ciphergoth: (Default)
Paul Crowley ([personal profile] ciphergoth) wrote2008-10-09 02:18 pm
Entry tags:

"Overhead projector"



This is a Zeiss STARMASTER ZMP star projector - $3M of the most advanced star projector in the world. It reproduces the positions, colours and magnitudes of stars with stunning, unprecedented fidelity, and is so precise that it can project deep sky object images which are only visible with binoculars (yes, binoculars inside the planetarium).



This is an overhead projector.

It seems John McCain can't tell the difference.

[identity profile] drdoug.livejournal.com 2008-10-09 01:55 pm (UTC)(link)
What's an OHP cost? A ton, tops? So if I give him, say, $250, will he get me the Starmaster ZMP? That'd get him my vote. If I had one.

Anyway, be fair to the guy - in the current financial turmoil, it's easy to slip up in money terms by four orders of magnitude or more. I've cocked up by three myself recently, getting my millions and billions confused. (In my defence (and his) it was a context where you'd normally expect millions but billions had turned up.)

Got to admire the guy's chutzpah, too, simultaneously campaigning as the Candidate of Experience and against the Federal debt that's recently topped $10 trillion. (Or some other figure with a lot of zeroes.)

[identity profile] topbit.livejournal.com 2008-10-09 02:35 pm (UTC)(link)
There's a counter of the US national debt in Times square - which stood around 8 years ago at $5 Trillion.

Now it's reached $10 T,and they've had to hack a '$' sign onto the front of the number - they'd run out of room on the actual display for it. On the bright side, it's now good for $99,999,999,999 - though they'd have to move the new $ sign left a bit to see all of the first number.

[identity profile] alan1957.livejournal.com 2008-10-09 02:57 pm (UTC)(link)
...will he get me the Starmaster ZMP?

Woz gonna post exactly the same comment. It would look as good in my living room.
aegidian: (cultural divide)

[personal profile] aegidian 2008-10-09 03:32 pm (UTC)(link)
I miss the London Planetarium (the Tussauds one that is, not the other one in Greenwich), it being there seemed to say that science is still cool and something folk'll pay money to see.

Except they didn't, well, not in enough numbers to make keeping their projector going viable. I know I didn't, not since I was six when it helped inspire my own love of science.

Darn it. Can we have Obama if the US foolishly decides not to have him?

[identity profile] biog.livejournal.com 2008-10-09 04:02 pm (UTC)(link)
Lol. Thanks for the link. That cheered me up upon getting home from work on what's been an otherwise fairly crap day.

[identity profile] ex-pipistre.livejournal.com 2008-10-09 07:50 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh dear. I guess maybe things are different in the reality where Putin is president of Germany...

I assume you're aware that McCain refused to answer a series of 19 questions on science asked by Nature?

[identity profile] en-ki.livejournal.com 2008-10-10 03:14 am (UTC)(link)
...and when hyperinflation hits, they can just put a "$10^" in front of it.