After that, you should enjoy the fireworks show.

There’s an awful lot of crickets out in the country.

I took pictures throughout the day. You can see hair-cutting, train-pulling, and fireworks by clicking on the photo below.

Is he guilty of performance enhancement?

One of the penguins at the Hampshire Wildlife Park in England molted all of his feathers at once. It seems that he does this every year. Normally, it takes a few weeks for all the feathers to fall out, so you don’t see too many bald penguins.

Since he doesn’t have any protection from the sun, the handlers crafted a wetsuit for him. He’s now the coolest penguin in all the land. Literally and figuratively.

My favorite photo is this one:

The shuttle has such amazing texture up close. You don’t see any of that in the long shots on the pad or at liftoff.

Now, if they’d only figure out a way you could edit files on your iDisk…
Apple MobileMe iDisk

Lowry Digital in Burbank was brought on board to apply their video processing techniques to the available footage from Apollo 11. You can check out the press conference at National Geographic.

Unfortunately, a group of researchers were unable to locate the original telemetry tapes from the Apollo mission. They hoped to rebuild the video from those sources, which would have been first-generation video copies, but it turns out the tapes were recycled (probably).

And, of course, the obligatory “Would anybody care about the moon landing if it happened today” opinion piece. People would care if it were the first time we walked on the moon, but it’s not. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were hardly the first explorers to be lauded and then quickly set aside. Magellan anyone? Even Columbus Day is more of a hassle to us than a celebration.

If you do want to follow the events of that celebrated mission, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and AOL have put together a really awesome Flash site that lets you follow along.

Now Nature has created a strain of bacteria that eats it.

Chinese Scientists Discover Bacteria Eating Up Their Oil

Scientists have had critters like this in the lab for some time now. In fact, years back I remember talk about using these oil-eating bugs to clean up oil spills at sea. It seems Nature has gotten the same idea.

It’s interesting to ponder why a complex ecosystem like the Earth would spawn a bacteria that eats oil. It’s even more interesting to theorize why these bacteria are only now being discovered, when oil, at least easy to reach oil, is going down in quantity.