I come across all manner of links on a daily basis, and it seems I keep getting more and more about the election. I was going to post a variety of links and then bind it together with a pithy/sarcastic commentary, when I happened across this quote about webloggers from the 9/7/99 Chicago Tribune:

"A Weblog is a Web site that
maintains a constantly updated list of links to other sites;
those links can deal with any subject or focus on a
particular one. Webloggers typically offer pithy, sarcastic
commentary about the links."

(This was found via this site about the blogging phenomenon)
So screw it. This site is cliché enough without it. Besides, I'm trying to swear off my pithiness, if not the sarcasm. Instead, let's consider today's theme Space Is the Place.

Consider this site. Basically, you pop in your zip code and it tells you all the satellites, space debris, and space ships that are traveling above you that you will be able to see at a specific time. Pretty cool stuff. That way you can see stuff like this, the International Space Station. Now that the solar panels are unfurled it's one of the brightest things in the sky. That last link, which is a big picture, is really neat because the track it shows in the time lapse is actually a double track, because it was taken just after the Space Shuttle de-docked. These last two links were from Metafilter, which I notice I've linked a lot to recently. Well, the stuff is cool. Another cool space site is Terraserver which is pictures from space, specifically by satellite. Want to see your house from space? You can, if you know where to look. Terraserver was originally started by microsoft to act as a data serving challenge: is it really possible to manage several terabytes of information in a usable manner? I guess it is.

Also, astronomers announced today they've found four new moons around Saturn. We'll get to see them a lot better when the Cassini spacecraft arrives. I'm not sure how much to say about Cassini. . . . while in debate in college we ran a case to stop Cassini from being launched. Not that we as a team didn't like the idea of a dedicated spacecraft to Saturn, but rather the largest amount of plutonium ever sent to space didn't thrill us. Since we're now past the danger of the thing exploding, or burning up in the atmosphere during the two flybys, we can now just enjoy the science that comes out of it and hope that we never get that stupid again. I mean, seriously, let's not forget that even forgetting the radioactivity, plutonium is so toxic that a pound of it, equally distributed and shoved up every human's nose, would kill most of the world's population.

I'll post something this weekend, although according to my site meter no one really visits on the weekend anyway. Why is that? My theory is that people mainly like to visit from work, and don't really do much surfing on their own time. I'm not passing judgement -- this post was done from work.