I consider myself a little bit informed regarding physics so I was somewhat surprised to read in John Rigden's fine book that "The Fine-Structure Constant is recognized as one of the most important constants in physics ". I used to know by heart the electron's charge and Planck's constant (for a solid-state class) but I had never heard about this constant. It's represented by the letter "alpha" and its value is 1/137.0359895.
The following measurements among others result in figures very close to this constant:

• Planck's constant divided by the mass of the neutron
• The square of the charge of the electron divided by Planck's constant
• The magnetic moment of the electron
• The energy state of the muonium atom, in which an electron orbits around a muon

OK, that last one was a reality check. It made me feel less informed than what I thought.

It's amazing the cool moon pictures one can get with the cheapest telescope and even a 1.3 Megapixel camera. This renewed my interest in Astronomy (although not for long). Now I want a higher resolution camera to get some planets and messier objects.

I have some GWII updates in my site.
Also of interest: this and this.

The .mac addessbook was working for a short while. it took them some time (days) to change the message to "Coming Soon" so it's obvious that they had some problems, but now it IS working OK. the new apps were also delayed. I got iPhoto 2 but it really isn't that much of an improvement. I have no use for iMovie or iDVD but I'm trying to get a copy of Keynote for evaluation ;-)

-- An israeli was in the "Columbia" so the TV has been covering it non-stop the whole day. sight...

Today was the MacWrold Keynote and there's lots of new wonderful stuff (besides the new powerbooks I mean). I had been playing with iSync and iCal already but now they turned on .mac synchronization which means I can see the contacts from clié in any browser anywhere. Safari, their new browser, didn't work too great for me, I'm back with chimera for the time being but it looks like a great beta anyways. I don't need iDVD so the new "pricing" for the iApps is OK with me and "KeyNote" is something that I would buy (but I'm not sure that for $100). You can subscribe to my Mexican Holidays calendar here (Supposedly because I'm not sure the URL is comming out OK)

Well, this is my first entry. I hope I can update this thing once in a while (not like my site that I've pretty much abandoned for a long time). This weekend I took the GPS for a drive and plotted the results in my site. Since the last time I played with it new software came out to interface the Garmin with an iBook under OS X. This one is in Japanese, the speed graphs came from it, but the coolest one up to now is flighttrack . Unfortunatelly the Garmin doesn't save elevation information for the trackpoints.
I'm still looking for a port of the BSD library that downloads the data from the GPS, I had it running under 10.1.5 but now it isn't running under Jaguar and I can not find the sources.