I thought you all might enjoy the picture I took last weekend. It’s a squid christmas light display. Click the picture for the full-sized picture.
Ocean City, MD has this huge display of different sea-themed Christmas decorations in a parking lot at the south end of the island. The squid - okay, well, it’s probably an octopus - is taller than I am, maybe 8 or 10 ft tall. There are about 30 of these things around the parking lot. Which is really odd because the parking lot is closed for the season. The whole town is closed for the season. There’s just dark motels and these things.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is a joint U.S.-Canada military organization based at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado. With help from our neighbor to the North, NORAD systems scan the skies for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) flying over the poles with deadly gifts from our friends in the USSR (Ob Russky: CCCP).
The goal of NORAD is to warn us in time for us to take cover. We might get 15 minutes warning. “With enough shovels…”
To accomplish the aerospace warning mission, the commander of NORAD provides an integrated tactical warning and attack assessment to the governments of Canada and the United States. To accomplish the aerospace control mission, NORAD uses a network of satellites, ground-based radar, airborne radar and fighters to detect, intercept and, if necessary, engage any air-breathing threat to North America. As a part of its aerospace control mission, NORAD assists in the detection and monitoring of aircraft suspected of illegal drug trafficking. This information is passed to civilian law enforcement agencies to help combat the flow of illegal drugs into North America. The command is currently developing a concept for implementing the new maritime warning mission.
Uh, “air-breathing?” What does that mean? They can’t protect us from flying fish?
Anyway, as vigilent as the fine people in NORAD are in protecting us from Cold War nuclear incidents, any unidentified aircraft will be assumed to be hostile and shot down.
Artist’s rendering of NORAD engaging Santa during his Christmas night rounds with toys for all the good boys and girls. Click the thumbnail picture above to download a larger image for your desktop.
Santa’s annual trip is a logistical nightmare for the folks at NORAD. His sleigh has no transponder. The only light is Rudoph’s nose. NORAD has responded with a special-purpose, one-night-a-year Santa Tracker. Santa-Cam images will be available at the site linked above on Christmas Eve.
As long as NORAD knows where Santa is at any time, there will be no mistakes.
Thanks to Max for the excellent artist’s representation.
Part of my [tag]engineering[/tag] curriculum was a very fun hands-on robotics course. A [tag]robot[/tag] like this one can move so fast that you don’t have time to get out of its way. Factories that use [tag]robotics[/tag] will have black-and-yellow danger lines on the floor around around each workstation and flashing lights on top of the robots. The factory floor looks like a crazy Christmas show, expecially when the lights are low.
A workstation ideally is defined as the maximum reach of the robot, not the extents of its motion in a given job, so that if there is a mechanical failure or a glitch in the program nobody gets surprised.
For the clueless, there are also multiple emergency stop switches. I can’t tell whether the fellow twirling around on the robot-ride [tag]end effector[/tag] in this video has an emergency stop switch within reach. I kind of doubt it. Not that he’d have time to actually use it.
While transcribing audio notes this morning I googled song lyrics from some songs I heard on WPRB, the Princeton University radio station, shortly before the holidays. Odd lyrics, too, at least as I noted them.
Tied you in your kitchen chair and broke your legs and from your lips allelujah
Those aren’t really the lyrics to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, of course.
The DJ on WPRB played Jeff Buckley’s cover version of the song. It’s too bad I didn’t transcribe the audio notes to my future self before the holidays. I would definitely given my husband Jeff Buckley’s “Grace” CD.
Gisher: Good Christians you have work to do, you should be reaching out to witness or at least help these people, show them some love…but what are you doing? HAVING PISSY FIGHTS OVER NATIVITY SCENES!
There are people who need your help, YOU HAVE GOT MUCH BETTER THINGS TO DO!
(Crowd says AMEN! AMEN!)
CHESTER, England — As Christmas approaches, a virgin mother is anxiously awaiting the arrival of her offspring. She’s Flora, the Komodo dragon.
In an evolutionary twist, Flora has managed to become pregnant all on her own without any male help. It would seem the timing is auspicious: The seven hatchlings are due this festive season.
Santa wasn’t very good to me this year. I suspect that he heard me accidentally call him Satan the week before Christmas. Or maybe he figured out that I’m a [tag]techno-Pagan[/tag].
I bought myself a toy instead. It’s better that way… I got exactly what I wanted and I didn’t have to be a good girl to get it.
My latest toy is a [tag]Siemens SX66[/tag] PDA phone. I needed this phone, really I did. My old Toshiba e310 is still in great shape, but it doesn’t have enough RAM. My old cell phone was one of Cingular’s freebies.
It’s not cutting edge, but the
SX66 is still an impressive little device. It runs the [tag]Windows Mobile 2003[/tag] OS, so I didn’t have to RTFM.
Yeah, ok, you want some more details. 400MHz [tag]X-Scale[/tag] processor, 128M of RAM and 64M of flash. For reference, my spare computer is only marginally faster and originally had less RAM. 128M of RAM doesn’t hold much in the way of fun, but the SX66 has an SD slot so I can carry around videos and photos on SD or MMC cards.
I have Cingular, and they have this silly thing called MEdiaNET. It’s expensive, a penny per kbyte. Fortunately the SX66 also has [tag]WiFi[/tag], and I set it up to check for WiFi first. It also has bluetooth - and of course the first thing I did was make it talk to my husband’s Motorola Razr. Hmmm, Santa was pretty good to him this year. The second thing was to have a great bluetooth group grope at work. Engineers…
As an aside, there are variations on this PDA for other phone systems. The Audiovox XV6600 PDA Phone works with Verizon and seems to have a bonus - a camera.
The SX66 connects to my PC with ActivSync via USB, just like my old Toshiba. It shares the calendar, notes and contact list with Outlook. I don’t use Outlook for anything but to keep all that stuff backed up.
And if that’s not good enough, it also has an Irda port. I had a universal TV remote on the Toshiba, which came in handy more than once. I love a good practical joke.
And of course, I had to get some accessories:
Halloween, in case you aren’t a history freak, is a remnant of pre-Christian rituals - a night when the spirits came back to walk among us, and a chance to make up for the wrongs we committed against them when they were alive. “All Hallows E’en”. It seems that the urban folks were converted to Christianity but that more isolated country folk - farmers and the like - maintained their pagan rituals in conjunction with the new religion. In some cases, the local church created a festival for some saint to coincide with the Pagan festival in order to try to absorb it. The Christmas tree and the Easter bunny and Easter eggs are prime examples of co-opted Pagan imagery.
We talk about this at our Solstice celebrations.
The point of religion is to give us the illusion of control over a world that we don’t understand. Rituals, magic, prayer, all of them are based on faith rather than on empiricism and an understanding of cause and effect.
Anyway, while you are out having fun, you are also helping to keep the Old Gods alive. Good job!
I highly recommend Sir George Frazer’s “The Golden Bough”. The original 12-volume set is a vast compendium of folk rituals, categorized, compared to similar rituals, and with commentary on their original meanings. The single-volume abridged version omits Frazer’s vast bibliography.
The clouds above us join and separate, The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns. Life is like that, so why not relax? Who can stop us from celebrating? -Lu Yu
squid 
octopus 
christmas+decorations 
Ocean+City+MD 
cephalopod 
cephalopodmas
Halloween
Christianity
Pagan
folk+rituals
magic
