Check this out: important early archaeology in the Philippines

Some amazing dates and places.  The Butuan Boats I have seen.  The argument still rages on: Where did Magellan really land?  At least three authoritative answers are to be seen.

Just this one link for today: 

15 Most Intense Archaeological Discoveries in Philippine History

Cloud Types

This is a good link.  There are undoubtedly dozens of others.  This one looks and feels right.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/learning/clouds

Back in the day I was wont to while away the mornings at the Weather Station on Moen, Chuuk, especially during the daily baloon launches.  These launches were coordinated throughout the Pacific, in a project of tne Weather Service.  I remember seeing the word "teleconnections," referring to interactions between atmosphere and ocean.  I'm, sure El Nino came into play.  And a device in a small protective closet (like those around the weather instruments at airports---this weather station was at the Chuuk Airport) that pumped air through a cannister for later analysis to detect isotope signatures from radiation blown around the Earth from Chernobyl, as I believe I recall.

And at this weather station I found a book, among several fascinating books, published by the UK Meteorological Office, an atlas of cloud types.  This was an amazingly unique and beautiful book, bound in plastic covers---so as to be water resistant---with extremely high quality photographs, and remarkably beautiful and apt photographs of each type of cloud.  The best I have seen.  I have searched over the years, and found nothing to equal it.

The observers at the Chuuk Weather Station took cloud observations, I think, hourly. 

I am not surprized then that the Meteorological Office would have a web site of this nature.

This is one for the list of links.  Every young man or young woman, of any age, would do well to have a gander at this site.

Fe asked "what is cloud nine?"  Here's what I found out from the Wiktionary:

Popular etymology references the 1896 edition of the International Cloud Atlas which defined ten types of cloud. The book defined the ninth cloud as the cumulonimbus, which rises to 10 km (6.2 miles), the highest a cloud can be. No conclusive evidence, however, confirms this origin.

This web site, the catalog of clouds, identifies Cumulonimbus as a low level cloud.  ?????

Another page on the same site references the cloud spotting guide:



Source: metoffice.gov.uk

On the same site may be found a link to a pdf of Cloud Types for Observers.  Could this be a later iteration of the same book I saw in the Chuuk Observatory?

[This  post bears no connection with the film or recent novel Cloud Atlas, which, nevertheless I would like to see.]

A Declaration of the Independence of the Mind

Written in 1919 by Romain Rolland (January 29, 1866–December 30, 1944) 

Arise! Let us free the Mind from these compromises, these humiliating alliances, this hidden subservience! The Mind is the servant of no man. We are the Mind’s servants. We have no other master. We are created to carry and to defend its light, to rally around it all men who are lost. Our role, our duty is to maintain a fixed point, to show the pole star amidst the storm of passions in the darkness. Among these passions of pride and mutual destructions, we do not single out any one, we reject them all. We commit ourselves never to serve anything but the free Truth that has no frontiers and no limits and is without prejudice against races or castes. Of course, we do not dissociate ourselves from Humanity. We toil for it — but for all humanity. We do not recognize peoples — we acknowledge the People — unique and universal — the People who suffer, who struggle, who fall and rise again, and who always advance along the rugged road that is drenched with their sweat and their blood. We recognize the People among all men who are all equally our brothers. And so that they may become, like us, ever more conscious of this brotherhood, we raise above their blind struggles the Arch of Alliance — the free Mind that is one, manifold, eternal.


More information here:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/07/declaration-of-the-independence-of-the-mind-romain-rolland/

Linac Coherent Light Source biological applications

I managed to find one article about this.

https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2014-12-04-x-ray-laser-reveals-how-bacterial-protein-morphs-response-light.aspx

Ironic: Emacs is native on OSX, not Ubuntu

Old News.  Just as troubling as ever.

I have yet to find a GNU/Linux distro on which Emacs is natively available, out of the box.

Emacs tool for browsing audio files

In this post on another blog of mine I posted emacs lisp code for a tool, which I boldly stole from dired-mplayer: dired-vlc.  Vlc is an excellent video player.  The code I posted allows one to rapidly and immediately play a video file/clip in Emacs dired, the directory browsing tool that I like the best. 

I have some video files, wav and mp3, and I wish to sort them.  So I edited the above mentioned code, and saved it to the file dired-audacious.el.  It was unbelievably easy and speedy to browse through the dozens of files, and delete the unwanted ones. 

In the above linked post, I mentioned another tool I cobbled together from other people's code, an improvement to org-mode's time marking code, to enable me to save a time mark within the video I am watching and type notes.  From these I have been able to easily compile indexes to videos and clips, for teaching purposes.  Dired-vlc was crucial. 

Here is the code for dired-audacious.  It works only if one runs linux and has audacious installed as a sound player.  

;==== %<===== Begin dired-audacious.el  =========
(require 'org)


(defvar dired-audacious-program "/usr/bin/audacious")


(defun dired-audacious (&optional timer)
  "Asynchronously start vlc on file through dired.  If an optional
argument is given (C-u), the org relative timer is started.  This
function purports to start vlc in rc mode, to leave open the
possibility of remote control."
  (interactive "P")
  (let ((file (expand-file-name (dired-get-filename)))
        ext files basename dir curr-file ;idx-file sub-file srt-file
    command options)
    (setq basename (file-name-nondirectory
            (file-name-sans-extension file)))
    (setq dir (file-name-directory file))
    (setq files (directory-files dir t basename))
    (delete file files)
    (setq command (format "\"%s\" \"%s" dired-audacious-program "--intf rc"))
    (if (y-or-n-p (format "Run command %s?" command))
        (start-process "junk" nil dired-audacious-program file)))
  (if (equal timer '(4)) (org-timer-start))
)


;; end dired-audacious.el

For explanation, please contact me

Search: Pencil Point Protectors

In days of yore, metal pencil caps were found at an art supply store.  I want some.  Amazingly, like most truly useful things, they are not easy to find.  Today is not the first day I have enlisted Google to search for some, or some way to make them.  Here's a little of what I found.  Dick Blick's art supply has some, at least online.

• Plastic Save-A-Point pencil caps.   These are all I found at Aaron Brothers.  They are crap.  Do not buy them unless you only sharpen pencils with a cheap plastic hand held sharpener.  The well sharpened point will protrude through the small hole at the point of the cap, and be easily broken off, or poke you.  
• DIY Paper point protectors 
• Jetpen has three or four varieties of point protectors
• Maybe Dick Blicks would have metal ones
• Plastic models (General Pencil?) at Aaron Brothers
• I think there may be a design on thingaverse for 3D printers.
•