Links of the week, 31/05/2009

Lots of space and aero this week, apparently!

How Sesame Street Changed the World

I used to watch Sesame Street when I was little (there is a picture of me when I was about 1 and a bit years old watching it, in black and white!). Of course, I couldn't know about all its benefits back then, but I still remember their song about crossing the road when the light is green.

Carina Nebula Panorama from Hubble

I shouldn't look at space pr0n at work, but this is just amazing.

B-2 Spirit

Isn't this, well, sexy? I'm drooling over this plane. Look at the trailing vortices in picture 5. I'll be in my bunk.

Robot exoskeleton

Robot exoskeletons are something very common in science fiction. While the ones in real life have, at least initially, medical applications, most of the ones I have read about or seen are involved with heavy work (like in Aliens) or warfare (for example, in Starship Troopers - the book, not the movie!). I want one too.

Rendezvous around the Moon

Before Apolo 11 made it to the surface, Apolo 10 tested their systems.

10 Amazing Sculptures Made of Typewriters

I learned how to type in my father's electrical typewriter. However, I do remember very vividly how once, when I was quite small, I went with him to the high school where he taught, and there was a very old typewriter lying around. I spent hours playing with it, watching the little arms move.

Whack-A-Kitty

No kittens were harmed in the production of this video. WARNING: may melt your brain of cute.

3D murals

Amazing murals. I have had trouble distinguishing what is real from what is drawn.

Waiting for Godot

I have tickets, I have tickets!

Hubble's final servicing mission

Several pictures of the last Shuttle mission, to service Hubble. We like Hubble, and I want to be an astronaut! I also learned a couple of days ago that one of the astronauts in this mission is a huge Star Trek fan, so NASA encoded the movie and beamed it up, so they could watch it aboard the ISS. Which is awesome.

Infrared picture of Shuttle Atlantis

I really want to be an astronaut!

PARA ABNORMAL

Knittar is a recurrent character in Para Abnormal, which leads me to think he is a knitter or has a knitter in his life. This time, Knittar fights the enormous Quilt Giant OF DOOM! Thursday's comic is also knitting-related. Subscribe to it and reyoince in the yarn.

The turkey and the zaps

Today, my body has been cleared from Sertraline for two weeks. Sertraline takes about two weeks to have some effect in an ill person so, despite having a rather short half-life, it makes some sense that the withdrawal side-effects would take about two weeks to wear off. They can stop any time now.
Technically, it's not withdrawal, but a discontinuation syndrome. Antidepressants do create a dependency, but they are not addictive: patients on them, while they need them to function, will not go down drug-seeking behaviours, and this makes a different (for example, in lab experiments, animals given the option will not increase their dose as they do with other addictive drugs).

The discontinuation has not affected my mood, which is a huge success. My best friend was incredibly proud of me when I told him that I had stopped them, and talked about how far I had come from the bad time.

The main problem I have had with the discontinuation have been the brain zaps, which feel like a static shock (I like this description of the zaps (4th paragraph)).
It took a couple of days for them to get started, which made me foolishly believe that I had escaped them. They reached their worse last week, about a week after I had stopped (which makes sense in the two-week theory), when I had to go home from work because I couldn't handle it any more, and they made my left eye see blue. I kid you not, my sofa was green when looked from my left eye instead of brown, and the pale cushions were blue. No awesome 3D effects, though.

At the moment the brain zaps are finally in remission: most of my morning are now free of zaps, and they only appear in the afternoon, as I get more tired. They normally get triggered by things like changing positions (like from standing to sitting down), when I change directions (turning corners is suddenly very difficult) and when I look at things that are at different distances (I've been looking at the floor while walking because it's always at a constant distance). They get worse the more tired I get.

And this is my cold-turkey experience. Dizziness that is still present, but no mood change. I guess is not so bad, but I would like if the zaps stopped, and if it also brought my incredibly vivid and realistic dreams to a halt. And a pony :)

More piggies, GIR. I demand piggies!

One of my favourite cartoon shows is Invader Zim, and in particular GIR, the little robot. GIR is quite a stupid robot, built like that on purpose by the rules where Zim comes from, before packing him to Earth, the furthest place they could think of. Zim is not a good invader. And GIR is so cute. I am a bit like GIR.

My favourite episode is Bad, bad rubber piggy, in which they build a Space Time Object Replacement Device and send piggies back to the past. These are for science, GIR. SCIENCE!
(Come here and hear audio-clips from the series. Just select "Bad, bad rubber piggy" on the episode search, and you will find out why I'm so weird, and how much this post is littered by quotes)

I have now made two piggies, with different patterns. I will make yet another piggy (need more piggies), but using design elements of both of them, as I would like something in between.

Piggy 1	Piggy 2

Were I a real scientist!, I would put the piggies in the Large Hadron Collider and fly them against each other to create a new breed of super-piggy, with the strength of ten thousand little piggies!


Oh, gods, I think I've gone mad.
Yay, we're doomed!

J is for...

J is for Jaime, my little brother.
By little, of course, I mean that he was born several years after me, as he is now a good foot taller than I am. I still weigh more than him, though, as he is closely related to spaghetti, so good old inertia is still on my side if we wrestle.

My much awaited little brother was born when I was nearly 8. I had wanted a little sibling for years, as most of my friends had some, but that was when it suited my parents best. There were, of course, times when I really hated ever wishing one, as everything was centred about him!
Here is my little brother when he was exactly one month old. Only one month to the day, don't get distracted by the hair. We were both born with that much hair, and it didn't fall off, not a single one of them. We have always been weird.

For many years, my mental image of Jaime was that of a 9 year old child, as that was his age when I left home. However, he is now 17. In the last year of so, as he enters the last years of teenagehood, we are starting to have more and more things in common. Instead of short "How are you? Fine, you? Fine" conversations, we now chat about things we both like, mainly video games, movies, science fiction and the internet. And I love being able to talk to him on the same level as to a friend!


Jaime will go to university next year, to study Computer Science. He is now finishing his exams, and getting ready to apply to university. I wish him the best of luck on his exams and university applications.

Franken-ADD booties

So, what does one do when her ADD booties are too long? Turn them into Franken-ADD booties, of course! Well, not quite, but I still cut into them and put them together, so it counts. While its not really a tutorial, I documented my process extensively, so I could share it, because I'm quite proud of my fixing of them!

The first part of the process involves research. TECHknitter has a very good article on how to fix knitting that it is either too long, or too short. This method is a lot simpler if you have stockinette instead of garter stitch, due to the geometry of the stitches (which I'm not even going to attempt to explain, she does a much better job).
However, shortening a piece of garter, although off by half a stitch, it's really like grafting two garter stitch pieces together, right? Cue for Theresa, of Techniques with Theresa fame. Her Knitty article on grafting is very good, and is what finally taught me to graft. However, in this case, the appropriate section is almost a throwaway comment at the end about how to graft garter.

With my newly gained knowledge and my tools, I set on to work.

First I decided that I wanted to get rid of 5 double lumps. Because the grafting would effectively add an extra lump, I picked up stitches so that there would be 6 lumps in the middle, with one to be created later (6-1=5!) I picked up the stitches as Theresa said: the stitches from the front have the purl bumps against them, and the stitches at the back have the knit stitches against them, as you can see in the picture.

Snip, snip!


Unravelling garter stitch is actually a bit complicated, as you can't really just rip. At every edge, the yarn wraps around itself, so you have to pass it through. Otherwise it kind of stops and the end!

And now, the grafting. The set up stitches are purl front (leave), purl front (leave). And then knit front drop, purl front leave; knit back drop, knit back leave.
I didn't look like much, I thought it was going to be a disaster and would have to reknit them.

However, tightening up the yarn yielded wonders.


At the end, I couldn't even tell where I had worked on it.


The edges are, as previously advertised, off by half a stitch, but I don't think it's really visible. Just in case, I did the snipping on the same place in the other slipper, just so they could be symmetrical.

And now I have booties! (at time of picture, booties don't have the slipper soles I got them, but I just want to wear them, dammit, it can wait!)