Cognitive Labs

This year, treat yourself to an all natural special effects display: the Perseid meteor shower. The Perseids, a remnant of an Earth encounter with a comet in ancient times, appear to originate from the shoulder area of the constellation Perseus. The expectation is for a heavier than usual shower coupled with a new moon. Perfect conditions.

Our Cognitive Labs recommendation is to get out into the dark, rural, desert, or mountain skies on August 12th to see this wonder. Around midnight, camp out under the stars with a sleeping bag or canvas chair and wait for the light show to begin, resting your gaze at the zenith. You should easily be able to see the double-cluster of stars which lies between Perseus and Cassiopeia under dark skies.

A couple of years ago we took in this spectacle from the Mammoth area in Yellowstone National Park, which is on the Eastern slope of the caldera and relatively treeless ( in fact sagebrush is more common) due to the rain shadow created by the Continental Divide a few miles west.

Sometimes the meteors are bright enough to leave a ray or afterimage.

Labels: double-cluster, mammoth, Perseids, Perseus, Yellowstone

Revitalize your mind with a little ActionScript. Verily, this is an odd little scripting language. You can serialize objects, but must become accustomed to the sometimes obscure syntax therein.

With its recent open-sourcing by Adobe, count on a river of innovations. For those accutomed to working in a text editor, white screen environment there is an acculturation process because many times you end up working in a small, framed space that accidentally gets minimized - so there is a constant fear of losing that last code snippet. But quickly becomes second nature as you realize how much ActionScript code is rehashed (for example by creative agencies doing ads) so really the level of creativity should be much better

Labels: actionscript, actionscript.org, adobe, breathe, code rehash, objects, serialized objects, turing, whew

2012: Will it happen? Mayan Legend has it that the year 2012 is the end of the Calendar. Some have forseen an apocalpyse. Is it related to global waming? A planetary convergence of some kind? A comet impact? Or a supernova? The Aquarian Age? Fact, or Fiction? Maybe it is the onset of cosmic senescence. Time will tell. Maybe it's time to enter yourself into the record book - of human eternity.

Labels: 2012, apocalypse, apocalypto, aquarian, global_warming, senility, the mayans