Wordless Wednesday

Time for a Wordless Wednesday. This one is for people who can read sheet music and know Mozart.

Enjoy!

Oh, and follow your dreams.

Astronomy - Orion & Cygnus

Here are a couple really cool pictures from apod.nasa.gov.

First, Part of the Orion constellation - 3 stars on the left are easy to see at night, but then when you zoom in with some really powerful telescope - so much more. Cool. This picture is from many pictures 'digitally stitched' into one.

Plus, here's a black hole - this one I don't think is a photo. Looks like an artist's picture, but very cool anyway. Cygnus X-1 is the name. Rush made a cool song about this decades ago. They had an album, A Farewell To Kings, and their big song was Closer To The Heart. They had another song, Cygnus X-1 - great song, but no one cared about it if they heard Closer To The Heart. Oh well, I guess black holes don't make good songwriting material compared to songs about the heart. Makes sense.

I Heard It Through The Grapevine

Grapes - From my grapevine - HOME-GROWN!!! !!! !!! !!! !!!

Here are the first grapes pulled off of my grapevine. I believe they are Concord grapes.

I had to shoo away the wasps that apparently love these grapes.

NASCAR - MARK MARTIN - YES - MARK MARTIN!!!

OK, tonight - Mark Martin.

If you are not sure why he is on this post, go to:

http://www.nascar.com

Look for "Standings" and then "Sprint Cup".

Then look for #1 ! ! !

Motivational Poster

Here is a very inspiring motivational poster.

Wordless Thursday - 3D Holographic Image

In this post I am doing a Wordless Thursday, and I'm also going to give you something to discover in a picture. This is a 3D holographic image. You have to kind of stare into the picture, move your head towards the screen, then away from the screen, as you try to focus your vision on a 3D image embedded within the patterns.

I find if you click on the picture and look at the enlarged version of it, it's easier to see the object within.

Good luck. What is it?

Geek Project: Microprocessor Trainer

Here's a hobby electronics/computers education kit that I bought a couple years ago at a yard sale for $1.

It's a Science Fair kit that you wire up according to the instructions. It teaches how to understand and use commands for a little microprocessor that has some pre-programmed ROM in it. It has a small amount of RAM memory for coding in your own shtuff.

Allegedly, this microprocessor is a close relative of the ones that powered Speak-N-Spell children's toys.

This picture came out

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It's a list of the commands that the microprocessor 'knows' you could say. It's quite complicated even to do simple things like adding numbers together.

Here are a couple pages from the text.

Daunting.

So far I understand how to take some data and add it to a register, and also how to display the contents.

This is a video of the program for a countdown timer. On the left you can see how many minutes are left in the countdown with the 3 left-most LEDs, in binary numbers, and then the next 4 show the tens column for the remaining seconds, in binary, and the digit on the right shows the ones column for remaining seconds.

Now give yourself 1,000 Geek Points if you can read binary coded numbers!