MAC Space Background Badly Photoshopped, Part 1/?

I recently started using a MAC at work, naturally I chose the background image which has something to do with space.

But the more I looked at it, the more it bugged me, I didn't know why - and then it hit me - it was totally faked. Those artsy people at Apple computers couldn't find a single real photograph to use from the universe of breathtaking space photography and so they made their own instead.

Here is what a moonrise from space looks like in real life. This photo was taken by an Expedition 29 crew member aboard the ISS.

source: spaceref.com

Lets notice a few things about the MAC artistic interpretation of a moonrise from space:

• The stars. Look at any of the photos that include earth or the moon from the apollo missions and you won't see any stars. Certainly not a fairy tale splattering of stars probably cut and pasted from a Disney movie.
• The moon looks perfectly circular. When looking at the moon through the atmosphere it is going to look at least a little distorted. This happens on earth too so no big surprise there. The color should also change.
• The sky is super blue.... not once you get to space; then the sky is black, it doesn't do that 'gradient' thing for very long.
• The dark side of the moon is light. This isn't even that big of a deal compared to all the stars that are shining out there, but in real life you wouldn't see the light of earth's albedo on the shadowed side of the moon in the same picture that you see the full-on daytime sunlight on the adjacent side. This basically means that they took a photo of a full moon and randomly added some shading to it. I wouldn't be surprised if the angle is completely impossible (knowing the latitude of the earth photo would help to calculate that).
• The whole picture looks too blue IMHO. Don't have anything scientific to say about it other than that.
• The moon's proportions look off (a telephoto lens? Then the earth below would look more distorted).

To end, lets remember the time that Aryeh sent a balloon to the edge of space and took this picture. You don't need to be an astronaut to know what an earth/space boundary looks like.

The 1929 market chart is not scary!

The Wall Street Journal's MarketWatch blog recently posted an idiotic chart comparing the behaviour of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the months leading up to the stock market crash of 1929:

I want to preface the rest of my comments by the following disclaimer: I am not a financial professional -- I leave all serious finance stuff to my talented MBA wife. My approach to economic issues can be summed up by this XKCD comic:

With that out of the way, let's continue. Aside from the fact that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is stupid, there are lots of people commenting on the two-scale axes thing. See here or here, for example. Their basic complaints are that it's not fair to compare the two sets of data because they are scaled to overlay. This is what they look like on the same scale. The red portion is the scary part leading up to the crash:

A little more clarity can be seen graphing these on a log scale:

In any case, this is where my lack of economic knowledge comes in -- I have no idea if that's a good argument or not. But, the graph is still nonsense. First of all, that graph is especially bad, since they didn't scale things correctly and also left out the range of dates used for the 1928-29 dataset. I've done my best to replicate and correct it:

Here, the past and current DJIA values are scaled to fit in the same window. As you can see, there is quite a lot of overlay between the pre-crash data and current data... so perhaps it is scary?

Second of all, and more importantly, I suspected that there were lots of times when the market looks like it does now. So, I wrote a program to go through every 84 week hunk of Dow data and compare it to the current period. This is a graph of the norm of the difference between past periods and the current period:

As you can see, there are many times where the difference drops and there is a time where the Dow's behavior is similar to the current one. In fact, the time with the closest overlap began March 16, 1954:

In other words, this point:

In other words, EVERYONE PANIC!!!   Oh... wait... maybe not. The thing is, people see patterns everywhere, even when they don't exist. To show you what I mean, I made this video:

There's a LOT of self-similarity in the Dow Jones Industrial Index, so it's not surprising that some arbitrary hunk of time-series data looks like another arbitrary hunk. But there is nothing "eerie" or scary about it.

Falling water west of Boston

I've been on a bit of a mission lately. Last weekend I visited a highway through a forest. This weekend I went around exploring various waterfalls near where I live. They will hopefully be tied together for you over the next few weeks.

This one is at the edge of the WhiteHall Reservoir

The sudbury river and Framingham reservoir number one

Village Falls Park, Needham MA. This is actually the Charles River that runs through Boston, just much further upstream.

Wintertime in Teaneck

Wintertime in Southern California

 My mother has been visiting me for a week.  Sunday we went whale watching.

Harbor Seals.

 

Here we have an offshore oil rig in its natural habitat.  We did not want to get to close and risk spooking it.

 Anacapa Island one of the five islands that make up the Channel Islands National Park.  The park itself extends one mile into the water around each of the five islands.

 Seabirds, there are examples of California Brown Pelican, Cormorant, and Blue Footed Booby.

 The birds in the middle are Blue Footed Booby.

California Brown Pelican.

Sea Lion.

A whole bunch of sea lions.

Two gray whales.  They where about 45 feet long.

The boat we where on.

 Me with Giant Coreopsis a plant that is all over the Channel Islands (photo credit: my mother).

Me with a fake elephant seal, they can grow to almost twice the size of this one (photo credit: my mother).

Wintertime in Boston

Lather, rinse, repeat?

The manufacturers of this soap felt the need to include these helpful directions:

In case you can't see the picture, it says:

Directions:
Use to wash hands as you would use any hand soap

I honestly do not understand this at all. Who in the world are these instructions written for? Do they really think there is someone out there, who, upon purchasing the soap, realizes "Wow, I've never used this particular brand of soap before. I wonder if there are any special instructions for using this particular soap?" And, if someone really is looking for written instructions on how to use a hand soap, this won't even help!

But this made me curious: Is this the standard instruction on all hand soaps? Readers, let me know in the comments what your soap says.

How to lift a mattress up to a balcony

From deep within the lanseybrothers blog draft archives; dated March 2012:

Here is a quick schematic for how to lift a mattress up to a second story balcony if you have three-four people to help and two ropes. The rope that goes under needs to be pretty strong, the rope that goes over does not need to be very strong. None of the people need to be that strong - but the people on the bottom need to be strong enough to lift the mattress about a foot at at time. Numbered instructions below:

1. Set the people and ropes up as shown in the diagram (strong rope tied to balcony at right).
2. Have everyone below give a short heave, and let the strong rope person take up the slack.
3. The upper person in the middle is just there to keep the mattress balanced on the strong rope, and should not need to pull up very strongly.
4. Do this several times until you can just tip the mattress over into the balcony.

Note 1: make sure that the person pulling the strong rope is standing to the side of where the rope is tied (or you will not the get the top of the mattress above the banister.

Note 2: This is a true story.

Aryeh and a laser pointer

Here is a fun picture of Aryeh and a laser pointer.