What I’m Currently listening to

BarlowGirl – Home for Christmas

Home For Christmas - BarlowGir...

Scotch Tape emits X-Rays: film at 11 « Watts Up With That?

This just boggles the mind.  What’s next?  Silly Putty allowing us to image distant galaxies?

Scotch Tape emits X-Rays: film at 11 « Watts Up With That?

Can This Watchdog Sniff Media Bias? - NYTimes.com

Article about spinspotter.com and their Spinoculars tool that allows people to report bias in articles and offer corrections that can be voted on.  It has potential.

Can This Watchdog Sniff Media Bias? - NYTimes.com

Neat Binary Adding Machine

And it’s done with marbles!

Flora and Fauna 4

Flora and Fauna 3

I think these were called Snowball plants.
This flower had a butterfly on it.

Flora and Fauna 2

A Weeping Willow just outside the garden.
These tiny, unimpressive-looking flowers were incredibly fragrant.
A very large Crate Myrtle.

???

Flora and Fauna at The Hermitage

Here is an interesting, gnarled old tree.
The tree was in bloom.
Here's another shot of it.
Mary thought these trees looked interesting.

Cicada

Here's a cicada shell I found in the backyard over the weekend while attempting to remove wild black raspberry vines. It was very hard to get the camera to focus on the cicada, rather than the wall in the background. I finally had to put my hand immediately behind it and get the camera to focus on it.

Google Chrome Crashes on Flash-based Weather Map

Well it didn’t take long to wipe the shiny off of the Chrome.  When Google said that they had developed new ways to automate user actions in the browser, and that they had tested it on all of the top sites, I actually believed them.  I should have seen their caveat that they couldn’t fill out forms as a warning sign.

What do you think a common user action is for people when there are three active tropical storms in the Atlantic?  Why, they go to weather.com and view an animated map.  Doesn’t it strike you as exceedingly strange that Google’s testing didn’t account for something that … normal?

Here’s how to replicate the crash:

• Go to any city in the US on the weather.com site.
• Click on the Local Map button
• Animate the map and wait for the crash

The funny thing here is that Google talks about how having a separate process for each tab makes the Chrome browser almost crash-proof.  It’s interesting that a simple plug-in can crash the whole thing.