from Space.com:

A delightful display of planets and the moon will occur on New Year’s Eve for anyone wishing to step outside and look up just after sunset.

Venus, brighter than all other planets and stars, will dangle just below the thin crescent moon in the southwestern sky. It’ll be visible — impossible to miss, in fact — just as the sun goes down, assuming skies are cloud-free.

Soon thereafter, Mercury and Jupiter will show up hugging the south-southwestern horizon (just above where the sun went down) and extremely close to each other. Jupiter is very bright and easy to spot; Mercury is faint and harder to see, but it’ll be apparent by its location just to the left of Jupiter.

SKY MAP: The sky from mid-northern latitudes at around 6:30 p.m. local time on Dec. 31, 2008. The best time will vary by location: Go out at or just before sunset and watch for all these objects as the sky begins to darken. Mercury will be the last to appear and the hardest to spot before it sets.

Jupiter and Mercury will set less than an hour after the sun, so timing your viewing just after sunset is crucial. You’ll also need a location with a clear view of the western horizon, unobstructed by buildings, trees or mountains.

All the planets, along with the moon and sun, traverse an arc across our sky called the ecliptic, which corresponds to the plane in space that they all roughly share. For this reason, you could draw an imaginary line from the general location of Venus and the moon, down through the other two planets, and the line would point to where the sun went down. This line could also initially help you find Jupiter and Mercury.

Weather permitting, you can get a preview of the sky show on Tuesday, Dec. 30. On this evening, the planets will be in nearly the same place they’ll be on Dec. 31, but the moon will be midway between Venus and the Mercury-Jupiter pairing.

Neat site, c/o colorinmonochrome: Readerville.com has, among other things, a book covers blog.

Great discussion curated by Tim O’Reilly on Radar about the learning process and the value of hard work. I commented.

Cheers

Here’s an encouraging chat with Sec. Treasury Henry Paulson via LATimes.com:

Siegel:

You said yesterday, overall, we’re in a better position than we were. That’s a modest statement of progress, but it’s a statement of progress. How can you tell Americans who are listening something that’s happened, something that should have affected their lives by now, that is a tribute to the nearly $300 billion that has already been committed by the U.S. government [to a banking bailout]?

Paulson:

Yeah, I would say the first thing I would say to Americans, what we were dealing with was, we were dealing with a financial system, a banking system that was on the tipping point. Credit was frozen. Banks weren’t lending to each other. People were asking themselves about the viability of banks.I believe the banking system has been stabilized. No one is asking themselves anymore, is there some major institution that might fail and that we would not be able to do anything about it. So I think that is a positive. I think in terms of the challenges, in terms of working through this economic downturn. Let me tell you, it took a long time to build up these excesses. It’s going to take a good while to work through this period. And the first focus, as I said yesterday, should be on recovery and repair. And it’s going to take a while longer to work through it.

Siegel:

But just to clarify, you’re saying no one is saying now there could be a failure of a major institution that we wouldn’t be able to deal with. There could be a failure of another major institution, though.

Paulson:

I got to tell you, I think our major institutions have been stabilized. I believe that very strongly.

All due respect (and there’s nothing like having someone in charge who knows where the bodies are buried), this is Fatuitous & Daft thinking (if this is truly his belief).

I understand that he must be under a good deal of pressure to reassure the public & business communities, but is he really saying there’s no more big shoes on this damned centipede waiting to drop? Not now! When there’s so many states yet to be honored by their own bank failure:

View the interactive version at http://www.feedba.cc

via mises.org

Obama didn’t win because of money, or the media’s liberal bias. He won because of a story. Americans of all stripes voted for a compelling narrative. For a society slowly forgetting how to think, and swiftly forgetting it’s history, hope is powerful.

But will this man and his advisors & appointees, his faithful & his opposition, his peers & the herd he will be responsible for actually effect change? WIll change be for better or worse? And will it affect the our image abroad, which for some earthlings is well-represented by the above illustration?

If you don’t buy the story argument, read marketing guru Seth Godin’s article, in which he predicts & explains the election’s result.

From American Public Radio‘s Marketplace story entitled An economist who saw it all coming :

In the first installment of our new interview series “Taking Stock,” Kai Ryssdal talks to political economist Ann Pettifor about global debt. She’s a fellow at the New Economics Foundation in London and author of “The Coming First World Debt Crisis.”

Economist Ann Pettifor knows a good deal about debt. And she has done something about it, too. She led an successful effort back in the late ’90s to cancel Third World debt. Then she wrote a book called “The Coming First World Debt Crisis.” I asked her how she saw the crisis coming.

This is a great interview. It’s amazing how far up rear ends up so many people’s heads were (& probably still) are. Click here to read the text of the interview, or click here to listen (opens in a new window).
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Via Makezine Blog:
The Unfinished Swan is a fantastic concept for a game and original use of the first-person format. The site (http://iandallas.com/games/swan/) has gone down due to traffic increases from recent web exposure, so for now, you can use the Google Cache

The Unfinished Swan – Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.

Major Kudos to COLORinMONOCHROME for learning something amazing from someone amazing & calling it on the mountain-top for all to hear. Now you too can make your own engrish, using only translate.google.com!

Possible engrish fodder:

1. Campaign speeches
2. Rap lyrics
   • If you don’t bring back my mother fucking money or my mother fucking dope, you can forget about Christmas nigga, cause you ain’t going even see New Years
   • My mother is not good if the money is the mother of six and I did not bring drugs is not a nigga more about Christmas, New Year to you, please refer to forget the cause can not be
3. Cookbook recipes, or anything procedural like instruction manuals for electronics
4. yoda quotes!
   • The boy you trained, gone he is… Consumed by Darth Vader.
   • The boy you trained, gone … he consumed in DASUBEIDA.
   • Yes. Yes. A flaw more and more common among Jedi. Too sure of themselves they are. Even the older, more experienced ones.
   • Yes. Yes. Jedi exists between the more common defects. They want to make sure that his own. In addition, the older, more experienced.

…to  etrienne for passively pointing me to marriedtothesea.com by way of her blogroll!

Care of CreepyLA: