, has been www.spaceweather.com. Check it every day.

Today they have something rather special. An "unprecedented 3D supercomputer model of a sunspot".

"To create the virtual sunspot, researchers programmed NCAR's IBM bluefire supercomputer with the laws of magnetohydrodynamics, sprinkled in some ground-based observations of actual sunspots, and hit "go". The bluefire is capable of 76 trillion calculations per second; even so, the programme took weeks to complete. The final model contains 1.8 billion points and covers a 3D domain 31,000 miles by 62,000 miles wide and 3,700 miles deep."

And it looks like this:





-- I think that's rather spectacular. Interesting that this virtual sunspot appears at a time when the sun has gone through one of its quietest phases in a century, for months now spaceweather.com has been reporting, as it does today:

"The sun is blank, no sunspots."

But it's a fact that some of the biggest solar flares in history have occurred just after these "quiet times". And the sun is definitely warming up. There have been a few spots of the new cycle. It's interesting, every 11 years the magnetic polarity of the sun flips -- the north pole becomes the south pole. So you can tell "old cycle" from "new cycle" spots by their magnetic polarity. For a time back there ... we had mixed spots. Just in case you thought you were the only one.

Here comes the sun ...

quote:

Originally posted by striv:
you guys must have seen this before.

Free Online File Conversion http://www.zamzar.com/

for all those jackass morons that send attachments in .docx or even better in .wps

Thanks stirv, zamzar is bookmarked.

About docx, you are aware that docx files are just zip files containing xml and images? You can basically view them with any browser or notepad.

quote:

Originally posted by Newro:
About docx, you are aware that docx files are just zip files containing xml and images? You can basically view them with any browser or notepad.

actually I didn't know.
Can you show me the trick to that?

Bump Top

downloaded

installed

love it

quote:

Originally posted by striv:

quote:

Originally posted by Newro:
About docx, you are aware that docx files are just zip files containing xml and images? You can basically view them with any browser or notepad.

actually I didn't know.
Can you show me the trick to that?

Rename it as .zip instead of .docx. Open as usual.

Microsoft also released a free converter for older versions of Word. Does OpenOffice support the format? I haven't checked. Apple's Pages does open .docx files with no converter needed.

NeoOffice (and therefore most likely OpenOffice) opens docx quite well. Better than the converted version done with the MS converter usually.

Thanks for telling me that OO now has dictionaries and spellchecking in versions 3.x.x, heavyboots. Unobtrusive, too.

Never again shall I bother with MS Office!

quote:

Originally posted by heavyboots:
NeoOffice (and therefore most likely OpenOffice) opens docx quite well. Better than the converted version done with the MS converter usually.

I have OpenOffice and it doesn't recognize .docx files....
Thanks for the tip guys!

Weird. I thought 3.0 was supposed to have that capability, but practically no one sends us .docx still so it isn't something I've tested thoroughly.

Very odd and definitely NSFW Tim Pope video for Soft Cell's 'Sex Dwarf' (1982): http://www.timpope.tv/index.php?page=84

Jonathan Ross interviews the fantastic Sir David Attenborough:

Part 1

Part 2

Neuromancer turns 25: What it got right, what it got wrong