What the hell is going on at the Naval Observatory?

Maurene Dowd's column in the New York Times pointed out that on Google Earth, the Naval Observatory, residence of the Vice President, is shown as a blurry blob. Apparently this used to be true of a lot of buildings in DC, but Google found alternate sources for images of the White House and other buildings, which are perfectly clear. Only the Naval Observatory remains a pixelated blur.

I went to Google Earth and to verify this, and also noted that they don't even tell you the address. If you type in "Naval Observatory" it takes you to some generic DC location. You have to follow Massachusetts Avenue northwest from Dupont Circle to the giant circular blob which is the observatory grounds. (I used to take walks up to the observatory when I worked on Dupont Circle, so it's a familiar route).

Not only that, but MSN's virtual earth shows the same blob!

I'm guessing that they've installed some sort of anti-aircraft facilities there and they don't want them seen.

My other conclusion is that MSN Virtual Earth, comparatively speaking, sucks bigtime! I had to download software for Google Earth, but it's so much slicker, I don't mind.

TD #2

Brady just tossed another TD, and I win the league!

Things were looking pretty bleak for me yesterday. I was down by 30 points, with only my defense and QB left to play. Fortunately I have the Chicago D, the most valuable "player" in the league and a total rock. They got me 19 points yesterday against Green Bay, so I knew I had a chance.

Sadly, tonight is the end of Monday Night Football on ABC. I grew up with it. I remember so many great games, many of them Dolphin games. The Dolphins are my favorite team (the first year I watched football as a child, living in Florida, was 1972, when they went undefeated) and they have played on MNF 70 times, which is more than any other team. Only the Cowboys are close, with 66.

I found out that John Lennon had died from Howard Cosell, during a Dolphins-Patriots game. I saw the famous game in 1986 where the Dolphins beat the then-undefeated Chicago Bears to ruin their perfect season. (A lot of other people did too -- it was the highest-rated regular-season game of all time). I saw Redskins QB Joe Theismann get his leg snapped like a twig by Lawrence Taylor of the Giants.

I guess I can get used to watching it on ESPN.

TD #1

Brady just threw a TD pass on New England's opening drive, with about five and a half minutes left in the first quarter.

A Merry Christmas

Despite all the pain, things worked out very well for me grade-wise. Better than I expected, or probably deserved.

I had to stick around Chapel Hill the weekend following finals to grade term papers and finals for Marine Sciences 12, two fairly miserable tasks. By the end of grading the final exams I was starting to hallucinate. The professor is not a big believer in multiple choice; there was a multiple choice section, but also 15 short essay questions. Times 30+ exams and that's nearly 500 short essay answers I had to read, most of them horrible and many illegible. But even that wasn't bad compared to the term papers.

It's sort of alarming. UNC Chapel Hill is consistently rated among the top 5 public universities in the United States. It's listed as "most competitive" in the college guides, so short of the Ivy League, MIT, Stanford or Duke, you don't really get a more elite undergraduate student body, but you wouldn't know it from reading these papers and exams. Despite clear instructions to base the papers on primary and secondary scientific literature, one of the students had as his main references "Sport Fishing" and "Marlin" magazines. Another discussed Atlantis, based on some looney new-age books. A third seriously discussed the possibility that dolphins are more intelligent than people. You have to allow for the fact that this is a general elective course, and 80% of the people in it are not science majors, but still.

Christmas was fine. I've been at my parents' house in Asheville, but once again for Christmas Eve I went to my sister's, stayed up late and helped wrap the gifts for the kids. I scored some clothes, CD's, a book of photography ("Magnum Ireland") I wanted, and some cash from the parents, so that was cool.

I don't think I've mentioned this in the blog, but this fall I've been in the Institute of Marine Science's fantasy football league, my first fantasy sports experience. I've done pretty well. I finished the regular season in first place and have made it to the final game. I'm currently 11 points down in the game. All my opponent's players have played, and I have only Tom Brady left, who is playing tonight. The way the scoring is done, it comes down to whether or not Brady throws 2 TD passes or not. If he does, I win the championship. Unfortunately, nobody got around to collect the money from everyone, so there's only pride involved. If I win, I think I'll retire from fantasy sports with a perfect record.

Long Time No Post

It's been quite a while since I posted anything, so a brief update is in order.

I've been studying. We're coming down to the wire -- finals are next week -- and I'm trying to get things wrapped up. For fluids and physical oceanography, all my work is done except studying for finals. For Scientific Computing, on the other hand, I still have tons to do (imagine my surprise). In particular we're supposed to do a write-up on a couple of important papers of our choice in applied math. We have to do both forward and backward literature searches and summarize all that too.

So one of the papers I'm doing ("Group Velocity in Finite Difference Schemes")is old (1982) and all the papers it references are older (obviously, the author not being psychic). That means none of them are in electronic form, and I have to physically hunt them down. That might not be too bad, except that UNC subscribes to the theory that if one library is good, a dozen would be better. Despite having three main libraries (the main main one, Davis, 8 stories and also known as the graduate library; the undergraduate library; and the old main library, Wilson, mostly used for historical archives these days) nearly everything I'm looking for is spread among other, smaller libraries, namely the math/physics library, the geosciences library and the chemistry library. So today is a day to expend shoe leather.

On top of that, I have another homework set in SciComp due tomorrow, and yet another due next week, finals week. Incredibly, the second one is a double set, worth 8% of my final grade. This instructor justitifies this attrocity by claiming that it's review for the final. Thanks!