There's a fancy new NASA video out which shows some love for the next-next mars lander (the mars science laboratory - new name, plz). Most notably, we're not just dropping a ballon-coverered lander and hoping for a right-side-up landing this time but this will surely contain it's own set of difficult engineering. Although I hate to be pessimistic about the entire thing, my failure-bet would be on detaching those little wires from the top of the actual rover after the lander places it gently on the surface of mars. Anyway, watch it yourself:

Mars Science Laboratory

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In lieu of the implementation of VoxPoints[1] I've gone and joined a service that actually has points: xbox live. After fighting with my WRT54G and Airport Express to do WDS (essentially have the AX act as a wireless repeater AND allow me to use the ethernet port on the AX as a way on to my network), the xbox 360 is online and I'm racking up points doing meaningless things in Lost Planet on easy mode. FYI and until I can add it to my sidebar[2]:

[1] Please ignore this if you're just trolling for new vox features
[2] See [1]

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I picked up an xbox 360 this weekend with Lost Planet and although it won't get turned on until I finish up my exams later this week, what other games should I get? Assume that Guitar Hero has already been suggested (because it has).

From what I've seen, Lost Planet looks pretty freakin' awesome. Halo 3 is pretty exciting also. Please suggest games that don't take 3 hours in-between saves because I really don't have that kind of time on my hands.

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I have a bunch of posts in perpetual draft form so I digress from them with some lolcat/physics humor. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you lolquarks:

Quarks Has A Flavor

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All this hot weather in San Francisco has been reminding me of Philadelphia summers. Really it's not that hot, but I'm just not used to the heat at all and, as my parents will tell you, I'm one cranky motherfucker when it's hot out and I'm uncomfortable (i.e. any time it reaches into the upper 80s). One particularly unbearable occurrence was the summer of '00 or '01 when Tom somehow signed us up for a computer job at Drexel University which, and obviously in retrospect, turned out to be the job that no one else wanted to do. We were working for one department or another and tasked with visiting every office under their command and taking inventory of the computer equipment they had. There is a certain joy that glimmers on the faces of people when they realize that they can pass the really hard, unrewarding work on to other people and these were the worst people to work for. People who barely said "Hi" in the mornings and "See ya" in the afternoons (who am I really kidding, they were mostly gone by noon) but just can't refrain from asking you if you're done with your multi-month project a couple times a day. Naturally, they wanted every number printed on the machines short of the ones printed on the underside of the processor so we spent a good number of hours sitting at various windows workstations pulling numbers from the registry or the inevitably impossible-to-view back panel and writing them down, only to return to our drab meeting room (which we were often kicked out of for actual meetings) to input them into excel. Naturally, every office we went to was air conditioned with the exception of the really obscure locations which were only twice as hot as it was outside and in the hallways. You might think the air conditioned offices were a perk and there you'd be wrong because the only thing I hate more than heat is being thrust from 90º+ heat to 70º air conditioning three times an hour.

So, now we have my three favorite things lined up in a row:

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Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory And the Search for Unity in Physical Law

Peter Woit

Peter Woit is the author of Not Even Wrong, the second book I've read on the failures of string theory and he's got my new favorite blog because of this line:

"For up-to-the-minute news about the Higgs, far better informed than any media source could ever be (and thus a great example of why blogs are changing the way the media works), your best bet is Tommaso Dorigo’s blog. His latest posting explains well what the current state is, and predicts that, with the data expected from the Tevatron through 2009, they should be able to have 2.5-3 sigma evidence for a 115 GeV Higgs if it is there, or if it’s not, rule it out at 95% confidence level up to 130 GeV."

Now all I have to do is get him to switch to Vox...

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Keeping track of the obscure locations in which Anil may or may not post to on any given day finally paid off with a brilliant animated gif mashup of G.W. and SNES-era Zelda.

Fairy Hunting With GWB

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