OK, I survived another handball tournament. Here's how it went:

Friday's first match was in C-singles against a young kid (Peres). Went up 12-2 in the first game, then decided to conserve strength and started playing a lob/position game. Won that game 21-8. In the second game I was already feeling tired and lost 19-21. Turned back on the power game in the tie breaker and won 11-5.

The second match on Friday night was in A-B doubles with Bob Parker against a couple of local kids who were definitely A players. They completely dismantled us, 2-21, 2-21. This bumped us into the "consolation" bracket, which was really the B bracket, where we belonged.

Saturday opened up with with a morning B doubles match against a team that I thought would beat us, but in the end we held our own and won 21-15, 21-11. Unfortunately beating this team really required a lot of my energy and I felt exhausted at the end of this match.

After a two hour break, I went in for my second singles match against a kid that had only been playing for two months (Armstrong), but who was a tremendous athlete. He beat me in the first game 3-21! I couldn't rally any speed and he kept running me around. Somehow I managed to miss that he was left handed, too. Figured that out in the second game and played an intelligent position game to compensate for my lack of mobility... but still lost 19-21. This kid was amazing; he's going to be a great open-level player if he sticks with it. This loss knocked me out of the singles bracket.

I spent the rest of Saturday trying to recover some strength; I was really sore and tired.

Sunday I only had one match, it was the B doubles championship between Bob and I and a couple guys from Santa Fe. I think if Bob and I had played at our fresh level we would have been a good match for these two, but we were both worked and they owned us pretty thoroughly. 8-21, 13-21. This left us in second place in the B bracket for doubles, which means we got to take home some nice glazed ceramic bowls that are very pretty. Woo!

I got challenged to an evening of Mario Kart Wii by a couple of friends of mine in Iowa. After 16 races and 16 Mouser victories, they resigned in shame! Advice to the casual Mario Kart player: don't use the wheel (use the nunchuck thumbstick) and don't drive automatic. Anyone else want to test their skills? 3308 7180 1701

Gmail themes are awesome, especially the ASCII one.

My Death Knight is out of BORT license plates. I repeat, we are out of BORT license plates.

I was having some preventative maintenance done on my truck and spent the time up in their waiting lounge using one of the two computers they had set up. A lady on the other computer asked if I could help her get to her email. She showed me the log-in screen for Yahoo mail and said that usually when she goes here she just sees her email. I told her that she had to enter her username and password, and she said... that she didn't want them to have her password.

I'll be playing in a handball tournament this weekend, for the first time since I mangled my ankle in late June. I'm out of shape and out of practice... wish me luck!

I was having dinner with Nina recently and out the window we could see Venus and another bright planet, probably Jupiter. I said that it couldn't be Mars because the color was wrong, and Nina said that it obviously wasn't Mars because it was too large. My impression, based purely on intuition, was that the angular diameter of the planets was small enough that the human eye couldn't resolve it—that the planets were essentially point sources to our eyes. However, since Nina holds a degree in Astronomy I decided I'd better trust her on this one since I had nothing to back my argument up with. This morning, while waiting for a simulation to finish, I looked into it.

The angular diameter of a planet is just a function of its actual diameter and the distance from the observer, and this distance changes on account of the orbital phase of the planet relative to Earth. Thus, the angular diameter of a planet can vary wildly. Below is a list of the range of angular diameters for each planet that I found on the web:

So how does this compare to the angular resolution of the human eye? This is a tough call, since the human eye functions more as a video stream device than a still image device. Much of the "resolution" of the eye is a result of small eye movements, comparisons between your stereo pair, and automatic interpolation performed by the brain. Various sources quote different values when it comes to the acuity of the human eye. Wikipedia suggests that the limit of human visual acuity is about 1.2 arcminutes per line pair, or about 18 arcseconds per "pixel" for true resolution of a single line. This guy gives the same figure with a bit more background. What this means is that for objects who subtend less than 18 arcseconds of angle (always Neptune, Uranus, Mercury; usually Mars; sometimes Saturn and Venus), the image on your retina is effectively a point source—the only things that vary are the brightness and color. Jupiter, however, is always larger than one pixel and should "appear" larger than the other planets when viewed with the naked eye from the surface of the Earth by a person with excellent visual acuity.

There are some complications to this analysis, namely that atmospheric conditions can cause the image of a light source in the dark sky to bloom and appear wider than it would from just outside of our atmosphere. But on the whole, Nina's right. Jupiter should appear larger than Mars (except possibly in the extreme case where Jupiter is near opposition and Mars is at closest approach, in which case Mars is about 1.4 "pixels" wide and Jupiter is about 1.7 "pixels" wide... this difference might fall into the noise of the wildly subjective brain.

OK back to work for me.

It has come to attention that some of my friends think I may have died recently.

There will be soon, or was recently, a memorial service in Albuquerque for a guy who went by "Mouser," but that guy was not me. His memorial service happened to coincide with the release of the new Warcraft expansion, which pretty much absorbed my entire last weekend and a good portion of my free time since then... so I've been out of touch.

Not dead, just hopelessly nerdy and socially ineffective. Fear not, nothing has changed.

I'm excited to see what the next administration will bring about. I just hope they are as effective as Obama's oratory. I wasn't really worried about the possibility of a McCain president... but the possibility of a Palin president was giving me the howling fantods. Thank Fucking Goodness we don't have to worry about that anymore.

Looks like everyone I voted for at the national level won... that's a first.

While trolling through astrophotos in Flickr, I came across an amazing tool: astrometry.net. It is an automated service that takes a starfield image and returns 'the astrometry world coordinate system—ie, a standards-based description of the (usually nonlinear) transformation between image coordinates and sky coordinates—with absolutely no “false positives” (but maybe some “no answers”). It will do its best, even when the input image has no—or totally incorrect—meta-data.' This means that, without any information about what part of the sky an image has recorded, when or where it was taken, and even if there are artifacts of the imaging system such as optical non-linearities, foreground objects, etc., it will provide a description of the field of view. It also spits out a list of interesting objects that are visible in this field of view.

They've hooked the tool up to a Flickr photo pool. If you submit a photo to the pool, the tool will respond within a day or so by commenting on your image with the world coordinate data and a list of interesting objects. It also puts notes of the correct size on your image for each of the objects.

For examples of the data it returns, check out the notes and comments for these images of Orion and the Antares region that I submitted to the astrometry pool.

I really like the mission of this project—to provide standards-compliant meta data for any astrophoto, including historical ones, so that they can all be searchable and usable in modern science. The core team is composed of people from NYU, University of Toronto, Google, and Microsoft. Awesome project.