Casiello Family Weblog

A rap song that reads better in the original Latin.

Cute – the Incredible Hulk has a blog.

on the NASA site

(via s-t)

Somtimes clothing tags don’t say the same thing in every language.

Well, Joanne, Gabe and I got up and saw a piece of the Venus transit this morning. Even after Sousa’s ‘Transit of Venus March’, Damon didn’t wake up! Oh, well, he can catch it in eight years.

I tried taking some photos and a video through a welder’s glass, but the cameras just didn’t have the zoom or resolution to show anything worthwhile, so all we have are our memories (and a few mosquito bites!)

Here are some pictures of the transit from all over the world, and a link to some videos.

Or you might have to wait 113 years!

For us East Coasters, the transit will be in progress by the time we can see the sun – it’ll be starting at 1:13 AM our time, and ending at 7:25 AM. Sunrise in Worcester is 5:11 AM.

West Coasters won’t see this one at all, but don’t worry, they’ll have a better view of the 2012 transit, and they won’t have to get up early – that one’s in the evening.

DON’T LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN! Use #14 welding glass, or an indirect method.

Here’s NASA’s page about the transit.

Another good site.

The Ecotarium is having a SkyWatch sleepover!

The last one was 122 years ago, before movies were invented. Here’s a movie of the last transit. (How? Massachusetts (yay!) astronomer David Todd made 147 photographs of the last transit on glass plates. In 2003, some astronomers at the Lick Observatory turned those plates into a QuickTime movie.)

(via MetaFilter)

Now this looks really cool! A water pump powered by kids playing on one of those playground spinning rides.

(via kottke.org)

An interview with Jane Jacobs – she doesn’t think the web will necessarily have a negative impact on communities and neighborhoods.

(via ip)

Spammer Howard Carmack was sentenced to 3 1/2 to 7 years in jail for sending 850 million spams, using 343 illegal email accounts under false names. Last May, Earthlink won a $16 million dollar lawsuit against him!

One down, lots more to go!

Monty Python alum Terry Jones agrees with Tony Blair, we *should* denounce those who threated the freedom and democracy that are synonymous with being American.

(via st)

Josh Abraham takes author Lynne Truss to task over her book Eats, Shoots & Leaves. And rightly so!

Fellow Worcester blogger apraetor found this on the National Park Service site:

(via New Scientist)

Observations of X-rays in galaxy clusters made from NASA’s orbiting Chanrda telescope confirm that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Analysis of supernova explosions and patterns in the cosmic microwave background already pointed to this, and all three give indicate that 75% of the energy in the universe is of the repulsive type needed to make the universe expand.

Repulsive? Expanding? They couldn’t be talking about…naah! I’m on a diet!

An entry from last January 16 (Don’t Try This At Home) originally linked to a video showing some stunt driving. Sometime in the intervening months that site got redirected to a porn site. This actually happens fairly frequently – if a site that’s at all popular lets their name registration lapse, even by accident, a porn site owner can immediately snatch it up and redirect its traffic to their site.

I apologize to anyone who followed the link and ended up seeing the porn site (especially Ben’s Newman Club friends – yikes!). I never intend for anything on this site to be worse than PG-13; if anyone sees anything like this again, please email brian at casiello dot net, and I’ll fix it right away. I also get notifications of comments, so if you just add a comment to a questionable entry, I can take care of it from there as well.

Just so you know, another problem common to weblogs is spam in comments. Spammers send lots of bogus comments to weblogs, all saying “Great site” or something like that, and fill it with pointers to their own sites; more often than not, these are porn sites as well. I have an automatic system in place to handle comment spam. It catches most of them automatically, and passes the rest on to me. But as yet, there’s no automatic way to handle links moving around. Sorry again!

(via Reuters)

An article on the Reuters website points to gasbuddy.com, which leads to worcestergasprices.com, a site with updated prices at area gas stations – ordered by price.

Cool!

(via boingboing)

An interview with (Dr.) Brother Guy Consolmagno, astronomer and curator of the Vatican’s meteorite collection.

(via st)

Tonight, the International Space Station will pass very close to Jupiter in the sky; a lucky few along an 80-meter path will see an eclipse! Hey! We’re pretty darn close to that line!

Check out line eighth line of this page – in Worcester, the sighting will start at 9:33, and last 6 minutes. Since Jupiter is close to overhead, the ISS should pass it around 9:36. Pretty much equivalent for Boston and Springfield, you can check for other cities here.

(via Dave Barry)

Tomorrow is International Tuba Day, so, umm, do something, uh, tuba-related.

A list of states and their residents’ average IQs. The list also includes which states voted for Bush and Gore, I had just never seen the IQ stats before. Good jaerb, Connecticut! And New Jersey – what’s up with that?

This is just cool! Check out the frame.