ObAthensLink: The Elephant Six Collective is a group of (mostly) Athens-based bands. A cross between a record label and a cooperative, the collective’s member bands are among the most original and conceptual in Athens. This page tells their story and has a sample from one of the highest-profile bands, Olivia Tremor Control.

More astronomy. The Hubble Data Archive contains over 100,000 Hubble Space Telescope observations of more than 20,000 targets. If you don’t mind digging a bit, you can find plenty of pretty pictures, including the famous deep-field shots showing uncountable numbers of galaxies. Please, try not to feel lonely and insignificant when you look at these. It’s tough not to, though.

While studying astrophysics at New Mexico Tech, I had many of the world’s best astronomy tools at my fingertips, ranging from the best astronomers in the world to the best observatories in the world. But, one thing I did not have was an F-18 Fighter Jet Mobile Telescope Platform. Dagnabit.

Today is the Feast of the Conversion of Paul. Today’s weather will indicate how the year to come will turn out (so said Europeans in the 15-1600’s). Fair weather = good year. Windy = war. Cloudy = plague. Here in Athens, it’s cloudy with bursts of wind. Dagnabit.

In my ever-increasing effort to bring this weblog to the masses, I give to you Malkovich’s Nest. Thanks to Malkovich Effect.

Robot Wisdom is now featuring a “Cam of the Hour”. There’s no telling how long Jorn will keep this up, but while it’s there you’ll find live camera shots from around the world. Already this morning we’ve seen a spectacular sunrise and a snow-covered Montana mountain.

So I come back from the high desert mountains of Colorado, where the weather was a balmy 50 degrees to Georgia and the worst ice storm in about 15 years. Something’s wacky about all that. Athens was hit pretty hard. Trees came down all over, and much of the city was out of power. Parts still are, including most of my apartment complex. Somehow my building stayed energized, but outside my windows, all was dark. I took advantage of the cold weather to stay inside, make a batch of sourdough pancakes, and fill a videotape with movies from the Independent Film Channel: Monster in a Box and _Gray’s Anatomy_, both monologues by Spalding Gray, Slacker, and The Pesky Suitor , a 30-minute short with Claire Danes.

Back in October, I linked to a page written by a person who claimed to have built a fission warhead out of radioactive material from discarded smoke detectors, and also planned to launch it on a model rocket on April 1, 2000. The page has since gone 404, but I’ve snagged a copy from google’s cache. My referrer logs show that this is a popular search topic now for some reason, so… here you go.

Is there a better movie soundtrack than the one for Until the End of the World? If so, I’d sure like to know about it. This CD is easily one of the best in my collection. Other Until the End of the World links: the not-quite-official-but-pretty-close site and The Strange Case of Until the End of the World. If you haven’t seen this movie yet, find it and watch it. It’s nearly three hours (unless you somehow find the 5 1/2 hour version) of beautiful cerebral cinema.

There are currently 16 weblogs linking to me, more than ever before, but that’s still not enough to get me listed on the beebo weblog popularity contest. Rather than illustrating my unpopularness, this really shows the explosion of weblogs in the last few months. Shoot, even my parents (hi mom!) are fixin’ to use Blogger to start one of their own.

“Hi mom” just reminded me of my college roommate Phil “de cat with Grape Jelly” Jones. Our freshman year we both had weekly physics lab writeups, and for some reason I can’t remember we found it funny to embed “Hi Mom!” somewhere in each writeup – in the text, in a graph, hidden in an equation, somewhere terribly clever. Now, ten years later, I don’t think my mom’s ever even seen one of my lab writeups.