@marsphoenix is a Twitter feed created by the guys at NASA to document what the Phoenix Mars lander is up to. It's written in first-person: "Sunny days and subfreezing nights," read a recent update. "I've been digging up a few new locations, looking for places to grab more samples for the instruments."

Kinda fun. It personalizes the whole thing. The lander takes questions from people on Twitter: average temps for the day, plans, equipment, findings, what have you. Plus, tweets from a robot like "We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE!, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t! best day ever!" are just too cool for words.

It's a bit depressing though, because the Phoenix lander has a very finite lifespan. It's not designed to last through a Martian winter. Sometime in the next couple of months, it'll be encased in "ice" (actually frozen carbon dioxide) and will freeze, if the darkness doesn't cut its power supply first.

@marsphoenix has been both up-front and weirdly sanguine about its impending doom. "The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will monitor the encroaching ice cap from above," read another recent tweet. "I won't see it. Darkness will get me first."

I predict a fair amount of net.grieving when @marsphoenix finally succumbs.

---

I promised an update on that hundred pushups site.

I started messing around with the hundred-pushups program somewhere in mid-June. When I first started out, I could manage maybe 10-15 pushups before exhaustion set in.

The program goal is to be able to do 100 consecutive pushups, and about 8 weeks later I'm not quite there yet. I can now knock off over 100 non-consecutive pushups no problem - i.e. a set of 35 pushups, pause, a set of 30 pushups, pause, etc. etc. Give me another month or two and I expect I'll be at 100 consecutive pushups.

So it does work. There's no question that my arms are stronger than they used to be. Three big caveats, though:

1. It takes awhile. I can't imagine trying to do this in six weeks unless you were already in fairly good shape to begin with. Give yourself some extra time.

2. It's not an exercise program by itself. All it works is your upper arms, chest and back. For everything else, you'll have to do other things. It was a nice "gateway," though. It wasn't long after I started the hundred pushups thing that I started running again.

3. You have to watch your form. I hadn't realized it, but for a long time I'd been bracing a bit with my left arm while I was doing my push-ups, and my left arm is now significantly stronger than my right. Free weights - specifically, dumbbells - will fix this.

Give it a try. You might surprise yourself.

I spent most of yesterday sitting in a King County Courthouse juror's box, listening to several not-quite-lawyers argue a murder case in front of a (real) superior court judge.

The case was imaginary but interesting. They use variations on the same scenario every year, so I won't post the details online, but it involves a shooting between two highly questionable characters in a dive bar. The questions are legal, not deductive: it's not "did this guy shoot the victim?" but "was the shooting justified?"

(No, bubblesutonium wasn't counsel on the case. This was a favor to one of her classmates.)

Today I get to catch up on all the housework, homework and grading that I didn't do yesterday, plus all the work I missed late last week after tweaking something in my lower back. God bless 222s, but they chop my IQ by about forty points. Fortunately I'm mostly back up to speed and back to good old Advil, which still lets me form coherent sentences.

Meanwhile, some bemusement:

I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have To Kill You. Coming soon to a movie theater near you. Any and all resemblance to the plot of first season Buffy is strictly coincidental.

--

File under Thank God This Woman Didn't Go To Hampshire. Alisa Shvarts, a Yale art student, announced that her senior project was her story of the nine months wherein she artificially inseminated herself as many times as possible, forcing miscarriages whenever she got pregnant. Cue total outrage (and that's a tiny, tiny sample). Warren Ellis called performance art bullshit, and as it turns out, he was right.

Shvarts, no idiot, published a piece the next day saying no, really, I did it. Honest, along with the usual academic pseudo-intellectual justification about miscarriage as "an act of reading constructed by an act of naming," and "destabilizing the locus of that authorial act." Confused conservative bloggers still don't get the joke, but I'm not sure the artist does either.

Thanks to rollick, I now know that you -- yes, you -- need to read this Onion AV Club interview with Lou Perryman and Sonny Carl. Never heard of them? Neither had I.

I was going to explain why, but I really can't do any better than to quote Ms. Robinson:

"Read this, you fools. It will satisfy all the cravings you didn't know you had for lucid descriptions of what it's like trying to bash out a low-level TV/Hollywood career, stories about making movies on a shoestring, and extensive, explosive profanity."

In lieu of actual content, have a webcomic that is a Darwinian explanation of marketing by sex appeal, or something.

chanphenglew brings us this important bulletin from the Onion News Network:

( Always remember to back up your Internet. )

Dear universe:

I will require one (1) of the following working, steampunk-modified system setups at your earliest convenience:

via Steampunk Workshop

Thank you for your prompt attention in this matter.

Regards,

WoS

thanks prosewitch

A couple things that have been making their way around the intertubes lately:

If you want to know if Spot loves you so, it's in his tail

When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.

A study describing the phenomenon, “Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli,” appeared in the March 20 issue of Current Biology. [NYT]

Quantum physics says goodbye to reality

Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual quantum events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by extra "hidden variables". Now physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism -- giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871). [PhysicsWeb]

Text reveals ancient secrets

In medieval times, scribes would occasionally recycle old parchment for books. Sometimes you can use X-ray imaging to discern the original writing from the parchment. Scholars investigating one such item, a medieval prayer book called the Archimedes Palimpest, had already found a unique work by Archimedes and a 2300-year-old text by an Athenian politican. Now they've found a previously lost commentary on Aristotle's work by a famed philosopher named Alexander of Aphrodisias, from about AD 200. All from one prayer book. [BBC]

Oh, and somebody found an Earth-like planet. Pity it's 20 light years away.

ETA: greygirlbeast also points out that the Prototaxites, tree-like organisms with 20-foot tall trunks that lived about 350 million years ago, were actually fungi. That's right: a 20-foot-tall mushroom. [Science Daily]

I have very low patience for most YouTube videos, especially fan recreations of SF tropes.

Which is why you need to watch Ryan vs. Dorkman II.

Best lightsaber fight I've seen in years.

For schmalturm and nomadicshiner: the armor of the future, now available on eBay. Except what the hell good is armor that leaves your knees exposed in a crouch?

For cupcakebandit, fraxl, s1obhan, and atonal: The simplified map of the US interstate system. Wonder what Tom would say about that visual?

For all my TA friends: the truth has been revealed.

For American Idol fans: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6].

For you: A sad story leads to the best headline ever. Dick Cheney, please call your office.

Good night. Or good morning, as the case may be.

Random Internet fame and infamy seems to be descending on several people I know today.

schmalturm found ketina's contribution to Eternal Fame: her Microsoft interview question. "You're in a 10 foot by 10 foot stone corridor. The Dark Lord appears. What do you do?"

I borrowed spoomeister and pinky_ki for a cameo appearance on Metroblogging Seattle. Heh heh.

The Onion's Chicago offices were closed today after one or more frozen pipes exploded, sending brown water everywhere and flooding the entire building. rollick has the story, sadly but understandably without pictures. Tasha, ma'am, I sure hope you got to spend some time in a very hot soaking tub after that little incident.

A lot of the course I teach is about understanding your audience and tailoring the message you're trying to deliver appropriately.

I'm thinking of using this site as an example of what happens when you're trying too hard.

---

While we're on the subject of analysis, my TA friend Lauren (not from my department) helpfully informs us from personal experience that writing "Good anal." on student papers may be misconstrued.

---

My cat Sandy is currently hoping that I'll fall asleep at my desk so that she can start nibbling on my hair, scalp, and brains with impunity. I think I'll disappoint her and go to bed.

The Internet is full of Useful Things this morning:

From the cooking community, we find the "Good Eats" drinking game.

There are writers who are also business-savvy, and then there are writers who would really rather just write, thanks ever so. Peter S. Beagle was one of the latter, to his cost. The author of The Last Unicorn apparently signed a couple of very unfavorable contracts in the late 70s and early 80s, and as a result has seen hardly a penny of royalties from his script for the animated versions of The Last Unicorn. silenceleigh points out that you can now buy a copy of The Last Unicorn on DVD from Conlan Press, which promises to actually share the profits with Beagle.

I'm working my way through this list of webcomics nobody has heard of, from an Arisia con panel. I already knew about XKCD, which has both the most romantic comic in history and the funniest cryptography joke ever, but the others are new to me. Cool stuff.

Aaaaaaaaaaaand....I really should stop procrastinating and finish this @#$%ing grading.

Should Americans Be Allowed To Marry?

...ganked from rezendi, who accurately notes that this video is "equally hilariously offensive to Canadians as well."

I can't begin to tell you how much of my first year of college was lost on "Commander Keen and its sequelae. It was perhaps inevitable: now you can play it on the Web.

Commander Keen, via Macromedia Flash.

Yes, dinosaurs walked the Earth, and side-scrolling EGA games were state-of-the-art hot shit.

The map of the Middle East, notoriously, was created by and for European interests. The diplomats who carved up the land paid little or no attention to the cultural or ethnic boundaries of the people who lived there. The world has been paying the price for that short-sighted greed ever since.

There's a peculiar irony in a Western scholar redrawing that map - and in the Armed Forces Journal, no less. I'm still fascinated.

Here's the map today.

Here's what the revised map might look like, with a full discussion.

(via The Map Room)

BLDG/BLOG claims it's about 'architectural conjecture' and 'urban speculation,' but I think it's more about rearranging my head on a daily basis.

For instance:



from Archinet, via BLDG/BLOG

I'm developing a real love for the Consumerist site. First we had the tale of the MySpace cancellation.

Now there's an MP3 of someone trying to cancel their AOL service, starring an increasingly desperate CSR who clearly is trained to say absolutely anything that will avoid having to cancel the service.

(ETA: The CSR was later fired.)

Reminds me of when I called to cancel my DirecTV service. The guy in Bangalore (named "Alex," or so he said) was very apologetic but said he had to transfer me to a different department. The different department turned out to be a woman with a strong midwest American accent.

"You've been a longtime subscriber," she noted. "Can I ask why you're canceling your account?"

Well, I'm moving to a house where I can't get DirecTV service.

"Oh. Well, were you aware that it's illegal per FTC regulations for homeowners associations to restrict access to DirecTV?"

No, ma'am, I don't think you understand. My house is right behind a hill. The only way I could get DirecTV service would be for you to move your satellite.

Long pause.

"Oh," she said. "Well, I'm afraid there's not much we can do about that."

Didn't think so.

So there's MySpace, a community site that is a competitor to LiveJournal.

Apparently MySpace has decreed that in order to shut down your MySpace account, you must jump through some hoops. After you get through the dialogs asking you to please reconsider, MySpace claims they will send an e-mail confirmation. They don't. If you keep complaining, you're sent an e-mail instructing you to do the following:

If for some reason you should be unable to delete the account, provide the email plus password for your profile and we will cancel it for you. If you don’t remember the password or it has been changed, please send us a salute as verification and we can remove the account.

To send a salute, please do the following:

Create a hand written sign that says MySpace.com and your friend ID. Your friend ID is the number between ID= and &mytoken in your profile's URL.

Get an image, or digital picture of yourself with this hand written sign.

This is image is a salute. Next, reply to this e-mail with the salute as an e-mail attachment, or as an e-mail link to where it is uploaded.

Sure, whatever. Not surprisingly, there's a more efficient approach. Just upload a metric ton of porn to your MySpace site [NSFW] and wait for someone to notice. Consumerist used this method to get their MySpace account deleted in less than six hours.

The lesson for today? Porn is always an option.

That interview stories from hell thread left me cringing in sympathy and giggling hysterically, sometimes simultaneously. Y'all rock my world. If you haven't already contributed your story, please do.

---

I haven't decided whether I'm more tripped out by the icon or the logic in this post. It's entertaining, though.

It's hard to explain why I like this comic so much. Maybe it was all the Bloom County I read when I was a kid.