lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

When George Lucas and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan decided to make the ancient Jedi at the heart of Luke's spiritual journey into a two-foot tall, pointy-eared alien, it wasn't clear how the character could actually be realized on screen using 1980 technology. At the time, animatronic technology wasn't thought to be advanced enough to pull off Yoda. .... they decided to try putting a trained monkey in a Yoda costume, including a full Yoda face mask. Rinzler showed a picture of the monkey on set, but he explained this idea was quickly abandoned when one of the people who worked on the primate scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey pointed out "Look, the monkey's just going to pull off the mask over and over again. It's never going to work."

In the picture, a monkey is outfitted with a cane and a mask and measured. The simian was also briefly considered for walking shots of Minch-Yoda that would have been impossible to execute with a puppet.

Pic taken from Vanity Fair

When doing an apt-get upgrade on my Debian (Lenny) box yesterday I received this message

Since release 150, udev requires that support for the CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED feature is disabled in the running kernel. Please upgrade your kernel before or while upgrading udev.

This was holding back the upgrade of all the packages. Looked around a bit and it seems that the solution for this problem is to let apt know that we do not want to upgrade the udev package. The way to do this is echo "udev hold"|dpkg --set-selections and then run apt-get upgrade

Biologists Rony Garcia and Jose Moreira from the Wildlife Conservation Society's (WCS) Jaguar Conservation Program rely on Obsession for Men, a cologne known for its complex scent, to help lure jaguars in the Central American country.

Note that this scent works on jaguars. There is no research of its effects on cougars .

The discovery that Obsession for Men acted as a magnet for jaguars was the result of an experiment by the WCS's Bronx Zoo in New York. The WCS was looking for ways to get cheetahs in front of camera traps, and, after several years of testing with different fragrances, found spraying the musky Obsession For Men near the heat-and-motion-sensitive cameras drew the cats for longer than other scents.

Links:

• Scientists use Calvin Klein cologne to lure jaguars at Yahoo! News

I wore a pair of torn jeans to office today. I was trying to look fashionable, but I later saw that I was wearing a torn jacket as well. I hope I did not project an image of someone-who-does-not-get-paid-enough.

I watched the pilot of the X-Files tonight. Memorable quote

What I find fantastic is any notion that there are answers beyond the realm of science. The answers are there. You just have to know where to look.

Now, since the real test for any choice is having to make the same choice again, knowing full well what it might cost - I guess I feel pretty good about that choice, 'cause here I am, at it again. — Oracle, The Matrix Revolutions

New entry at my site - a review for my watch, Casio's G-Shock MT-G Atomic Tough Solar Watch, which I love. Read more here

I had a very weird dream tonight. I saw that I was a space traveller and we came in contact with aliens who could live in 17 dimensions. These aliens did not try to kill us off, but they made us humans well aware of the inadequacies of living in "just" 3 dimensions. These guys looked similar to humans, but I do not remember what other things they could see that we could not.