Old truck, new car

Cash for clunkers finally went through today and we traded the 1994 Trooper (15 mpg) for the 2010 Prius (50 mpg). The Prius is a beautiful car, but the Trooper was a trusty old friend for many years. Farewell, Trooper ole' buddy!

More coverage of the great Jupiter splat

Amateur Astronomers Are All Gazing at Jupiter - NYTimes.com: "In an age of “American Idol,” amateurs in every imaginable discipline seem to expect an eventual moment on the big stage, and Mr. Wesley certainly got his. A 44-year-old computer programmer in the town of Murrumbateman, outside Canberra, Mr. Wesley scooped the university observatories and government satellites when he noticed the black mark around 1 a.m. last Monday, his time, using the 14.5-inch-diameter reflecting telescope installed in his backyard, before retiring for the night to watch cricket and golf on TV, he told reporters."

Comment -- I have not seen the black mark on Jupiter. The planet does not rise until after midnight, and besides, it's been cloudy, cloudy, cloudy. It's one of the worst summers for observing that I can remember.

Besides, I'm not sure I'd be able to see it in my small telescope.

Low calorie bacon? Really, what's the point?

Futurismic - near-future science fiction and fact since 2001:

In a post entitled “The Neuroscience of McGriddles,” Jonah Lehrer (How We Decide; Proust Was a Neuroscientist) samples the “eerily delicious” McDonald’s product and reaches some dark conclusions:

…The most pleasurable thing about the sandwich isn’t the pancake or the bacon: it’s the calories. According to a recent paper in Neuron, the brain also receives rewarding input from metabolic processes that have nothing to do with the tongue. When you eat at McDonald’s, a big part of the pleasure comes from the fact that the food is sustenance, fuel, energy. Even mediocre food is a little rewarding.

"Indeed, even mice with an impaired sense of taste still prefer sugar water over both plain water and water with artificial sweetener. “What they enjoyed were the calories.” And humans’ desire for high-calorie food seems based on our evolutionary investment in a large cranium.

This is a troubling idea, since it reveals the very deep biological roots underlying the obesity epidemic. Let’s imagine, for instance, that some genius invented a reduced calorie bacon product that tasted exactly like bacon, except it had 50 percent fewer calories. It would obviously be a great day for civilization. But this research suggests that such a pseudo-bacon product, even though it tasted identical to real bacon, would actually give us much less pleasure. Why? Because it made us less fat. Because energy is inherently delicious. Because we are programmed to enjoy calories." (photo by shawnzam)

Comment -- How cool! I blog about neuroscience and bacon in the same post.

100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About | GeekDad | Wired.com

100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About | GeekDad | Wired.com

Audio-Visual Entertainment

1. Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
2. Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.
3. Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo. See what happens when you give a Walkman to todays teenager.
4. The number of TV channels being a single digit. I remember it being a massive event when Britain got its fourth channel.
5. Standard-definition, CRT TVs filling up half your living room.
6. Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.
7. High-speed dubbing.
8. 8-track cartridges.
9. Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.
10. Betamax tapes.
11. MiniDisc.
12. Laserdisc: the LP of DVD.
13. Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations. (Digital tuners + HD radio bork this concept.)
14. Shortwave radio.
15. 3-D movies meaning red-and-green glasses.
16. Watching TV when the networks say you should. Tivo and Sky+ are slowing killing this one.
17. That there was a time before ‘reality TV.’

Comment -- There's about 85 more "things your kids may never know about" on the list in this post.