This is the polishing log for my 150 mm parabolic telescope mirror.

Note - this blog post got noticed and was reprinted by EarthSky:
https://earthsky.org/brightest-stars/how-to-observe-sirius-b/
Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky, visible anywhere on Earth except the far North. If you live in the northern hemisphere at a temperate latitude, Sirius is that very bright white star due south every winter in the evening. But did you know that Sirius is also a double star? The companion, Sirius B, also known as The Pup, is a very small star orbiting the primary, and can be seen using amateur telescopes, even small ones. It’s not an easy observation to make, but it can be done if you follow certain guidelines. Here’s how to do it.

An ATtiny2313 chip, some C code, a bunch of LEDs and other components - that’s your DIY Halloween decoration this year. I’ll show you how to do it, and there’s a video at the end of this page showing the digital creepiness in action.

So, we did a “science project” today, the kids and me. We made a scale model of the Solar System, out on the street, to get a visual impression of its true size. It was pretty amazing. It’s a very easy project to do, takes a couple hours, and it’s a lot of fun.

A few years ago I bought a motorcycle, and quickly discovered the necessity of trying to predict other people’s behavior on the road - profiling, basically, not for the sake of it, but in the interest of my own safety. On a bike, the main source of trouble is not yourself, it’s other people. Also, on a bike, trouble is either absent, or very very big. So I started to collect these observations - and continued to do so even later when driving my very boring and average four-wheel sedan.
These are not inflexible rules, but merely “statistical truths”. I do think the observations are sound, so I use them all the time as guidelines. Here’s the list:

It used to be that lasers were big bulky expensive things that required a laboratory to run and an entire factory to build. I remember the first He-Ne laser I saw two decades ago, the size of a small telescope and probably not more powerful than the laser pointer I carry on the keychain nowadays. Well, not anymore. It’s pretty easy to build a laser today, on the kitchen table or in the garage, for a surprisingly small investment. The goal is to make a laser capable of burning small objects, such as a piece of paper, a balloon, etc, while keeping the whole project cheap - even as cheap as $35 if you don’t make any mistakes. Here’s how.

Finally got rid of cable TV today (actually Mihaela did, it was her initiative). Renting movies on Netflix is quite enough, even more so if you consider that you can do video streaming from Netflix directly to the PS3. What with their tens of thousands of titles, I’ll never run out of movies to watch. Kids get their cartoons too from the same source. Plenty of fish in that pond.

Goals - we all have goals. Some people’s goals are pretty lofty - make a million this year, or ten, or climb the Everest - and sometimes they even achieve them. Others have more modest ones. Mine was to bench press 100 kg (220 lb), and I achieved it today. Here’s the blow-by-blow.

This is the third part of the review. The second part is here:
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This is the second part of the review. The first part is here:
</zeitgeist-movie-debunked-part-1/>