You might want to review Brain Candy #16 - Iridium Satellite Spotting . I had my first unplanned Iridium satellite viewing a few days ago. Catherine and I were in Peninsula so I could complete my Winking Lizard World Tour of Beer project (see www.winkinglizard.com). I got out of the car and looked toward the front of the restaurant. There were two bright lights in the sky; one was exceedingly bright. I was pretty sure that it was an Iridium flare, so I watched it. It peaked in brightness and then faded rapidly in about 15 seconds. It met the criteria. I asked the waitress in the Winking Lizard if she knew what the latitude and longitude of the restaurant were and got a well-deserved blank stare. When we got home, I pulled up my copy of BC #16, looked at the data and found that I had indeed seen a magnitude -7 flare; as bright as any I had seen previously. In BC #16, I stated that -7 was the maximum for Iridium flares, but that wasn't correct. Some flares can be as bright as -9 (more negative is brighter, the Sun is -27 and the Moon is -12). By the way, the German Space Operations Center site from BC #16 has been privatized and has been renamed to www.heavens-above.com. It looks like they have spiffed it up from what I remember it to be. Give it a look.
I talked about the Tasmanian tiger at some length in BC #3. I've since found a site on the subject that really awed me. Take a visit to the Thylacine Museum at livingplanet.virtualave.net/000001_thylacine_museum_intro.htm. There you can find an impressive array of pictures, movies, facts and historical details about this weirdly beautiful and possibly extinct animal, all presented to great effect. One of the most famous thylacine pictures can be seen here at high resolution. It shows a captive thylacine which has its jaws open at an apparently impossible angle (thylacines hold the mammal record for how wide they can open their jaws). What I didn't know until I visited the site was that this is a thylacine threat display. Immediately after the shot was snapped, those huge jaws bit the photographer! Ouch! I give this site my highest recommendation.
In BC #6, I talked about Comic Strip Cornucopia. It's now on hiatus; often, sites like this don't return. I'm hoping it does. While you wait, you might take a look at www.politicalcartoons.com. They have recent cartoons for a huge number of cartoonists, as well as links to other political cartoon archive sites.
The last Brain Candy, #28, mentioned a dictionary site. Here is another: voycabulary.com. This takes a different approach to dictionaries. You can type in text or the URL of a web page and have this site process the results through a dictionary. Each word then has its own link to a dictionary definition. There aren't many dictionaries, but some of them are language dictionaries, so you can use it to look up foreign words. It's amusing, and in some cases, I expect it could be very useful.
In BC #4, I presented a book resource, and books have played a role in several other columns. If you like to use book reviews to help you decide what to read, go to www.booksindepth.com. It accesses book reviews from an impressive number of newspapers and magazines, both U.S. and foreign. It offers similar information for movies, travel, health and other topics.
John Schmid and I discussed web cams in BC #5. A site I just found, World of Webcams, claims to have links to over 900 outdoor sites. It's at go.to/wowcam. I tried it with the Kingston, Ontario and the Wollongong, Australia web cams. It looks like a convenient way to access web cams, but by default, it presents you with a framed view of the target page. I find this annoying. It's better to instruct your browser to open up the web cam site in a new window; then it will not be in a frame.
In BC #22, I talked about media sites. I found two new ones of note. One is at www.mediainfo.com/emedia. It's E&P Media Links. It lets you browse media sites by region. So far, I've only looked at newspapers in the U.S.; various small town paper sites were available (everything I wanted to see) and it was quite convenient. The other site is Gary Price's NewsCenter at gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~gprice/newscenter.htm. This site seems to focus on major media outlets and regional resources. Gary also has a Speech and Transcript center at gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~gprice/speech.htm that looks interesting.
Enough updating - here's a new site. I like politics and I'm a techie, too. When the two subjects mix, I'm usually very interested. There is a very interesting article titled "What Gives Them the Right?" which you can read at www.oreilly.com/news/tangled_1199.html. It deals with how we can fix the "software" problem (poor quality, high prices, excessive updates, monopolistic tendencies, low levels of innovation, etc) while potentially reducing government involvement with that industry. Read it; I think you'll find it interesting. I think I'll ask my legislative representitives to read it, too.
CATBAR - Brain Candy #29 - Reminiscing / Brian Rock / December 11 1999