Star maps

Stellarium is a free downloadable software application that "shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope." Once I entered my longitude and latitude*, the program identified the constellations in the sky to my north . . . very neat.

* To find your longitude and latitude, enter your zip code here.

Hansen Dam

A few scenes from Roman Polanski's Chinatown were filmed here. My little detective goes looking for trouble on the top of the dam.

Big Steps and Brainwaves

I've noted this quote before . . .
Music is the pleasure that the human soul encounters from counting without knowing that it is counting. -- Leibniz
. . . but it came back to me again when I watched this video"

Getty Villa Daze

Lifestyles of the large and hungry

If you had to be a hippo, this would be a good one to be . . .

The Great Squirrel Uprising of 2007

They're out there. Beware.

Puppet reactions

What a 5 year old looks like at a puppet show . . .

No Frills

I used to love the Carol Burnett Show as a kid and this is a particularly hilarious skit:

The music of birds

Many musical works have paid homage to bird songs, including The Goldfinch by Vivaldi, The Hen by Rameau , The Cuckoo and the Nightingale by Handel, and Cirrus Minor by Pink Floyd. It was, of course, Father Kircher who pioneered the musical transcription of bird vocalizations in his Musurgia Universalis. But nobody, to our knowledge, went to greater lengths to notate avian music than the early 20th-century naturalist F. Schuyler Mathews. More.

Congratulations, graduates

Now on to kindergarten . . .