The Wilderness Downtown is a concept film by Chris Milk. I took the bait because it featured music by The Arcade Fire
It’s still very cool tho.
The Wilderness Downtown
September 1st, 2010Earl and Fiona
August 31st, 2010Check these out:
and:
Looking like an incredibly wet Labor Day weekend. 
Not wanting to sound like a broken record here but given this:
I’m gonna bet Fiona turns it up a notch too.
HD 10180
August 25th, 2010I’m really getting my rocks off on this one. First of all, the paper:
Read it yet? Huh? It’s SOOOO cool!
What it all boils down to is something that looks kinda something like this:
I think that’s supposed to be a view looking inward towards their sun from the planet farthest out. The planet you’re close to is not to scale with the others. However, the really cool part is one of those planets appears to be about 1.8 Earth mass units. That’s not real big at all. The sun’s about 1.4 the size of ours too. In other words, you’ve got an Earth sized planet orbitng an Sun sized sun. Only problem is the Earth sized planet is circling the Sun sized sun in about two days apparently. They’ve even got cool videos:
Now, most of the articles are referring to this as a “remarkable” solar system. What are the chances that discovering something literally at the very onset of a technology is unique? My bet is these solar systems like HD 10180 are going to be overwhelmingly common within in a short period of time. I really am thinking we’re going to discover life, if not communicate with it, in my lifetime. It’s just a matter of time before we see one of these exo-planets with a fabricated object orbiting it.
The Moon is shrinking?
August 23rd, 2010
Moon shrinking NASA reports, and it’s been doing it for some time. NASA claims that shrinking of the moon is a fact, because of cooling and contractions. The shrinking moon has been under examination by NASA scientists.
Shrinking of the moon has always been up for debate, but now new evidence could show that it’s a fact. In fact, scientists are reviewing new photos to conclude their research.
The scientists came to this conclusion after leaving a viewing of Despicable Me. The culprit appears to be something that looks like this:
( OK, I know it’s not a shrink ray doing it, but the timing certainly is odd. What’s even odder is they really are blaming it on global cooling. )
Happy New Year on Neptune!
August 19th, 2010Around 1846 or so some of my ancestors decided things weren’t so good in Scotland. They decided to give a new place called America a try. They hitched a boat, which took several months to get to New Orleans, then hitched another boat which went up the Mississippi and Kentucky Rivers and dropped them off in Frankfort, Kentucky. Not satisfied with Frankfort, they headed shouth to the Kentucky-Tennessee border. By foot. They walked through wilderness until they found a spot they liked. They lived there a while till Morgan’s Raiders made things pretty miserable and they moved to a nicer spot. Some call it God’s Land. They raised a couple of generations there till a younger generation decided they wanted to move into the city. There lived a couple of more generations until a young girl married an up and coming astronaut wannabe and they left for college. That didn’t work out so well so he bacame a lawyer and they had three kids. One of those kids was me. Forty years later I had my son. Quite a lot’s changed since 1846. As of today, one thing that had not changed did:
It was the same year on Neptune as it was when my ancestors started walking. Neptune just completed it’s first orbit since 1846.
Cool huh?
CME’s and hurricanes ( and stuff like that )
August 10th, 2010We got a couple of things going on right now:
Nothing new about that. It hit last week. What’s different is we got another one coming tonight. On top of that we got:
A low pressure system in the Gulf of Mexico. The last time I wrote about these two things happening at the same time was in August 2005. A tropical storm that had done little damage and seemed to be pretty much spent suddenly exploded into a Cat 5 and destroyed New Orleans. That storm of course was Katrina. Not saying it will happen again, but I’m definitely keeping my eye on it over the next few days.
And if something does happen, I don’t want to hear another astronomer tell me there is definitely no relation between the weather on the Sun and Earth.
Checking out the weather
August 5th, 2010We’ve been having thunderstorms for a day or so. I love a good thunder-boomer. Today had been clear and sunny. I don’t need that right now, I’ve planted some grass. So, I’m sitting at work and I hear this boom outside my office. For some reason my weatherbug‘s times are all messed up and the little radar thingy jumps all over the place. Effectively useless. So I zoom out to the regional view, same thing, different times, still useless for what I might have heard. I close it and pop up yahoo. It doesn’t show anything, but the time is old. Then, I get a brilliant idea that isn’t practiced much any more I think.
I turned around and looked out the window. There’s a huge black cloud heading right at me. Pretty cool huh?
International Space Station loses its ammonia
August 3rd, 2010
In the meantime, the ISS is a completely useless $100 billion piece of junk. They may or may not be able to fix it. ISS is slated to close up shop at the end of 2015. That’s five years. Given the current political climate, I don’t see Obama, Bolden, or whoever claims to be in charge of NASA‘s lack of direction coming up with anything beyond next week as far as planning goes. As with everything else science under Obama’s administration, it will just die. The argument could easily be made to just let it die now instead of wasting more money over the next five years.
However, I’ve got that special something Charles Bolden and Obama do not. I’ve got vision. Rather than simply letting it die along with the Shuttles, turn it into a Mosque where Muslim kids can go to feel good about their contributions to science. Rather than the Muslims spending millions of dollars building a Mosque in Manhatten where a LOT of people don’t want them, spend that money keeping up ISS and the Shuttles.
Win, Win, Win.
If that doesn’t fly based on separation of government and religion issues ( for some reason that doesn’t apply with NASA this year ), we could always lease it out to Richard Branson and Paris Hilton so they could make the first space hotel. I’m sure Richard would want to call it Virgin Space, but if Hilton’s involved, that just wouldn’t seem quite right.
And of course there’s always Plan C. Use it for science research that can not possibly be done on Earth and expand it to be a base for satellites like Hubble that need regular maintenance. However, I realize how silly that sounds under an Obama led NASA.
NASA is hoping a spacewalk will allow them to fix the problem. If not, with this administration, they may as well come home.
August 4, 2010 Storm
August 3rd, 2010
That white blob on the sun is the source of what should prove to be, well, not as interesting as one would think. A massive CME is heading right at Earth. That means we’re gonna get some extra oomph in our auroral lights. Might even get some ( extra ) static on our cell phones. If weird things start happening sometime tonight, now you know why.
Cell phones all staticy?
July 8th, 2010This is most likely why:
If that had been pointing at us, your phones would not be working at all. And guess what, it’s spinning our way!
