Darkoshi

I want to say Jupiter is doing a lunar flyby tomorrow. The Lyrids meteor shower is expected to peak tomorrow night too.

The dark part of the crescent moon has been looking more visible than usual; a lighter shade of gray. Earthshine is brighter this time of year, according to those pages; the latter one gives an explanation as to why.

Looking at the moon recently I had the thought of it being a 5 days' journey away; not the kind of thought I used to have while looking at it.

Humans have been on the moon 6 times already; the last time was Apollo 17 in 1972. I hadn't remembered it being more than once.

I still want to find out why it wouldn't work to send a craft around the moon when the moon is in the new moon phase, so that the craft could see the far side all lit up. I imagine the sun's gravity causes problems with the trajectory, but then again the sun is so far away that I'm not sure.

My eye is back to looking nearly normal again. It took a bit under 2 weeks for the blood to clear up.

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Sometimes at 1am, you just have to make a pot of noodles.

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Some people are driven to go snorkeling in the frigid antarctic ocean, to take photos of vicious predators.

Some people are driven to spend 3 hours trying to get a single line of a SQL script to work right. And to spend yet another hour or two trying to get that Bluetooth adapter to work.

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Chia seeds really turn gelatinous when soaked in liquid! Chocolate soymilk + chia seeds = an almost effortless dessert. (Forestfen gave me a bag of chia seeds as a gift.)

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9th of March. And I haven't had time since my xmas vacation, to get back to my cassette -> mp3 conversion project.

I've been wanting to go back and watch all the prior seasons of Doc Martin. Maybe. So far, I've watched the movie that introduced his character, and 1 of the 2 movies that were prequels to the series. That's it. During the same time period, Qiao has watched about 5 or 6 whole seasons of Star Trek:Deep Space Nine.

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This brain-teaser intrigued me: "You are standing at a train station when a train goes by at 60 mph. At the back of the train there's a person who throws a baseball at 60mph out the back of the train. What does the ball do and how fast does it travel?"

The answer was "it drops to the ground, barely moving at all." That's sort of what I was guessing, though it was hard to visualize.

So if the person instead throws the ball at a lesser speed, then the ball falls towards the train, even though it is thrown in the other direction. At least, it would appear that way from the stationary observer's perspective.

And if you were wanting to toss the ball from the train to the person standing in the station, you'd have to throw it straight out from the side of the train, before you were even with the person, as the ball would continue moving in the train's travel direction even as it moves out away from the train.