Cranking

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Stop what you're doing. Actually, you don't have to stop what you're doing, right now, but please reserve a few hours of listening time over the next day or so in order for you to do these things. 1. Listen to Back to Work, episode #12 - "Chewie's Medal Is Not Canonical". 2. Listen to the 'After Dark' portion of the show. 3. Go read "Cranking" on 43folders. 4. Listen to Back to Work, episode #13 - "THE KID'S GREAT". 5. Listen to the 'After Dark' portion of the show. Merlin is awesome.

Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 Book About Flies

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I saw the news about the crazy price for this book come across one of the websites I visit and/or Twitter the other day. Today, I ran across an explanation of what was happening in this instance. Michael Eisen writes:

Amazingly, when I reloaded the page the next day, both priced had gone UP! Each was now nearly $2.8 million. And whereas previously the prices were $400,000 apart, they were now within $5,000 of each other. Now I was intrigued, and I started to follow the page incessantly. By the end of the day the higher priced copy had gone up again. This time to $3,536,675.57. And now a pattern was emerging.

Lightning Video

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I shot these clips in about 30 minutes time standing in our apartment window facing south towards Huntington. We live just off Eisenhower Avenue, across the street from the USPTO. This was just at the beginning of the storm. If my arm had not gotten tired from holding my iPhone 4, I probably could have gotten a few other really good shots. About an hour and a half after shooting this (while editing this together, in fact) a huge strike happened just a few hundreds yards from here, just outside our window.

Time-Lapse: The Mountain

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Less than a month ago I linked to a stunning video produced by Terje Sørgjerd called "The Auora". A little over a week ago, he posted a second video filmed on El Teide in Spain. El Teide is Spain's highest mountain and, as Terje writes, "one of the best places in the world of photograph the stars and is also the location of the Teide Observatories, considered one of the world's best observatories". Terje goes on to write:

The goal was to capture the beautiful Milky Way galaxy along with one of the most amazing mountains I know El Teide. I have to say this was one of the most exhausting trips I have done. There was a lot of hiking at high altitudes and probably less than 10 hours of sleep in total for the whole week. Having been here 10-11 times before I had a long list of must-see locations I wanted to capture for this movie, but I am still not 100% used to carrying around so much gear required for time-lapse movies. A large sandstorm hit the Sahara Desert on the 9th April and at approx 3am in the night the sandstorm hit me, making it nearly impossible to see the sky with my own eyes. Interestingly enough my camera was set for a 5 hour sequence of the milky way during this time and I was sure my whole scene was ruined. To my surprise, my camera had managed to capture the sandstorm which was backlit by Grand Canary Island making it look like golden clouds. The Milky Way was shining through the clouds, making the stars sparkle in an interesting way. So if you ever wondered how the Milky Way would look through a Sahara sandstorm, look at 00:32.