Archives for posts with tag: Devin
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Monetize vs. Monetitize

By Devin
August 4, 2010 //
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Here’s another cool movie of the recent complex solar eruption.

For the post I put up the other day about it, I uploaded a video from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory that I couldn’t find on YouTube yet. This morning, I got this email from everyones’ friends in Mountain View:

Your video August 1 Coronal Mass Ejection might be eligible for the YouTube Partnership Program, which allows you to make money from playbacks of your video.

Making money from your video is easy. Here’s how it works: First sign into your YouTube account. Then, review and complete the steps outlined here…

…If your video is approved, we’ll start placing ads next to the video and pay you a share of the revenue as long as you meet the program requirements.

We look forward to adding your video to the YouTube Partnership Program.

Thanks and good luck!

The YouTube Team

First time I’ve had something get enough hits to trigger their automatic moneygrubber— it’s an odd feeling. Kind of makes me feel like I need a shower. Video’s ineligible anyway, I think, since it’s publicly (i.e., government) produced footage.

Keep your eyes peeled tonight and tomorrow for more aurora! The second, slower coronal mass ejection is still arriving and I noticed earlier tonight that the Space Weather Prediction Center has extended its geomagnetic storm watch through Friday. I’m heading to Eastern Washington this weekend and am hoping against hope the ionosphere is still willing to put on a show that far out.

Oh and, here’s what Monetitizing looks like, if you were wondering:

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Categories maintenance, sciencenews, technology

In The Year 2525…

By Devin
August 2, 2010 //
1

Here’s a graph of 5-minute averaged gross X-ray flux for the past couple days from the GOES satellite. Basically, it’s a graph of energy in certain wavelength bands being emitted by the Sun :

It’s logarithmic, but don’t worry about that if you don’t understand it. The letters on the right are the weight classes for coronal mass ejections, or solar flares. As and Bs are your intercontinental phone line static and X is your transformers-exploding geomagnetic superstorm.

The other day, there was a C3 class flare from Earth-facing sunspot 1092. It’s a pretty moderate size as these things go, but probably just enough to touch off the Northern Lights. But here’s the cool part. The coronal mass ejection triggered a larger solar event, ripping a huge magnetic filament off with it. I think that’s the filament across the top in the image below from SOHO.

The filament is around half a million miles long— twice the distance between Earth and the Moon— and the whole damn thing took off with the flare and heaved straight for Earth.

Fingers crossed for dark clear skies— there oughta be one hell of an aurora at the least.

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Categories sciencenews

Hellcats Under The Pacific

By Devin
July 23, 2010 //
0

I saw on CNN.com breaking news about a 7.3 in the Moro Gulf, off the Philippines. CNN said it was “616 kilometers (575 miles) deep,” so I headed to usgs.gov to see which number was wrong. Arrived to pre-CNN news that the 616 was right— for the second of two 7.4 events within half an hour of eachother. The first earthquake was 576 kilometers deep; both are way deeper than the shallow Pacific Northwest variety I’m more used to.

Pretty funny screwup for CNN.com but not for poor Mindanao. Beam positive juju— they got hit horrifically by a tsunami from the same seismogenic zone in 1976.

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Categories sciencenews

Dispatches From The 21st Century

By Devin
July 22, 2010 //
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A real and entirely non-comforting email I received this evening:

Dear CLEAR customer,
We may have sent you an email notification on 7/21/2010 or 7/22/2010 indicating that your account information had been updated. If you did not make any changes to your account, please disregard this notice. It was an error on our part, and we have since corrected the issue.
We have verified that the information on your account is correct. No action is required on your part.
We value you as a CLEAR customer and apologize for the error.
Sorry for the inconvenience.

Sincerely,
CLEAR

On a brighter note, since we moved across town, our connection is working better than ever. 5×5 with no leaning out the window!

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Categories life

Design Anarchy

By Devin
July 21, 2010 //
0

All apologies to Secretary Wayne Clough— “a geotechnical engineer who reads and writes poetry,” a quote Michelle Obama gets laughs with in a pretty good speech— but I’m pretty sure this public exchange at the end of his introduction was the part more of the United States public was interested in:

In other design news, the Stranger put up (giant file size) versions of the draft environmental impact statements for the Deep Bore Tunnel. Crowdsourcing in the hope of somebody finding a chink in the armor, I think. Nothing I’ve seen so far strikes me as nearly so meaty a target as the fact that the WSDOT geotechnical report totally bungles our tectonic setting— no megathrust mention, attributing Nisqually to a shallow thrust “associated” fault, slickensides in boreholes downtown…

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Categories news

Hosted our last trivia night tonight…

By Devin
July 19, 2010 //
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…and I already have a category I’ll never get to use: Dick Cheney’s Miracle Heart. 5 heart attacks, first at 37— and now, he may have no pulse.

I shudder to think that my father’s pardon could have been physically near the general area where this photo was taken.

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Categories news

A More Serious Quickie Before Bed

By Devin
July 16, 2010 //
0

I was disgusted earlier this week by the size of the Goldman Sachs fraud settlement— amounting to about 3.4% of their 2009 bonus pool— leaving me primed to jump on this Elizabeth Warren bandwagon. I like the idea of Obama using this as his opportunity to make an M Night twist and not only tap Warren for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau but simultaneously clean house and can the cronies Geithner and Summers.

It’s a pretty elaborately constructed fantasy world I live in. Meanwhile, in the real one, Glenn Beck gave a Jesus “was a conqueror” and “make the Jews pay” speech and prostitute patron David Vitter is gobsmacked at the idea of Rachel Maddow exhibiting femininity.

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Categories news
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