That is the death of 2 stars that you are seeing, as they let off material in their 800 year orbit of each other.  Phil Plait has lots more detail over at Bad Astronomy.

From the perspective of statistical analysis, the MBTI’s fundamental premise is flawed. According to Myers & Briggs, each person is either an introvert or an extravert. Within each group we would expect to see a bell curve showing the distribution of extraversion within the extraverts group, and introversion within the introverts. If the MBTI approach is valid, we should expect to see two separate bell curves along the introversion/extraversion spectrum, making it valid for Myers & Briggs to decide there are two groups into which people fit. But data have shown that people do not clump into two separately identifiable curves; they clump into a single bell curve, with extreme introverts and extreme extraverts forming the long tails of the curve, and most people gathered somewhere in the middle. Jung himself said “There is no such thing as a pure extravert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.” This does not support the MBTI assumption that people naturally separate into two groups. MBTI takes a knife and cuts the bell curve right down the center, through the meatiest part, and right through most people’s horizontal error bars. Moreover, this forced error is compounded four times, with each of the four dichotomies. This statistical fumble helps to explain why so many people score differently when retaking the test: There is no truly correct score for most people, and no perfect fit for anyone.

Our event will take place on Saturday, September 18th at 7:30pm.  I’m hoping for a clear night, because if it’s fully cloudy there won’t be much to see, so we’ll have to cancel.  Here is the flyer I managed to come up with (based on the template from the observe the moon team):

It’s also available as a PDF for printing.

The overall list of topics going on at the Farm in their series is pretty interesting stuff.  As I’ve not seen it online yet, I’ll duplicate it here for anyone interested:

Exploring a Sense of Place

A series of guided walks and events on the Vassar Farm & Ecological Preserve

Wednesday September 8th at 3:30 PM: Walk led by Dr. Mark Schlessman and Keri VanCamp

Topic: Wildflower Walk *

Saturday September 18th at 7:30 PM: Program led by Mid-Hudson Astronomy Club

Topic: Astronomy:  International Observe the Moon Night

Wednesday September 22nd at 3:30 PM: Walk led by Dr. Lucy Johnson

Topic: Native American Usage of the Preserve and Valley*

Saturday September 25th at 9 AM:  Walk led by the RT Waterman Bird Club

Topic:  Bird Watching

Wednesday September 29th at 3:30 PM:  Walk led by Dr. Kirsten Menking

Topic: Glacial History of the Preserve*

Wednesday October 6th at 3:30 PM: Walk led by Hannah Clark and Jason Carter

Topic:  Forest Ecology and Invasive Insects*

Wednesday October 13th at 3:30 PM: Walk led by Dr. Meg Ronsheim, Abby Falk-Rood, & Keri VanCamp

Event:  Mushroom Foray and Basic ID*

Wednesday October 20th at 1:30 PM: Program led by Keri VanCamp & Emily Vail

Event:  Wetland Buffer Planting*

Wednesday October 27th at 6:30 and 8 PM (Rain date October 29th):  Program led by Hannah Clark, Jason Carter, & Dr. Glenn Proudfoot

Topic:  Northern Saw Whet Owl**

All events could be canceled due to adverse weather.  Please contact us if the weather forecast is questionable.  Participants should meet in the parking area near the large red barn across from the community gardens at the Vassar Farm.

*A van will also bring people from campus to the farm.  It will depart from the main circle 15 minutes before the program begins.

** Space for this event is limited. People must RSVP to Hannah or Keri. This event will be held at the Collin’s Field Station.

To RSVP or for additional information contact:  Hannah Clark at hannah3890@yahoo.com or Keri VanCamp at (845) 437-7414.

Twitter’s OAuth implementation and open source clients

Requiring third-party developers to embed a consumer secret key in the source code of their Twitter client applications potentially puts free and open source (FOSS) client software at greater risk of key exposure than closed-source client software. The key would be visible as plain text in the source code, where anybody could find it and use it for their own purposes. Indeed, one can already easily find dozens of OAuth consumer secret keys by using Google’s code search engine.

Twitter felt that allowing FOSS Twitter clients to use OAuth posed an unacceptable risk. The company warned that it would invalidate any OAuth keys that it found published in the source code of FOSS client applications. This was deeply troubling to the developers who maintain such software, including me. I am the developer behind Gwibber, a GPL-licensed microblogging client that is used in Ubuntu and other Linux distributions.

This is a damn shame.  I just fixed up my little script that talks to twitter, and I’ll be publishing keys out to github later this week because it’s asinine that they would build an interface which makes it overly burdensome to use open source clients.  OAuth has some neat ideas in it, but making it fundamentally Free and Open Source hostile seems like a bad direction to go.

From SpaceWeather.com:

Last night, the atmosphere over Australia settled into a state of rare, crystal-clear transparency — and it did so directly above the observatory of world-famous astrophotographer Anthony Wesley. The result was a picture of Jupiter that some onlookers are calling the finest-ever by an amateur astronomer. “On a scale of 1 to 10, the seeing was a 12,” says Wesley. “Now I know what it must be like to see the giant planet from space.”

Just remember, this was taken, from the ground, by an Amateur, with a 16″ telescope.  Really freaking cool.

We used to think Pluto was all on it’s lonesome out in it’s far away orbit.  It turns out, we just got lucky in finding it, and it’s part of a class of objects, now called Trans Neptunian objects.  As more and more objects got discovered in the Kuiper belt it became pretty clear that there were good odds we’d find something larger than Pluto.  In 2005 we did, it’s now called Eris.

I remember with fondness when I got myself a copy of DHTML the Definitive guide, which had 200 pages of all the html tags, all their style attributes, when they were supported, what they did, and some examples.  That, and the “view source” button on every browser, made learning HTML layout something that was feasable.

The mobile application space lacks both of those things.  While there is a decent amount of open source applications on top of Android, they cover a very small set of similar appearances, so I definitely find my motivation can sometimes wane while trying to figure out how to right align columns in a table.

I think this explains a lot about why Flash isn’t going away any time soon.  Learning new layout paradigms is a heck of a lot harder than learning a new programming language, and that kind of investment is far more of a lock in than a language.  It’s the reason my Chumby will probably never end up with any custom widgets from me (as I’d need to learn Flash), and the Meego effort has a very dim future (C++ and Qt… in 2010… really?).  At this point I’m willing to put in the time to learn a new layout and UI model for Android because I’ll be able to use it on my phone and my TV, but my interest in having to get good at a 3rd UI paradigm is just not thrilling.

Update: I managed to get over the hump with learning a bit about building custom components.  Hopefully that means a new release of Where is Io out this week.

“Would you like to play a game?”

It looks like the software patent cold war that we were in is over, and we’re now moving into a software patent hot war.  Ars Technica has a piece on Paul Allen’s IP holding company suing 11 big internet giants.  This comes after a number of large patent suits, including Oracle v Google, Nokia v Apple, Apple v HTC.

I’m hoping that we actually get another case in front of the supreme court for them to rethink punting on deciding on software patents.

Snopes has the entire history of the event.  I’ve corrected 3 people now on the subject already this year.  If you see this in the wild, send them to the Snopes site.

Smokey the Bear Says – “Only you can prevent wild hoaxes from spreading on the internet.”

The Vermont Historical Society has this incredible video on the event, which is really something to behold (embedded below).

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

If you are in the mid Atlantic area, and are interested in Linux and Open Source, you should check it out.

Investigating Cults

David Sullivan, Professional Cult Investigator

Learn about cults from a man who’s seen them from the inside. Professional investigator Sullivan describes the process of identifying and investigating cults, providing an overview of how cults recruit, convert and maintain control of their members through a variety of psychologically coercive techniques. A licensed private investigator for more than 19 years, Sullivan has worked in collaboration with leading authorities in the area of undue influence.

MP3 Audio Here.

Richard Dreyfuss

Academy Award-Winning Actor; Founder, The Dreyfuss Initiative

Recognized for his roles in Jaws, American Graffiti, and Mr. Holland’s Opus, Richard Dreyfuss has issued a call to action in our classrooms. Dreyfuss believes civic education is the foundation of public education; yet over the years, it has become more about memorizing facts and dates than understanding context and history. By incorporating logic, history, and critical thinking with a national standard, Dreyfuss hopes to inspire a new way of teaching and preparing America’s youth. Learn more about his bold national initiative to enhance civic education in today’s classrooms.

MP3 Audio Here.

Tony Hsieh

Author, Delivering Happiness; CEO, Zappos

In conversation with Geoffrey Fowler, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Meet the man who built a business based on happiness. Hsieh co-founded LinkExchange and sold it to Microsoft for $265M in 1998. He then took Zappos from $1.6M in 2000 to more than $1 billion in 2008. Contrary to the take-no-prisoners persona one might presume would be required to rake in such revenues, Hsieh has made his mark by focusing his business model, ironically enough, on happiness. Hsieh now brings you his secret recipe for Zappos success. How does a company go from $1.6M to more than a billion dollars on happiness? And how did Hsieh make Zappos one of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For”?

MP3 Audio Here.

David Boies: Challenging Law and Making History

Attorney; Chairman, Boies, Schiller and Flexner LLP

Pamela S. Karlan, Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law, Stanford University; Co-director, Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, Stanford University – Moderator

Challenging Law and Making History: Overturning CA’s Prop 8 Gay Marriage Ban.

Boies has been deeply involved in some of the most prominent legal disputes of the past two decades. From serving as special counsel to the Justice Department in the United States v. Microsoft trial to representing Vice President Al Gore in the Bush v. Gore case following the 2000 presidential election, Boies’ legal experience is extensive and varied.

Together, Boies and former Solicitor General Theodore Olson have successfully overturned California’s Proposition 8 ban on gay marriage. The judge’s ruling on the case happened just one day before this program was recorded. In a recent interview with Salon.com, Boies asserted that overturning this legislation will “improve the lives of gay and lesbian couples…it will not in any way harm heterosexual marriage.” In 2010, Boies was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. Boies provides a behind-the-scenes look at the Prop. 8 case, and provide insight into what it takes to challenge the status quo and make legal history.

MP3 Audio Here.

I’m also sticking these all over in Sean Cast as well, for anyone that wants to add to their normal podcast listening.

This is way too cool. The European Southern Observatory just released a press release with data for a exo solar system they’ve been studying which appears to have 7 planets. More importantly, the planets are in a pattern very similar to our solar system, with the smallest one found as small as 1.4 earth masses.

This was presumably rushed out after it was announced yesterday that on Thursday NASA would be making the first Keppler announcement.  Which means there may well be even more exciting planet news by the end of the week.

# sudo update-alternatives –config wish
There are 3 choices for the alternative wish (providing /usr/bin/wish).

Selection    Path                   Priority   Status
————————————————————
* 0            /usr/bin/wish-default   10000     auto mode
1            /usr/bin/wish-default   10000     manual mode
2            /usr/bin/wish8.4        841       manual mode
3            /usr/bin/wish8.5        840       manual mode

Then type ’3′ and hit enter.  Now you’ll be using tk8.5 by default, and miracle of miracles your eyes won’t be scarred by jagged ugly fonts in gitk anymore.

The national parks’ history is full of examples of misguided visitors feeding bears, putting children on buffalos for photos and dipping into geysers despite signs warning of scalding temperatures.

But today, as an ever more wired and interconnected public visits the parks in rising numbers — July was a record month for visitors at Yellowstone — rangers say that technology often figures into such mishaps.

People with cellphones call rangers from mountaintops to request refreshments or a guide; in Jackson Hole, Wyo., one lost hiker even asked for hot chocolate.

Though the article doesn’t really stress this point, this has always been a problem.  People that are clueless about nature, possibly because they’ve been sheltered from it in the cities or suburbs, are clueless, whether or not they have a cellphone or gps.

When I finally figured out that it attempted to work with Amazon I noticed that I had disabled all the sites I actually use in the tool.  Twitter is rediculously slow under https, like 1 minute to load a page slow.  Google images aren’t searchable under https, so you don’t see it on the sidebar as an option.  Some of the facebook javascript wasn’t fetchable over https.  Wikipedia inbound search from google doesn’t work if it’s enabled.

It makes me wonder what part of the internet is used by the folks writing this addon, because it doesn’t seem to be the same part that I’m using.

For those that are already developers, this approach to developing is going to be tedious. We are not the target audience. This is really designed to open up the world of mobile development to a much wider set of people, especially as an introductory computer science course.

User Experience (UX) is important on many levels, some times surprising ones.  Reusing words that people think they understand in ways they don’t causes a lot of confusion and adds a lot of confusion (and thus waste) to systems.  I did propose that priority words were annotated with a number, so those outside the core could get a handle on what’s going on, which was a well received comment, and will go into the next version of this tool.

Rule 1: Spend as much time on logistics as on content

Most events run by amateurs are “amateur” because they fall down on details. They have a great idea, or a great speaker, but the event turns out mediocre because the sound system doesn’t work or because there’s no parking nearby. It’s more fun to focus on the big stuff, but getting the little stuff wrong will kill you just as dead as getting the big stuff wrong.

Overall a very good refresher on the things to pay attention to when trying to run public events, especially handy if you are involved in local groups doing community outreach.