canspice.org

Alice and I got Settlers of Catan for Christmas. Since there’s only two of us and the game is designed for three to four people, we’re going to have to find a good two-player variant. And since I know that a number of people who read canspice.org are Settlers players, you all might have some recommendations for good variants. I know of two on Mayfair Games’ site, and I can find a bunch on Google, but I’m looking for recommendations from people I know, not recommendations from the faceless Internet. So, recommend away!

Why hello Duckie! Getting in the Christmas spirit, are you?

Aw, a bow. How cute! Did you want to help me decorate the tree?

Yes, you can hang that one up right on that branch there… that’s it…

Oh Duckie.

How about helping with the lights? We’ve got a couple of strings that have to go up. Okay, you grab that end, just hold it…

Oh Duckie.

So how about some Christmas food and drink, Duckie? Fancy a candy cane?

Um, Duckie. You’re supposed to take the wrapper off first. How about some rum & eggnog?

Oh, I see you’ve already poured some. Well, drink up!

Um, Duckie. You’re not supposed to swim in it.

Duckie, time for bed! Oh, you’ve got some friends over?

Oh, okay, you can sing some carols. “I’m Dreaming of a Duckie Christmas”? Can’t say I’ve heard that one before…

Duckie! Duckie! Wake up, it’s time to open presents! Look, this green one here is for you!

What is it, what is it?

Well hurry up!

It’s your favourite movie, Requiem For A Duck!

Oh look, another one for you! It’s from your Aunt Daisy and Uncle Ping!

So what is it?

It looks like a scarf!

It’s Christmas toe socks! Put them on Duckie, put them on! Oh I bet Aunt Daisy made them for you!

Oh they’re so cute!

Well, that’s another Christmas! Anything to say to our friends, Duckie?

“Mind the mess!” Oh Duckie.

Merry Christmas from Alice and Brad (and Duckie) everyone!

It started off with an email on Thursday from Ron Baalke to the Minor Planet Mailing List titled “Near-Earth Asteroid 2004 MN4 Reaches Highest Score To Date On Hazard Scale.” A forward of a JPL press release, it described an asteroid discovered in June 2004 whose predicted orbit sent it on a potential collision-course with Earth on 13 April 2029. The probability of collision was put at around 1 in 300.

Usually when things like this happen more observations are made, orbits are refined, and the probability of collision goes down.

Not this time, though. More observations were made and the impact probability has actually gone up to about 1.6%, earning 2004 MN4 a score of 4 on the Torino scale. As more observations come in the probability of collision should probably go down, as there’s roughly a 98.4% chance that the asteroid won’t hit the Earth.

Keep up-to-date on the status of 2004 MN4 on the Impact Risk page.

Of course, I’m not going to mention that 13 April 2029 happens to be a Friday.

Douglas just released a press release about WFCAM’s first light, which includes stunning images of the Orion Nebula. WFCAM (short for Wide Field CAMera) is a new instrument for the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope, and it went on the telescope a couple of months ago for commissioning. Along with finding asteroids it’s (not surprisingly) very good at taking wide field images. It’s about 1200 times larger than another imaging instrument we have called UFTI, so all things being equal an image that would take 5 minutes to get on WFCAM would have taken 100 hours with UFTI. Damn!

The pictures available with the press release are some of the best I’ve ever seen, particularly the central region and the northern section of the central region. There’s also a very good example of just how big a WFCAM field is in comparison to UFTI — the little green square in the leftmost image is the field-of-view of UFTI. I highly recommend checking them out!

Audioscrobbler is a bit of a funny name, isn’t it? It’s obviously something to do with audio, but scrobbler? What does it scrobble? How does it scrobble? And just what is scrobbling anyhow?

I think scrobbling is currently undefined, but it seems to have something to do with collecting lists and making recommendations on them. In the case of Audioscrobbler these lists are songs that people listen to. What they do is have plugins for a bunch of different audio players (Winamp or iTunes, to pick two) that send information about the song you’re listening to to the Audioscrobbler server. They keep track of what you’ve listened to over time and based on your favourite artists they can make recommendations on other artists you may like, based on what other people listen to.

It’s not an entirely new idea (Amazon does it to give you recommendations, for example) so it’s not terribly news-worthy.

So why the post? Because Audioscrobbler has an RSS feed for each user that can be parsed relatively easily, and I’ve just set that up on this website. Over in the sidebar you’ll see the most recent songs I’ve listened to on my laptop. Took a bit of PHP courtesy Ed Porras and a cron job to download the RSS XML to the server hosting canspice.org. It’s a bit roundabout but it seems to work.

And if you’re crazy enough to want to subscribe to the RSS feed of the most recent ten tracks I’ve listened to, here it is, although I don’t know why anybody would really want to do that.